When Israel Had a Champion at the UN
By PETER COLLIER - 9/05/2012
Jeane Kirkpatrick experienced an epiphany shortly after Ronald Reagan appointed her Americas permanent representative at the UN in 1981 when Israels ambassador Yehuda Blum came to her office for his first official visit.
She had been appalled during the previous four years by what she regarded as the Carter administrations contemptuous attitude toward the Jewish state, and particularly by the way that preceding UN ambassadors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry had, respectively, criticized the Jewish state as stubborn and intransigent (and met secretly with the PLO representative), and voted for Resolution 465 condemning Israels occupation of Arab territories including Jerusalem.
But she didnt realize how deeply these attitudes had penetrated the US mission until she saw the way the career foreign service officers she inherited from the previous administration dismissively referred to Blum by his first name and rudely interrupted him on this first visit. She sternly pointed out to them that Blum was a Holocaust survivor who spoke nine languages, and angrily ordered them out of the room...
The personal relationship was political for Kirkpatrick. Seeing the hatred of Israel in her first days at the UN, she told her colleague Richard Schifter with a stricken look on her face, I think the Holocaust is possible again. I didnt think so before I came to the UN, but I think so now.
She brought this feeling to president Reagan who agreed with her that the US had to stand against the obsessive vilification of Israel.
Kirkpatrick defended Israel by her unyielding critique of what it faced at the UN. Charging that diplomacy regarding the Arab- Israeli conflict at the world body has nothing to do with peace, but is quite simply a continuation of war against Israel by other means, she said that the UN, as a result, had become a place where moral outrage was distributed like violence in a protection racket; a place where Israel is regularly and routinely attacked for manufactured crimes amidst deafening silence when 3 million Cambodians died in Pol Pots murderous utopia... when a quarter million Ugandans died at the hands of Idi Amin... and when thousand of Soviet citizens are denied equal rights, equal protection of the law; denied the right to think, write, publish, work freely or emigrate.
She pointed out repeatedly that hatred of Israel deformed all aspects of UN operations: A womens conference is suddenly transformed into a forum for the denunciation of Israel because of assertions that the biggest obstacle to the realizations of womens full enjoyment of equal rights in the world is Zionism....A meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency becomes so absorbed in negotiations and debate over a resolution to expel Israel that it almost forgets to worry about nuclear non proliferation.
The writer is the author of the recently published Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (Encounter Books, 2012).
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...3IHwCg&usg=AFQjCNGTCg2CqvdKXLVPiYPOOq1uHmtffw
By PETER COLLIER - 9/05/2012
Jeane Kirkpatrick experienced an epiphany shortly after Ronald Reagan appointed her Americas permanent representative at the UN in 1981 when Israels ambassador Yehuda Blum came to her office for his first official visit.
She had been appalled during the previous four years by what she regarded as the Carter administrations contemptuous attitude toward the Jewish state, and particularly by the way that preceding UN ambassadors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry had, respectively, criticized the Jewish state as stubborn and intransigent (and met secretly with the PLO representative), and voted for Resolution 465 condemning Israels occupation of Arab territories including Jerusalem.
But she didnt realize how deeply these attitudes had penetrated the US mission until she saw the way the career foreign service officers she inherited from the previous administration dismissively referred to Blum by his first name and rudely interrupted him on this first visit. She sternly pointed out to them that Blum was a Holocaust survivor who spoke nine languages, and angrily ordered them out of the room...
The personal relationship was political for Kirkpatrick. Seeing the hatred of Israel in her first days at the UN, she told her colleague Richard Schifter with a stricken look on her face, I think the Holocaust is possible again. I didnt think so before I came to the UN, but I think so now.
She brought this feeling to president Reagan who agreed with her that the US had to stand against the obsessive vilification of Israel.
Kirkpatrick defended Israel by her unyielding critique of what it faced at the UN. Charging that diplomacy regarding the Arab- Israeli conflict at the world body has nothing to do with peace, but is quite simply a continuation of war against Israel by other means, she said that the UN, as a result, had become a place where moral outrage was distributed like violence in a protection racket; a place where Israel is regularly and routinely attacked for manufactured crimes amidst deafening silence when 3 million Cambodians died in Pol Pots murderous utopia... when a quarter million Ugandans died at the hands of Idi Amin... and when thousand of Soviet citizens are denied equal rights, equal protection of the law; denied the right to think, write, publish, work freely or emigrate.
She pointed out repeatedly that hatred of Israel deformed all aspects of UN operations: A womens conference is suddenly transformed into a forum for the denunciation of Israel because of assertions that the biggest obstacle to the realizations of womens full enjoyment of equal rights in the world is Zionism....A meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency becomes so absorbed in negotiations and debate over a resolution to expel Israel that it almost forgets to worry about nuclear non proliferation.
The writer is the author of the recently published Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (Encounter Books, 2012).
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...3IHwCg&usg=AFQjCNGTCg2CqvdKXLVPiYPOOq1uHmtffw
