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October 19, 2001/Cheshvan 2, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 6
Leaders leery of U.N. Nobel
MICHAEL J. JORDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Consider this week in U.N. history: The organization and its leader win the Nobel Peace Prize for being at "the forefront of efforts to achieve peace and security in the world" - while Syria, a state long accused of sponsoring terrorism, is elected overwhelmingly to the all-important Security Council.
If nothing else, the bizarre confluence of events underscores the fact that supporters of Israel view the world body much differently than does the rest of the globe.
Given the U.N.'s history of Israel-bashing, Israeli officials will continue to resist the organization's push for a greater role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - peace prize or no peace prize.
The "only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by way of the United Nations," the Nobel committee proclaimed.
Israelis, however, beg to differ: They note the guaranteed advantage Palestinians enjoy at the United Nations, where the Arab-Muslim bloc dominates the 189-member body.
When criticizing the United Nations, Israeli officials and U.S. Jewish leaders distinguish between the institution and its top official. The Nobel committee awarded the prize "in two equal parts" to the United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, himself a Nobel laureate, praised Annan as a humanitarian who "really worries about the poor of the world" and is "changing the face of the U.N."
Jewish leaders note that Annan has rejuvenated the world body in his five years at the helm.
But Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders have a litany of grievances with the United Nations from the past six months alone.
Israel long had complained that - after pressuring Israel for years to comply with U.N. resolutions and withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon - the world body went strangely silent when Lebanon ignored the same resolutions and left its newly liberated territory under the control of Hezbollah.
This isn't the first Nobel selection Jews have protested. There's an ongoing campaign to strip Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat of his 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with Peres and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
But concerning the United Nations, Jewish leaders point to several other examples of worrying politicization that hinders its mission:
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In May, the United States was ousted from the U.N. Commission for Human Rights, which includes representatives from such human rights aggressors as Sudan, Syria, Cuba and China.
In early September, Israel and the United States stormed out of the U.N. World Conference Against Racism because of the level of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol, proceedings that many Jewish observers described as "an anti-racism conference that is itself racist."
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