Monday, December 13, 2010
[The following, by Vic Rosenthal, is crossposted from FresnoZionism.]
'Cultural performance' by al-Ashtar theater group at UN on International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. UN photo.
This is going to be an easy post for me to write, since I will let my friends at our United Nations write most of it for me:
In 1975, by its resolution 3376 the United Nations General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and requested it to recommend a programme of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination without external interference, national independence and sovereignty; and to return to their homes and property from which they had been displaced. The Committee's recommendations were endorsed by the Assembly, to which the Committee reports annually. The Assembly established the Special Unit on Palestinian Rights (later redesignated as the Division for Palestinian Rights) as its secretariat and, throughout the years, has gradually expanded the Committee's mandate.
As far as I know, no other 'people' has a committee to help them exercise their inalienable rights -- certainly not the Jewish people, or the Kurdish people or the Tibetan people or anyone else. To make sure that nobody forgets the 'plight' of the sainted Palestinians,
Assisted by the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Committee organizes international meetings and conferences, cooperates and liaises with civil society organizations worldwide, maintains a publications and information programme, and holds each year on 29 November or around that date a special meeting in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (29 November).
November 29, 1947, as everyone knows, is the date that the UN General Assembly passed the partition resolution which would have created -- for the first time in history -- a state for the 'Palestinian people'!
That must be why they're celebrating it, of course -- oops, no, they are commemorating the nakba, the 'catastrophe' which came about because the peace-loving 'Palestinian people' started a war with the Jews in the Mandate -- not because they wanted a Palestinian state but because they didn't want a Jewish one! And they got their neighbors to join in.
By the way, those neighbors -- Transjordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon -- didn't want to create a Palestinian state either, but they too didn't want a Jewish state, so they invaded the area of the Mandate and tried to get the territory for themselves. This is how Jordan came to control Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem for 19 years.
But to almost everyone's dismay, the Jewish state came into being. One of the most dismayed was the exiled leader of the 'Palestinian people', Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had expected the Hitler would nip the Jewish state in the bud by murdering the Palestinian Jews. Here is a snippet from a NY Times report on revelations from newly declassified documents:
In chilling detail, the report also elaborates on the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.
In fact, the report says, the Muslim leader was paid "an absolute fortune" of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party's elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated more than 350,000 Jews there.
On Nov. 28, 1941, the authors say, Hitler told Mr. Husseini that the Afrika Corps and German troops deployed from the Caucasus region would liberate Arabs in the Middle East and that "Germany's only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews."
The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria -- he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes -- and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israeli Arab leaders and "were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism."
"You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in," Dr. Breitman said. "And after the war, you have real Nazi war criminals -- Wilhelm Beisner, Franz Rademacher and Alois Brunner -- who were quite influential in Arab countries."
Too bad for Husseini and his 'Palestinian people', but Montgomery, Eisenhower and the Red Army stopped the Afrika Corps and Hitlerism before they were given their 'inalienable rights' to a judenrein 'Palestine'.
Apparently our United Nations has taken up Husseini's cause, now that Hitler is gone. The UN has set up a "Civil Society Network" that non-governmental organizations can join if they really care about helping the Palestinians get their inalienable rights.
Want to join? Here is all you need to do:
(a) be a recognized local, national or international non-profit organization;
(b) support the Charter of the United Nations, the principles of international law and the achievement of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily its right to self-determination;
(c) have demonstrated that it has concrete programmes or the serious intent to establish such programmes in support of the achievement of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
And our United Nations also publicizes the activities of organizations working for this humanitarian goal. For example, here is the North American calendar of "NGO Action News" for the past week:
Jewish Voice for Peace, Adalah-NY, Brooklyn for Peace, Code Pink, Jews Say No!, and Students for Justice in Palestine-Columbia held a demonstration on 10 December at TIAA-CREF's offices in New York, to protest the financial service's investment in companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. Supporters who were unable to join the protest are invited to sign a related petition.
The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) has launched its Winter Bazaar 2010, which will run until 21 December, in Washington, DC. Proceeds from sales of Middle Eastern maps, manuscripts and art, will benefit the ATFP as well as the American Charities for Palestine.
CODEPINK will lead a delegation to Gaza from 30 January to 6 February, to get a firsthand look at conditions on the ground.
J Street will hold a conference on peace in the Middle East called "Giving Voice to our Values," from 26 February to 1 March, in Washington, DC.
The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation urges Americans to tell their Members of Congress to put US -- and not Israeli -- interests first, when it comes to budget decisions.
Creative Nonviolent Resistance against Injustice and PalestinianGandhis.org are selling Fair-Traded Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Palestine in order to benefit Palestinian farmers. All profits will be donated to the newly created Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. For more information, contact Dennis Loh at: lohdennis@gmail.com.
J Street: pro-Israel and pro-peace. Right.
Oh, an aside: the UN's Committee claims to support a "two-state solution." But nowhere do they say anything like "two states for two peoples" or mention the Jewish people. Combined with the call for a right of return for 'Palestinian refugees', this implies that their vision of "two states" is the same as that of Mahmoud Abbas (which ultimately is the same as that of Husseini and Hitler): A Jew-free 'Palestine' alongside a former 'Israel' overrun by 4.5 million 'refugees'.
I support "the achievement of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily its right to self-determination".
As such, I advocate the course of action most likely to achieve a Palestinian state in the immediate future -- the total cessation of violence against Israel and Israelis. (Along with the numerous other benefits of this this policy, it's also the only one they haven't tried.)
Oh, is that not what you had in mind? Sorry...
In all seriousness -- have the Palestinians forgotten who it is they're dealing with?? Israel is, to the best of my knowledge, the only country to have won a war, sued for peace, and given away 70% of its territory to its vanquished foe.... merely in return for a peace treaty and an end to warfare. It worked for Egypt; there's no reason to think it wouldn't work for the Palestinians.
The Palestinians would get everything they claim to want, if they would cease the violence. They've known this for many years. One can only conclude that what they claim they want is not enough for them. (What a concept.)
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
"Too bad for Husseini and his 'Palestinian people', but Montgomery, Eisenhower and the Red Army stopped the Afrika Corps and Hitlerism before they were given their 'inalienable rights' to a judenrein 'Palestine'."
AND too bad for islamofascists, progressively racist socialists that the Israelis are NOT the unarmed Jews of WW2 nazi/national SOCIALIST infested europe.