Ban Ki-Moon doubles down on justifying murdered Jews
By purposely omitting the human rights violations of the Palestinian Authority against their own people, Ban shows that he is far more concerned with condemning Israel than protecting Palestinians.
By SHMULEY BOTEACH
Over the last four and a half months, 30 Israelis have been murdered and 301 wounded by Palestinian terrorists. There have been 83 stabbing attacks, 22 vehicle ramming attacks, and 15 shootings against Israeli civilians.And yet, for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Jews are responsible for their own deaths. In his January 26 remarks to the UN Security Council, Ban justified the murder of Jews by citing "Palestinian frustration" and the "paralysis of the peace process." For Ban, "alienation and despair" explain why Palestinians murder innocent men, women, and children.Ban's remarks were condemned by Israeli leaders for justifying terrorism and stoking murder in cold blood. But rather than retract his dangerous words, Ban doubled down in an op-ed in the New York Times, again blaming Israelis and settlements for the murder of Jews.By purposely omitting the human rights violations of the Palestinian Authority against their own people, Ban shows that he is far more concerned with condemning Israel than protecting Palestinians.Ban's words and writings betray a blatant anti-Israel bias. Based on his statements you would get the idea that Israel alone is entirely at fault for the violence occurring and the Palestinians are completely blameless. Ban touts the well-known lie that if Israel would just withdraw from Judea and Samaria, peace would break out throughout the land.However he knowingly and disingenuously leaves out the continuous genocidal incitement on the part of the PA and Hamas. He omits Abbas' praises for the "martyrs" who kill Israelis while meeting with terrorists' families, lauding their violence and "bravery." And Ban conveniently ignores the fact that Abbas and the PA absolutely refuse to give up the "right of return" which are well-known code-words for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel. In fact the PA has enacted laws stating that the right of return can never be relinquished.Netanyahu summed up the motivations behind the recent wave of violence when he stated that Abbas "continues to incite with lying propaganda about al-Aksa, lying propaganda about executions, and by rejecting all true efforts to come to negotiations."Ban claims that the Palestinians' desperation explains their violent actions. Yair Lapid pointed out how idiotic this statement is by pointing out, "There are millions of people in the world whose lives are harder than those of the Palestinians. In Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East…Those people don’t think there is anything, anything at all, which gives them license to take a knife and stab a mother of six. To take a knife and stab a woman who is five months pregnant." Ban is well aware of this. But when it comes to Israel, when has the truth mattered to the UN?Ban also fails to admit the gross human rights violations and executions that the PA and Hamas commit against women, homosexuals, Christians, and anyone who would speak out against them. Ban omits Mahmoud Abbas becoming a dictator by abolishing elections. He omits that Palestinian squalor is the result of Arafat having embezzled more than a billion dollars from the Palestinian people or the Abbas kleptocracy which has enriched him and his sons Yasser and Tariq to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.Ban's blatant bias against the Jewish state compels him to grossly misrepresent the causes of the violence in Israel and the near daily murder of Jews. He is well aware that after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 Hamas easily overthrew Abbas' attempt at governance and fired 14,000 rockets at Israel. Ban knows that this scenario would very likely be repeated in the West Bank with even deadlier results. Yet his inexplicable hostility toward the Jewish state compels him to peddle this fraudulence. In effect, Ban’s op-ed presents Israel with the stark choice of suicide, on the one hand, and international condemnation on the other.
Ban heads a corrupt and impotent organization that failed miserably to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. And yet he focuses on Israel to distract from the UN’s failures at stopping genocides today. Ban Ki-Moon will go down in history as having failed to stop the genocide of Arabs in Syria and the ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the Middle East. He will be forever known as someone who spoke out against a military solution in Syria that might have stopped the mass murder of innocent Arabs. Someone who called on Obama not to attack Assad after using chemical weapons against children. Someone who eve spoke out against the bombing of ISIS.Ban Ki-Moon has no problem attacking the Jewish state and has written articles condemning Israel on a number of occasions. But the same Ban who regularly attacks Israel for settlements has never condemned China for the occupation of Tibet, Turkey for the occupation of Cyprus, or Russia for occupying Crimea.Ban has failed to speak out and stop the grossest human rights violations proliferating across the globe and the UN has all but guaranteed that Iran will become a nuclear power.In your last year as Secretary General of the UN, it is understandable that you would try to force a high risk, dangerous agreement on the Israelis in the hopes of salvaging some remnant of a legacy. But it’s not too late to fix your broken moral compass and call on the Arab tyrannies that surround Israel to emulate its example of democracy and human rights rather than being remembered as the man who obsessed over Israel while the rest of the world burned.Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” is the international best-selling author of 30 books, winner of The London Times Preacher of the Year Competition, and recipient of the American Jewish Press Association’s Highest Award for Excellence in Commentary. He will shortly publish The Israel Warrior’s Handbook.