By JPOST EDITORIALUnited Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon(photo credit: REUTERS)
Little attention was paid in Israel to the latest UN anti-Israel extravaganza. Presumably we’ve grown inured to the hatred spouted at the Jewish state.While the Arab Spring’s carnage boggles the civilized mind, the World Health Organization, the UN’s public health agency, has identified the true transgressor – Israel.WHO’s annual assembly last week condemned Israel for “violating the health rights of Syrians in the Golan.”This is a travesty in every conceivable aspect. While the bloodbath in the region continues unabated, the international forum has found nothing else worth focusing upon but Israel. Only Israel was singled out by the WHO assembly.This comes despite the fact that Israeli medics and hospitals provide indisputably altruistic treatment to spiraling numbers of civilians and enemy combatants from Syria, fleeing that country’s killing fields. The most cutting- edge medical care is given critically wounded victims who reach the Golan border.But most disheartening of all is the fact that this disgraceful resolution was adopted in Geneva by a whopping majority of 104 to 4, with 6 abstentions and 65 no-shows. Israel, unjustly accused and unjustly convicted in another UN kangaroo court, was condemned even by European delegations, which purport to occupy the high moral ground – although they ought to know all about blood libel.Gallingly, the Syrian government – which has been mass-murdering its own citizens – submitted a document that urged WHO to “intervene immediately and take effective measures to end inhuman Israeli practices that target the health of Syrian citizens.”The Israeli “occupation authorities” were accused of “continuing to experiment on Syrian and Arab prisoners with medicines and drugs and to inject them with pathogenic viruses.” This charge aroused no revulsion apparently among the participants. Not one representative of any country of the European Union was outraged, protested, or walked out of the deliberations.This could be perceived as farcical, were it not in fact tragic.The Palestinian Authority, Israel’s purported peace partner, blasted Israel for supposed sins against Gazans and West Bank Arabs, cynically omitting mention of the fact that Israeli hospitals are where the seriously ill Palestinians choose to head to when in need, including PA higher-ups. Gaza’s Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh sent his granddaughter here and Mahmoud Abbas’s wife was recently operated on in an Israeli hospital.
We Israelis serially impress ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for our good deeds – and these are prodigious indeed, even under challenging circumstances.Our knee-jerk reaction is to dispatch our rescue and medical crews to any disaster site anywhere in the world. We helped during Turkey’s last major earthquake, although all we received in return was invective and hostility. We sent our medics to Haiti after its earthquake, only to be berated in medieval libel-style for organ-theft. We aided the Nepalese victims of the latest Himalayan earthquake, only again to be maligned for a variety of supposed nefarious ulterior motives.There seemingly is nothing the Jewish state can do to convince its defamers of its true nature, no more than individual Jews could before Israel’s independence.This is hardly the first bizarre anti-Israel resolution to be produced by UN forums for whom Israel remains an unparalleled atrocious ogre. But this resolution stands out for its utterly outlandish misrepresentation and boundless wickedness. It must be judged the most abhorrent since the UN equated Zionism with racism in 1975 (an equivalence the UN itself later rued and retracted).Time and again the most brutal dictators dispatch to the UN their mouthpieces, who in deadpan fashion declaim the obligatory human rights catchphrases, while promoting Israel’s denunciation for any and every imaginable trumped-up crime against humankind. All the while, representatives of self-righteous democracies smugly vote for the vilification of a fellow democracy, as if thereby vindicating their own virtue. Foreign ministries – which demand existential risks of Israel – don’t raise a semi-quizzical eyebrow, but go with the Israel- bashing flow and countenance the new Judeophobic zeitgeist.Their stock pretext is that this isn’t anti-Semitism, but a legitimate critique of Israeli policies. Yet only Israel is thus pilloried. Moreover, Israel is wrongfully and falsely damned in a grotesque spectacle of hate.
