Listening to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas address the UN
General Assembly last week, I thought I heard a faint echo in the
chamber. I heard it again when President Obama argued that he was
for establishing a Palestinian state before he was against it.
I thought for a moment that it was the shade of Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, the liberal Democrat who in 1975 stood up in the
General Assembly to pronounce its “Zionism is racism” resolution an
obscenity.
But when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
spoke, I recognized the voice I heard in the background.
Netanyahu chose to stand on the shoulders of a diminutive woman:
the late, great, Jeane Kirkpatrick.
In tones that ranged from combative to conciliatory to
exasperated, the Israeli leader challenged the members of the UN
to, for once, impose the same standards by which they judge Israel
on the Palestinians. Why not, he argued, hold the Palestinians and
Israelis to the same standards of conduct, and morality?
Netanyahu recited a brief version of the United Nations’
abuses of Israel. The 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution. The 1980
peace agreement with Egypt that was denounced in the UN. He said,
“And it’s here year after year that Israel is unjustly
singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation
more often than all the nations of the world combined. Twenty-one
out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel — the
one true democracy in the Middle East.”
Not only is Israel condemned routinely, Netanyahu said,
some of the worst despots, dictators and terrorists are elevated to
prominence in the UN: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as leader of the UN
disarmament conference, Gaddafi’s Libya chairing the Commission on
Human Rights, and now Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon presiding over
the Security Council.
It is a blindness to morality, an abandonment of
epistemological standards that distinguish between freedom and
slavery, between terrorism and democracy, that Netanyahu argued
against. It is the same moral blindness that Jeane Kirkpatrick
condemned as “the sin of moral equivalence.”
Almost three decades ago, Kirkpatrick argued with
intellectual precision that the Soviets had undermined the semantic
rules by which people and their nations had been judged. She said
that it had been important that an educated person found it
important and persuasive to distinguish between the concept of
civilization set forth in the U.S. constitution and the alternative
concepts of the Soviet “constitution.” But, she said, by their
ideological and semantic attacks, the Soviets had managed to create
a sense of equality. In 1985, she wrote:
I believe that anyone who fails to see a difference
between Grenada and Afghanistan is not only seriously mistaken but
very seriously confused, and that their confusion is a direct
consequence of the Soviets’ colossally effective assault on the
realms of value and meaning which our civilization holds
dear.
What Kirkpatrick saw three decades ago in the Soviets’
ideological war (which Ronald Reagan won) is what Netanyahu sees
now in the ideological war the Palestinians are winning. The sin of
moral equivalence in the UN — and among ideological leftists such
as President Obama — compels the UN and the left to see the
Palestinians and the Israelis as equals.
If the Palestinians cannot achieve that equivalence, they
cannot isolate and delegitimize Israel. And if they cannot isolate
and delegitimize it, they cannot achieve their goal which is to
destroy it.
Preceding Netanyahu, Abbas claimed that the Palestinians
had adhered to every international standard, to the terms of all
their agreements with Israel, and rejected violence and terrorism
in all its forms. He claimed, repeatedly, that the Palestinians’
demands were legitimated by many UN resolutions, earning them a
“more effective role for the United Nations in working to achieve a
just and comprehensive peace in our region that ensures the
inalienable, legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people
as defined by the resolutions of international legitimacy of the
United Nations.”
Let’s remember who the Palestinians are, and who Abbas
chooses to ally them with. Only then can their claim to
“legitimacy” be judged.
When reports of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon were broadcast that day, Reuters filmed and CNN
broadcast Palestinians in East Jerusalem dancing in the streets.
The Palestinians tried to suppress the footage and then claimed it was false. It
wasn’t .
They have yet to live up to any agreement they’ve made
with Israel. And they have always been an anti-democratic terrorist
force. Yasser Arafat’s export of Palestinian terrorism to Lebanon
first undermined and later destroyed the Lebanese democracy in
1969.
Only four months ago, Mahmoud Abbas signed a “unity
agreement” with the Hamas
terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip. The Hamas charter calls
for the destruction of Israel, and bars any compromise.
The differences between the Palestinians and the Israelis
are as stark as the Cold War differences between us and the
Soviets. The moral equivalency is as false — and as dangerous —
now as it was then.
President Obama also spoke at the UN last week. His speech
garnered almost as little attention as it deserved, which is to say
none at all. The only notable element was Obama’s reaffirmation of
his belief in the moral equivalency of the Palestinians and the
Israelis.
Obama’s sin of moral equivalence is not new. It is a
foundation stone of his entire foreign policy. He has repeated that
sin so often on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that it is a
cliché.
This time, it was almost different. Obama seemed to be
saying that he was for a Palestinian state before he was against it
(or at least before the Republicans won the NY-9 special election).
And despite the implicit threat of vetoing the Palestinian
application in the UN Security Council, Obama once again resorted
to the same old sin.
He said, “Each side has legitimate
aspirations. And that’s part of what makes peace so hard. And the
deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in each
other’s shoes, each side can see the world through the other’s
eyes. That’s what we should be encouraging. That’s what we should
be promoting.”
This is the President of the United States, comprehending
his role as superpower head of state to be a combination of high
school guidance counselor and 1960s’ folk singer. Hey, Netanyahu:
walk a mile in Abbas’s shoes.
Netanyahu has been in the UN too many times to either
ignore the danger it poses or to take it too seriously.
Twenty-seven years ago, before becoming Israel’s UN ambassador, he
got some advice from a prominent rabbi. As Netanyahu recounted it,
“He said to me, you’ll be serving in a house of many lies. And then
he said, remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a
single candle can be seen far and wide.”
Today, the House of Many Lies will take up the Palestinian
statehood application in the Security Council. The debate, long or
short, will end with the application failing either because of a
U.S. veto or because it has failed to get enough votes before the
veto needs to be cast.
And while this is going on, in the economic leper colony
that calls itself the “Eurozone,” the members will feverishly
debate whether Greece’s nose will fall off before Portugal and
Spain lose their ears. Russians will cheer the new candidacy of
Vladimir Putin to succeed the placeholder who succeeded Putin as
Russian president. (And, as in the good old days, those who don’t
cheer will be found beaten to a pulp in Moscow
alleyways).
Here at home we’ll seek solace from the Obamalaise by
speculating about whether Rick Perry’s awful debate appearances
will bring his campaign to a premature end and wondering if
Congress will force a government shut-down. Few will pay attention
to the UN.
When I was researching my book on the UN several years
ago, I had the good fortune to interview British historian Paul
Johnson who — with his wife — received me graciously in their
London home. His verdict on the UN was compelling. “The UN is now a
central problem for the world, because we take too much notice of
it.” Fortunately, that truth is eroding.
