New York-The UN Committee scheduled to hold a virulently anti-Israel
meeting on European Parliament premises in Brussels August 30-31, 2007 has
just released a statement attempting to cover-up the date of its
inception.
The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian
People (CEIRPP) has recently come under unprecedented criticism for its
extreme anti-Israel activity. In response it has now declared that it
“would like to state most unequivocally that this Committee is not
anti-Israeli, nor are its activities. It was established by the General
Assembly in 1974…” The Committee was in fact not created in 1974, but on
the same day that the UN General Assembly declared Zionism a form of
racism, November 10, 1975.
“The CEIRPP is no stranger to controversy,” EYEontheUN Editor Anne
Bayefsky said. “For the last thirty years, it has hosted events around
the world, all of which have a common theme: Palestinian ‘resistance’ and
return is the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is UN-speak for
encouraging terrorism and the end of a Jewish state.
“This is the same UN Committee notorious for prominently displaying a
Mideast map-at UN headquarters-without the state of Israel. The
decades-long practice of displaying the map was discontinued only after
EYEontheUN disseminated a photograph of it.”
Though the 1975 Zionism is Racism Resolution itself was eventually
rescinded in 1991, the Committee, mandated to spread its message, lived on
as the only UN body devoted to the claims of a single people.
Other portions of the recent missive belie the Committee’s innocence still
further. The release maintains the Committee was established “…with a
mandate to promote…the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes
and property from which they had been displaced and uprooted…The
forthcoming Conference will provide…particular attention…to the role of
elected representatives in advancing the cause of Middle East peace in
concert with civil society”-an obvious effort to promote Hamas-those
“elected representatives” dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
Bayefsky warns, “The Brussels meeting is a brazen attempt by the UN to
enlist the support of the European Union in its anti-Israel agenda. It
will offer yet another opportunity to spread a dangerous historical
revisionism and the violence such a message is certain to spawn.”
Participants scheduled to speak include the following:
• Christopher Doyle, Director of the Council for the Advancement of
Arab-British Understanding-who has pontificated that terrorism “a.k.a.
‘resistance’ was inevitable” and boycotts and sanctions of Israel was a
positive step. Doyle was invited as the only NGO to speak at UN
headquarters during the UN’s 2005 November 29th session along with the
Presidents of the Security Council and General Assembly.
• The coordinator of BADIL, a UN-accredited NGO-BADIL is best known for
advocating Zionism is racism, the end of a Jewish state and the
glorification of terrorism. Via its Web site literature, BADIL approves
of “special reverence…to the martyrs of the intifada, whose sacrifice is
paving the way to the ultimate victories of freedom and return…”
• The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee-They have “…express[ed]
their full support to the proposal of the largest British Association of
University Teachers (AUT) to boycott two Israeli universities…We wish to
stress our respect and high appreciation of this courageous and moral
position, which signaled the globally rejected racist and colonial
policies of the State of Israel…analogous to the practices of the old
South Africa Apartheid regime.”
“One can only marvel at the audacity of the Committee’s statement, which
declares that allegations of an “anti-Israel” agenda are a
“misunderstanding,” Bayefsky said.
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For more information see EYEontheUN.org
EYEontheUN is the only independent UN accountability organization
headquartered in New York dedicated to making transparent the UN’s record
on its fundamental promise – to identify, condemn, and protect against
human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to
international peace and security. Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN, is a
Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro Institute
on Human Rights and the Holocaust.