Israel Matzav

Iran elected Vice President of UN General Assembly

If you needed any more proof of the total moral decadence of the United Nations, here it is. Iran, which has called for the destruction of a fellow UN member state, has been elected Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly.

On Wednesday, the U.N. General Assembly elected Iran one of its vice presidents and Qatar as president, each for a year-long term starting in September. At one and the same time the Obama State Department has been blanketing the airwaves with speeches on this administration’s love affair with the UN under the title “principled engagement.” But with Wednesday’s U.N. elections, what kind of principles might the Obama administration be talking about?

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In practice, though, the Qatari president of the General Assembly, and his new right-hand, Iran, have something else in mind. In their first couple of weeks on the job, they will have two contentious orders of business – the U.N.’s Durban III racist “anti-racism” conference scheduled for September 22, 2011 and the Palestinian effort to seek statehood without having to accept a Jewish state. There are now some very clear indications of their strategy.

Last week, the General Assembly adopted a resolution planning the Durban III conference, an event intended to “commemorate” the anti-Semitic event held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. Durban II took place in Geneva in 2009, and it was headlined by the most famous advocate of genocide today, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Durban III plans entail an opening session with a select group of speakers – including none other than the president of the General Assembly.

It is instructive to recall what Qatari General Assembly president Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser will have to commemorate. At the first Durban conference on “combating intolerance and xenophobia” the head of Qatar’s delegation, Abdul-Rahman H. Al-Attiyah, declared: “all the Israeli heinous violations are justified as a means to bring back every Jew to a land that they raped from its legitimate owners and denied them their right to claim it back.”

Al-Nasser will, undoubtedly, also reflect his emir’s current agenda. During the opening days of the General Assembly in September 2010, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, said: “the war on terror…has plunged us into a kind of war with no limits, nor end, nor logic, nor legal or moral conditions. ..[W]e believe that even as the phenomenon of terrorism exists, it should not be treated by waging wars…To the contrary, it has…undermined the efforts made in dialogue among cultures.”

As for his Iranian sidekick, he’ll have plenty to keep him busy. According to U.N. rules, vice presidents of the General Assembly fill in for the president with “the same powers and duties” on the many occasions when “the President finds it necessary to be absent during a meeting or any part thereof.” They also serve on the governing body of the Assembly, the so-called General Committee, which draws up proposed agenda items and the priority of items – like how to handle a Palestinian statehood resolution, for example.

Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Khazaei, lost no time to make it clear what his country plans to do with its new status as a U.N. role model. “Membership in the General Committee is a good opportunity to assert fair positions in the world order…[and] be instrumental in planning the meetings of the Assembly and the arrangement of internationally significant issues for inclusion in the agenda of the Assembly,” Khazaei told Iranian PressTV. He then specifically cited the “important issue” of the “Durban Conference focusing on racial discrimination.”

Oh and by the way, you're not likely to see Hillel Neuer and UN Watch destroying Iranian speakers at the Durban III conference.

To ensure that the views of Ahmadinejad and company get full billing, the General Assembly will also be treated to “summaries of the discussions” (conducted during the day at roundtables), while the whole event will be webcast around the globe. A few non-governmental organizations will be allowed to speak – provided that they are included on a list drawn up by the president of the General Assembly and approved by U.N. member states “on a no-objection basis.”

In case you’re wondering, the resolution that hands Iran and its friends a veto over the selection of anti-racism advocates who will be permitted to speak at Durban III was adopted by the General Assembly without a peep from Obama administration delegates.

Principled engagement, U.N. style.

Your tax money at work. That's especially true if you're an American. Your government pays 22% of the UN budget, and will be paying millions of dollars (along with the City of New York, which has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel) to protect all these 'diplomats.'

That's beneath contempt.

Labels: Durban III, Emir of Qatar, Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Qatar, unilateral declaration of statehood, United Nations Watch

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:40 AM