Editorial (September 25, 2009)
Welcome to Fantasy Island
THE United Nations may be situated on Manhattan Island, but were you aware it’s not considered US territory? The land the compound sits on is considered an international zone, controlled by the body itself.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, then, that a lot of the mishegas that goes on there seems to exist in its own bizarre reality. Like a twisted adaptation of the 1980s US television series Fantasy Island, at the United Nations, the peculiar happenings that often go on in the east side enclave are as boundless as the imagination.
Where else but the UN could Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ruthless despot who considers his Holocaust-denying beliefs a source of great pride, command a warm and welcoming international audience? Maybe in the taxi from the airport he is still the man who allegedly brutally suppressed protests following the recent contested election.
No doubt while waiting in line at the hot dog cart on the corner he is still the same person who has defiantly snubbed western pressure to abandon his nuclear ambitions. But once he steps inside the gates on First Avenue, witness the remarkable transformation from pariah to respected statesman.
The reality-bending qualities of the UN do not stop there, of course. Case in point: the UN Human Rights Commission’s Goldstone reports on the Middle East released last week. The report essentially damns Israel for its actions during the Gaza war while slapping Hamas on the wrist for the sake of appearances, not to mention its establishment of implicit moral equivalence.
The premise for the inquiry, which was ordered to scrounge up “evidence” to validate the foregone hypothesis that Israel had committed “war crimes”,¬† was rejected as inherently biased from the outset by a collection of western powers.
That’s not a problem for the UN, which has never let facts or objectivity stand in the way of its politicised and often discredited reports on the Middle East over the years. Given that the UN plays by its own rules, dealing with the UN takes special care.
Nobody knows that better than Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who served as his country’s ambassador to the UN more than two decades ago.
Whether you agree with his politics or not, one has to imagine that Israel’s plan for navigating through the UN’s political obstacle course is in good hands with Netanyahu.
The Israeli leader, who was in New York spearheading a campaign to discredit the Goldstone report while he juggles an improbable summit with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has the experience to deal with this confounding body. We wish him luck. He’s going to need it.
Irwin calls it quits
HANGING up her parliamentary spurs, pro-Palestinian federal MP Julia Irwin announced last week she was calling it a day. During her 11 years on the ALP backbenches, Irwin became a vocal proponent of the Palestinian spin that casts Israel as a colonialist land-grabber, and the terrorists and rejectionists encircling Israel as the victims of the Jewish State.
In Irwin’s bizarro world, the Jewish people’s 5000-year history in the Middle East was for nought; the country was “a creation of the United Nations”, she asserted in a 2002 speech to Parliament during the depths of the Second Intifada, when suicide bombers were striking Israeli civilians with chilling regularity.
Irwin also subscribed to the nefarious nonsense that there was a “Jewish lobby” in Australia and that it had hijacked the ALP’s Middle East policy.
Most darkly, she had no problem with freely comparing Gaza to “a walled ghetto … a concentration camp”, promoting the malevolent slur that couches Israel’s considered self-defence measures in metaphors of Nazi genocide. If all else she said was wrong-headed, the “concentration camp” comparison was unforgivable.
Some within the ALP believe Irwin’s anti-Israel positions served her well in her western Sydney seat of Fowler, with its large Lebanese community.
Whatever her motives, Irwin was seen as the personification of Labor’s extremism, and her antics were highlighted in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Jewish community whenever Labor and the Coalition battled it out in the federal election campaigns of 2001, 2004 and 2007.
But since the Rudd Government came to power in 2007, Irwin has remained on the margins, in fact, she never rose above committee positions.
A possible successor to Irwin is Aboriginal leader and former ALP national president Warren Mundine, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Israel and who was present when the Caulfield branch of the ALP held a meeting at the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Melbourne.
Mundine’s preselection in Fowler would be a welcome change, not only for the Jewish community, but for all those who value fair play in Australia.
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