David Singer: Abbas Set to Defy Trump and Netanyahu at United Nations

Here's the latest article by Australian lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas seems set once again to embark on another futile journey to the United Nations (UN) seeking recognition of a second Arab state – in addition to Jordan – within the territory comprised in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

A senior unidentified Palestinian source threatened such action on 21 August:

“If we don’t hear within a month and a half that the American team has stopped talking and started doing, Abbas intends to mobilize anyone and everyone he can for the UN General Assembly session on the establishment of a Palestinian state, regardless of the Israeli and American reactions”

 President Trump was quick to respond  – State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert telling a press briefing on 23 August in answer to a question as to why America was loath to commit – or recommit - to the two-state solution:

“We are not going to state what the outcome has to be. It has to be workable to both sides. And I think, really, that’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it. It’s been many, many decades, as you well know, that the parties have not been able to come to any kind of good agreement and sustainable solution to this. So we leave it up to them to be able to work that through.”

Negotiations – suspended since April 2014 – extending over the past 24 years between Israel and the PLO have not produced any workable and sustainable solution. Abbas is clearly in no mood to resume those negotiations without preconditions.

A replay of Abbas’s appearance at the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2011 therefore seems inevitable. Israel’s Prime Minister – Benjamin Netanyahu – was quick to point out at that time how automatic majorities at the UN had been used to incite institutionalised hatred against Israel.

“After all, it was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland  – it was then that this was braided  – branded, rather  – shamefully, as racism. And it was here in 1980, right here, that the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt wasn’t praised; it was denounced! And it’s here year after year that Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined. Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel – the one true democracy in the Middle East.

 Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It’s the –  the theatre of the absurd. It doesn’t only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles:

 Gaddafi’s Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam’s Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

You might say: That’s the past. Well, here’s what’s happening now  – right now, today. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the UN Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organisation presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world’s security.

You couldn’t make this thing up.

So here in the UN, automatic majorities can decide anything. They can decide that the sun sets in the west or rises in the west. I think the first has already been pre-ordained. But they can also decide – they have decided that the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest place, is occupied Palestinian territory.” 

This theatre of the absurd seems set to be repeated once again at the forthcoming 72nd Session of the UN General Assembly.

Israel-bashing can never resolve the 100-years-old Jewish-Arab conflict.

Out of the Mouths of Buffoons?

In 2006, in a speech aired on Arab satellite TV station Al Jazeera, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi declared: "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe – without swords, without guns, without conquests. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades." He noted that if Turkey joins the European Union – a cause dear to the heart of British Prime Minister David Cameron, of course – there will be a further 50 million Muslims in the heart of Europe’s counsels. "Europe is in a predicament, and so is America," he continued. "They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time .... All people must be Muslims."

In November last year, when the flamboyant colonel visited the equally flamboyant Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, his country’s former coloniser and now its best trading partner, 200 “escort girls” hired through an agency were whisked off to a Rome villa where they were lectured on Islam by Gaddafi, and each received, along with 50 euros and a volume of his bons-mots, a copy of the Koran. Last Sunday, again in Rome with Berlusconi for economic talks, Gaddafi lectured on Islam to 500 young women paid to attend his talk, urged them to marry Libyan men, and declared that Islam should “become the religion of all Europe”.

The man who hoodwinked the Scottish government over the state of health of the Lockerbie bomber – who’s just celebrated the first anniversary of his freedom despite having at his release been diagnosed with just weeks to live – also attempted some rather sophisticated blackmail, demanding that the European Union pays Libya £4.1 billion a year to stop the illegal immigration of Africans who use Libya as their gathering point for the Mediterranean crossing. “Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa,” he said pointedly. “At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe .... What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans? We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion.”

It’s ironic that back in the 1960s and 1970s the “First World” was being told by latter-day Malthusians and the vanguard of the environmental movement to restrict their families to just two children per couple – “Zero Population Growth” – and that nowadays we’re being told by some “experts” that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic growth. It might not be politically correct to say so, but mass migration from the Third World does present a real social and cultural problem for developed countries – and the colonel has tapped into that fact, using some very blunt language indeed.

There are, as we all know, many Cassandras who warn that Europe is being deliberately colonised by Muslims intent on imposing Islam on everyone  – and that in view of their relative youth and fertility patterns theirs is the demographic weapon, the weapon that Gaddafi spoke of in 2006. (In traditional Muslim societies polygamy tends to be restricted to affluent men, who can afford to have up to four wives – but, as far as I’m aware, in dear old deluded Britain welfare payments are available to surplus wives and their children, so long as the polygamous Islamic marriages have taken place overseas, in countries where polygamy is lawful.)

"What would happen if a European head of state went to Libya or another Islamic country and invited everyone to convert to Christianity?" asked one Italian daily following Sunday’s event. "We believe it would provoke very strong reactions across the Islamic world." A Vatican spokesman dismissed as “lacking seriousness” Gaddafi’s latest call for Europe to embrace Islam – although the spokesman did add that Europeans’ widespread indifference to their own faith and to matters sacred “could create a fertile ground for the eventual future penetration of Islam in all of Europe”.

Colonel Gaddafi is popularly portrayed as a preposterous figure. But then so were Mussolini and Goering. Could we be faced with a case of “out of the mouths of buffoons”?