Monday, September 26, 2011

Say What You Like...

...as far as I'm concerned, Tony Blair is still a hero in my books:

The Enigmatic Mr. Blair
"Maybe he has acted for no more noble a motive than consideration for his American royalties and lecture fees, but anyway he has stood up and unequivocally opposed Mahmoud Abbas's bid for full recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN.

"You can pass whatever resolution you like at the United Nations or the Security Council, it doesn't actually deliver you a state on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, and if you don't have a negotiation, whatever you do at the UN is going to be deeply confrontational," Blair, who is the international community's official Middle East representative, was quoted as saying."
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"Blair has supported the US and Israeli position that a real peace settlement can only come about from face-to-face negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Given the whole history of the conflict, this seems the only feasible position. A UN resolution recognizing a Palestinian state, as matters are at present, would have only one point: it would contribute to the delegitimization of Israel."
And that IS the point. And for that matter, the delegitimization of the UN, as if there's anything left to delegitimize.

Also, from the same source, The UN House of Lies
"In tones that ranged from combative to conciliatory to exasperated, the Israeli leader challenged the members of the UN to, for once, impose the same standards by which they judge Israel on the Palestinians. Why not, he argued, hold the Palestinians and Israelis to the same standards of conduct, and morality?

Netanyahu recited a brief version of the United Nations' abuses of Israel. The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution. The 1980 peace agreement with Egypt that was denounced in the UN. He said, "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."

Not only is Israel condemned routinely, Netanyahu said, some of the worst despots, dictators and terrorists are elevated to prominence in the UN: Saddam Hussein's Iraq as leader of the UN disarmament conference, Gaddafi's Libya chairing the Commission on Human Rights, and now Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon presiding over the Security Council.

It is a blindness to morality, an abandonment of epistemological standards that distinguish between freedom and slavery, between terrorism and democracy, that Netanyahu argued against. It is the same moral blindness that Jeane Kirkpatrick condemned as "the sin of moral equivalence.""

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