Bolton ‘Maps’ A Change for U.N. Culture

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The New York Sun

Criminal attorney Benjamin Brafman was master of ceremonies at the Zionist Organization of America dinner Sunday. He opened by telling the audience that unless they were expecting a telephone call from God, they should turn off their cell phones.


Delivering the keynote address was Ambassador John Bolton, who was received the Defender of Israel Award. He spoke about the United Nations – “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”


Mr. Bolton said that despite progress, to say that Israel is treated as a normal nation at the United Nations is a “fantasy.” He discussed the president of Iran’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and said that in light of Iran’s 20-year pursuit of nuclear weapons, “These statements are not just a mere flight of rhetoric.” He said these sorts of statements need to be refuted when they are made.


Speaking of refuting statements, Mr. Bolton gave an example of the time the United Nations Development Program provided funds to print banners, T-shirts, and coffee mugs after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza that read “Today Gaza, Tomorrow Jerusalem.” He said such statements were unacceptable.


Mr. Bolton said that last week America tried to have the Security Council issue a statement condemning the terrorist bombing in Netanya, but that Algeria objected to naming Syria as the source of the attack and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as the group that carried it out, even though the group had already claimed responsibility.”It became clear Algeria simply wasn’t going to budge,” he said, adding that the American reaction was, “If this body can’t summon up the political courage to state the truth, we’ll just do it on our own – and it’s something we plan to do quite regularly in the future.”


The ambassador also brought up the recent day of solidarity with the Palestinian people, an annual event at the United Nations.This year, he said, there was a map of the Middle East that was somehow missing Israel. Among those appearing at the event were the secretary-general of the United Nations, the president of the General Assembly, and the president of the Security Council, none of whom said anything about it.


“This is not simply a mistake that the three dignitaries made by going and not speaking about the map. They didn’t speak about the map because they didn’t see anything unusual, and in fact there isn’t anything unusual when it’s in the context of the United Nations,” Mr. Bolton said.


Rather than criticize those speakers, Mr. Bolton described it as an opportunity – “a pivot point” – to change the culture at the United Nations. He said that in the next few days, America would find out who the highest U.N. official was that gave approval for the map, under what authority the official made that decision, and who else was aware that the map was being prepared.


Mr. Bolton said that if the event came out of the regular U.N. budget, the American taxpayers paid 22% of the cost of the map, and said, “We’re going to do something about that.” He said it would be a part of something wryly called “management reform at the U.N.,” and that a lot of “underlying attitudes – anti-Israel, anti-Zionist,anti-Semitic, and, let’s be clear, anti-American – still persist at the United Nations.”


He referred to what Paul Volcker called “fixing the culture of inaction” at the U.N. Mr. Bolton spoke of trying to remove the “sclerotic decision-making processes and the unresponsive, unaccountable actions of the U.N. bureaucracy,” which he said was important for all member governments,not just America.


“We want to abolish the U.N. Human Rights Commission and replace it with something that actually defends human rights and doesn’t have Libya as its chairman,” Mr. Bolton said. He would prefer a council that doesn’t have regular members like Cuba, Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, and others that he sarcastically referred to as “stellar performers” in the area of human rights.


About Syria, he said, “The Syrian people deserve democracy.” He spoke of getting Syria to stop the flow of terrorism and financing of weapons in Iraq, where they are killing American and other coalition soldiers: “We have to be unrelenting in our pressure on Syria. Unrelenting.”


That evening, the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award went to Eli Hertz ,a leader in the PC industry; the distinguished leadership award went to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a principal with Bernstein Investment Research & Management; and the Ben Hecht Award went to journalist Caroline Glick, who moved to Israel in 1991 after graduating from Columbia University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In the audience were philanthropist Ira Rennert, NewYork Secretary of State Randy Daniels, and Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney.


gshapiro@nysun.com


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