Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who leaves his post in two weeks, blamed Israel for the Arab violence in a scathing speech in Jakarta
His speech, delivered by a U.N. official in Indonesia, was one of his most off-balanced anti-Israel addresses ever.
He was preaching to the chorus, as evidenced by the lengthy title of the conference, called “the Meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on the Question of Jerusalem.”
With the title “the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” Ban could not be expected to preach Zionism, but his wholesale blame for Israel as the cause for Arab violence is subtle incitement for more Arab terror.
Some of his choice remarks were:
The anger we are witnessing is bred from nearly five decades of Israeli occupation.
It is the result of fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust.
It has been fed by the wounds of decades of bloody conflict, which will take a long time to heal. Palestinian youth in particular are tired of broken promises and they see no light at the end of the tunnel.
Obviously, there was no mention of the openly-stated Palestinian Authority agenda that incites children to kill Jews and constantly displays the map of Israel as “Palestine.”
Ban also did not relate to Arab pogroms ever since the “First Aliyah” that marked the beginning of the will of Jews to re-establish the State of Israel.
Nor did he explain the “fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust” as causes for the Arab nation’s going to war against Israel instead of accepting the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947, for the War of Attrition in the 1950s, or for seven Arab countries preparing to annihilate Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967.
He called for “a negotiated solution” for a “sustainable Palestinian State [[to] be established and Jerusalem emerge as a capital of two States, with arrangements for the holy sites acceptable to all.”
There was no indication of what compromise might be offered by the Palestinian Authority.
As for Israel, he damned “the settlement enterprise [that[….threatens to close the window of opportunity to reach the two-State goal.” He also condemned Israel’s policy of demolishing homes of terrorists, whose murder of Jews, according to him, is caused by Israel.
Ban probably will be succeeded by a leader from Eastern Europe. When Ban took his post from in 2006, it was thought no one could have been worse for Israel than his predecessor Kofi Annan.
Ban proved everyone wrong, and there is every reason to suspect his successor will be even worse.