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Clothes, send a Emperor’s Clothes ============================================== Lebanon's
Bankruptcy and UN
Treachery: Note: if you've reached this page from footnote #1 in the Arutz Sheva article, "Shebaa Farms and UN Deceit," the information on the Golan Heights that you are looking for is here. ============================================== You probably don't know the following because nobody quotes the relevant text. On 22 May 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a report on implementing Security Council Resolution 425, calling for Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Lebanon to take charge of the area Israel vacated. That part is well known; what’s not is that Annan’s report mocked Lebanon and Syria for clumsily fabricating the claim that Lebanon had sovereignty over a small but important area known as Shebaa Farms, part of the Golan Heights. (The militarily strategic [1] Golan Heights looms above northern Israel; Israel seized it from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.) Kofi Annan's report, whose relevant section is reproduced below, did not discuss the motive for the bogus claim, but that became obvious after Israel withdrew: to enable Lebanon to argue that Israel still occupied some Lebanese territory, thus allowing Hezbollah (and Lebanon) to present Hezbollah's kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers and its shelling of and raids into Israeli communities as 'resistance' aimed at forcing Israel to relinquish Lebanese lands. Syria supported Lebanon's claim for the obvious reason that it also wished to give Hezbollah a pretext for terror, but Syria's support has been weak, as Lebanese PM Siniora complained on US Television, because Syria doesn’t want to actually surrender its own claim to Shebaa Farms. [2] So, wherein lies the UN's duplicity? * Despite knowing - and, in diplomatic language, stating! - that the Shebaa Farms issue was the purest baloney; * Despite the fact that Shebaa Farms has been used for six years by Hezbollah, with Lebanon's support, [3] to justify Hezbollah's ongoing war; * Despite the fact that launching an unjustified war is the greatest war crime; * Nevertheless, neither the UN, nor any of its members, including the US, ever even suggested that Lebanon is criminally guilty. Rather, Lebanon has been described as a victim of Israel and (to a lesser extent) of Hezbollah. The whitewash is so complete that Lebanon's Justice minister recently boasted: "During the term of this government, Lebanon has become the pampered son of the international community." [4] Everyone (the US included) competes over sending $$millions to rebuild Lebanon; not a cent is pledged to rebuild Israel, hit by thousands of missiles. The deceit of the so-called international community has been extreme, with the UN Security Council a) every year expressing grave concern over the fighting around Israel's northern border, while avoiding Lebanon's criminal role and criticizing Israel for her (minimal) acts of self-defense; b) every year repeating that Lebanon should speedily (!) dispatch troops to take charge of southern Lebanon, in accord with Resolution 425, even though Lebanon not only sent no troops but openly backed Hezbollah [5] and c) every year renewing the term of UNIFIL (the UN Interim Force in Lebanon), charged with certifying Israel's withdrawal (a dead issue after May 2000) and with helping Lebanon deploy to the border. By renewing UNIFIL at Lebanon's request every year, and never denouncing Lebanon for using Shebaa Farms as a pretext for war, the UN provided Lebanon/Hezbollah with a cover for jihad. And now the UN's US-French-sponsored cease fire endorses negotiations over the Shebaa Farms 'dispute,' thus giving UN approval, after the fact, to six years of jihad by Hezbollah and Lebanon, with Iranian and Syrian support - jihad justified by an 'issue' the UN dismissed as a clumsy fraud six years ago. Beyond belief.
Annan's 22 May
2000 UN report can be read at The key paragraphs is #17:
Even as Kofi Annan mockingly dismissed the Shebaa Farms claim, his duplicity is evident in the above remarks about Security Council Resolution 242 and the Golan Heights. Israel seized this 400 square miles strategic area from Syria during the Six Days War in 1967. Aside from the question of whether Syria ever had a legitimate claim to the Golan Heights [6], from the time Israel and Syria signed an armistice agreement in 1949 until the 1967 war, "Syria used its position on the Heights to shell Israeli farms and settlements in the Galilee below and to attack Israeli water projects in the Huleh Valley." [7] Indeed, Syria's shelling of northern Israel was one of the root causes of the '67 war.
Contrary to Kofi Annan, Resolution
242 does not dictate Israeli withdrawal from the
Notice that Resolution 242 did not call for Arab
states merely to make a verbal show of peace in exchange for
territory, but to "respect" Israel's right to a secure existence.
How did Syria respond? In the 33 years between the passage of
Resolution 242 and Annan's 22 May 2000 report, Syria's
state-controlled media continually broadcast calls to destroy Israel,
while the government granted arms, money, free transit and a base of
operations for terrorists acting on that call. Syria continually
violated the central point of Resolution 242, its call for Arab regimes
to stop trying to destroy Israel. How grotesque for Mr. Annan to cite
Resolution 242 to bash
Shame!
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Footnotes and Further Reading
======================================== [1] The Golan Heights looms above northern Israel and southwestern Syria. Seized by Israel from Syria during the Six Days War in 1967, it is militarily strategic. This is noted in an important US military document. In June 1967, shortly after the Six Days War between Israel and the Arab states, US Secretary of Defense McNamara asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an appraisal of Israel's minimal needs to defend against Arab attack. In the report, which was kept secret until the early 1980s, one of the areas the Joint Chiefs described as vital for Israel was the Golan Heights, just seized from Syria. (This includes the Shebaa Farms area.) Here's what they wrote:
[2] The transcript of
Prime Minister Siniora's remarks about Shebaa Farms and his complaints
about Syria, which could have been written by the Marx Brothers, are
posted as part of a comment by Jared Israel, at [3]
Lebanon's Minister of Information endorsed Hezbollah's terror on US TV
in October 2000, as quoted here: [4] The
BBC Worldwide Monitoring translation of the 27 August
2006 interview with
Lebanese Justice Minister Charles Rizq, published by the
London-based newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat,
is posted at
[5] http://emperors-clothes.com/archive/nightline.htm#kidnap [6] The question of the strained legality of Syria's claim to the Golan Heights is discussed in the "The Peace Encyclopedia" at http://peace.heebz.com/golan.html#whatis
[8]
Resolution 242
can be accessed at
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