Published November 20th, 2006
in Opinion and United Nations.
After having just finished writing a post asking for your opinions on the UN, I thought it would be fair for me to expand a bit about what I don’t like about the UN. And the end of the article you’ll find some praise for the United Nations, just to be fair. Here’s what I already wrote earlier:
General Assembly resolutions are, by merit of not being binding, irrelevant. And the Security Council is, due to the veto-system, incapable of making decisions on many touchy subjects. Having to attain a majority of votes is usually such an arduous project that resolutions are watered down to a shadow of their original intentions and often achieve nothing.
Published November 20th, 2006
in Opinion, United Nations and Your Opinion.
While browsing a multitude of political blogs and forums after yesterday’s UN General Assembly resolution on Israel and the subsequent comments of John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, I found that there are some very strong and very different opinions out there on the future of the United States in the UN.
Bolton yesterday -in a slightly roundabout way- suggested that the United Nations might not be “capable of playing a helpful role in the region”, referring to the Middle East, and said that anti-Israel bias is “a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies.”
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging an immediate end to all acts of violence by Israelis and Palestinians. (Sources: BBC World and Haaretz).
The resolution calls for an immediate end of Israeli incursions in Gaza and Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. It also calls for an immediate investigation into the recent Beit Hanun shelling, where a few misfired shells killed 19 Palestinians, to be set up by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The investigation is likely to be headed by former US president Jimmy Carter. There is no mention of the Hamas-led abduction of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit.
The United States tonight vetoed a United Nations Security Council Resolution condemning the IDF ‘massacre’ at Beit Hanoun - an incident last wednesday that killed 19 Palestinians, calling for Israel to immediately withdraw all forces from the Gaza Strip and for UN observers to be deployed in the area.
The resolution, proposed by Qatar, called for an “immediate investigation into the massacre that took place in Beit Hanoun” and for Israel to “cease all violence against the civilian population in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.” In a last-minute effort to avoid a US-veto, Qatar changed some of the language in the resolution - including dropping the word ‘massacre’.
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