Thursday, October 20, 2016

Erasing the West

  • The UNESCO vote seems clearly a response to the expansionist, jihadist aspirations of members of the OIC who sponsored it: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan.
  • Some analysts consider a vote to abstain to be a victory for Israel, but for Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, Slovenia, and Italy it was blatant appeasement and fear of their own often-violent Muslim minorities: "Please, please, don't blow up our capital cities. We will reject Jewish and Christian history and pretend Jesus chased the money changers from the steps of Montmartre."
  • UNESCO's Director General Irina Bokova had already announced her opposition to the resolution, a position for which she received death threats.
  • Having demonstrable historical fact, such as Jewish patrimony on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, subject to the whims of the UN, in which, as the late Abba Eban said, Arabs could muster a majority to decide the sun rises in the West, is not a positive proposition.
  • The question remains how to convince nations in the West to stand for themselves in the face of Islamists committed to replacing them.
Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted Christian and Jewish heritage off of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Tuesday they ratified their perfidy. The vote seems clearly a response to the expansionist, jihadist aspirations of members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that sponsored it: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan. The vote, and the behind the scenes machinations, deserve evaluation.
Upfront:
  • Group 1: The "in favor" voters are a nasty collection of corrupt, dictatorial, largely Islamist (traditional Islamic theology gives Jews their place on the Temple Mount; these Islamists appear intent on removing all traces of Christian and Jewish presence from the Middle East) or Marxist, and unanimously frightening places. They are, in the immortal words French diplomat Daniel Bernard applied to Israel, "shitty little countries." Even the big ones. But see below for a caveat.
  • Group 2: The US, UK, the Netherlands, Estonia Germany and Lithuania had nothing to be ashamed of in the first round; they voted "against." But see below for a caveat.
  • Group 3: Some analysts consider a vote to abstain to be a victory for Israel, but for Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, Slovenia and Italy it was blatant appeasement of Group 1 and fear of their own often-violent Muslim minorities: "Please, please, don't blow up our capital cities. We will reject Jewish and Christian history and pretend Jesus chased the money changers from the steps of Montmartre."
If the West had stood for its own history, it would have mattered. Democratic Japan and South Korea should have voted "against" as well. There might be a narrow exception for India, which had never before failed to vote in favor of an Arab-led anti-Israel resolution.
  • Group 4: Israel's friends in Africa were a disappointment -- Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Togo and Uganda abstained. Can we dump on them? Yes, we can. Isn't it too much to expect African countries to stand on principle when Western European countries duck? No, it is not. True, Israel will not make them pay for their "in favor" vote, but countries that benefit from their relations with Israel in a profound and concrete way(check especially Uganda and Ghana) can and should stand with Israel in the face of Arab countries -- heirs to colonial Muslim slave-traders and still practice slavery today -- who drained African coffers for oil money and exported radical Islamic jihad to the continent. In this hemisphere, Haiti, where IsrAID is for the second time promptly on the ground to help Haitians recover from a natural disaster, is particularly disappointing.


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