Israel Matzav

John Bolton Stands Up

John Bolton Stands Up

At Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson reports that United States Ambassador to the UN John Bolton has castigated Kofi Anan for participating in the 'International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People' where a map of pre-1948 'Palestine' was displayed and labelled 'Palestine.'

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador John Bolton has complained to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan about an annual U.N. event where a map of pre-1948 Palestine, an area that now comprises the state of Israel, is displayed.

“It was entirely inappropriate for this map to be used. It can be misconstrued to suggest that the United Nations tacitly supports the abolition of the state of Israel,” Bolton said.

“Given that we now have a world leader pursuing nuclear weapons who is calling for the state of Israel to be ‘wiped off the map,’ the issue has even greater salience,” he said in a January 3 letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Friday. The letter was first reported in the New York Sun. ...

Bolton’s letter complained about the symbolism of Annan attending the latest International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, held last November 29, along with General Assembly President Jan Eliasson and Russian Ambassador Andrei Denisov, the Security Council president for November.

He questioned whether the United Nations could promote the event when U.S. law prohibits funding such events. Washington’s dues cover about a quarter of the regular U.N. budget.

Annan’s office was preparing a response to the letter, U.N. chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. He said the secretary-general was grateful that Bolton and others had brought the matter to his attention and had raised the matter of the map with the General Assembly’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which stages the annual event. It was not Annan but the committee that decided in 1981 to display the pre-1948 map at the annual event, he said.

“This gives a very unfortunate impression that the United Nations favors replacing Israel by a single Palestinian state, which is not the case,” he said, stressing that Annan regularly describes Israel as a full U.N. member and strongly disapproved of the Iranian president’s comments.

Truthfully, if the General Assembly had a straight up and down vote without a threat of a US funding cut off, my guess is that they would vote Israel out of existence. That's reality folks.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:14 PM