Have You No Shame? (Part 2 of 3)
We at Citizen for Term Limits are grateful and honored that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has granted us permission to publish the full transcript of his excellent speech at the UN General Assembly, September 24, 2009.
Part 2 of 3
(click here for part 1)
Well, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging.
Rather than condemn the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here in the United Nations have condemned their victims. This is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating terrorists with those they targeted.
For eight long years, Hamas fired rockets from Gaza on nearby Israeli cities and citizens – thousands of missiles, mortars hurtling down from the sky on schools, homes, shopping centers, bus stops. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately fired on our civilians, not a single UN resolution – not one! – was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.
In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It was very painful. We dismantled 21 settlements – really bedroom communities and farms. We uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We just yanked them out from their homes. We did this because many in Israel believed that this would get peace.
Well, we didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in the Israeli towns and cities immediately next to Gaza became nothing less than a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued after we left, they actually increased dramatically. They increased tenfold. And again, the UN was silent – absolutely silent.
Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. This happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.
I’m not passing judgment. I’m stating a fact – a fact that is the product of the decision of great and honorable men, the leaders of Britain and the United States fighting an evil force in World War II.
It is also a fact that Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians, Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes directed against the rocket launchers themselves. Now mind you, that was no easy task because the terrorists were firing their missiles from homes and schools. They were using mosques as weapons depots, as missile caches, and they were ferreting explosives in ambulances.
Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes. We sent thousands and thousands of text messages to the Palestinian residents. We made thousands and thousands of cellular phone calls urging them to vacate, to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.
Yet faced with a clear-cut case of aggressor and victim, whom do you think the United Nations Human Rights Council decided to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.
By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth! What a perversion of justice!
Now, Delegates of the United Nations, and the Governments whom you represent, you have a decision to make. Will you accept this farce? Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could be mustered to declare that the earth is flat.
If you had to choose a date when the United Nations began its descent, almost a free fall, and lost the respect of many thoughtful people in the international community, it was that decision in 1975 to equate Zionism with racism. Now this body has a choice to make. If it does not reject this biased report, it would vitiate itself: It would begin or re-begin the process of vitiating itself from its own relevance and importance.
But it would do something else. It would send a message to terrorists everywhere, saying: Terrorism pays; all you have to do is launch your attacks from densely populated areas, and you will win immunity.
And then a third thing: In condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Let me explain why. When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that even if they didn’t stop, at the very least Israel would have made this gesture, an extraordinary gesture, for peace, but it would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense if peace failed. What legitimacy? What self-defense?
The same UN that cheered Israel as we left Gaza, the same UN that promised to back our right of self-defense, now accuses us – my people, my country – of being war criminals? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense, for acting in a way that any country would act with a restraint unmatched by many. What a travesty!
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