New Zealand's Mercenary Motives for Its UN Vote against Israel

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In the 20th and 21st centuries, Peace is the refuge of scoundrels. It is the excuse for all sorts of aggressive diplomatic moves and sometimes it is even the excuse for military attacks. In September 1939, after Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, under Hitler and Stalin respectively had invaded Poland and while the ruins were still burning, both of these aggressor powers issued a joint statement that they were engaged in a "struggle for peace." Likewise, after the racist anti-Jewish vote at the Security Council, the White House spokesman, Ben Rhodes claimed that US abstention --effective support for the racist anti-Israel resolution, which he acknowledged-- was meant to help bring peace. Nothing new under the sun.

No doubt New Zealand would make that same claim, perhaps adding a devotion to justice. But maybe there were other motives for New Zealand's bigoted vote at the UN SC. Indeed, a New Zealand foreign policy expert explained the business advantages that New Zealand would receive on account of this mendacious pro-Arab vote. An item on the site of Radio New Zealand on 25 December 2016 tells us: 

New Zealand's role in promoting a UN Security Council resolution against Israel may have some economic payoff, a foreign policy analyst says.

The expert, one Steve Hoadley, reassures his countrymen that New Zealand will not suffer from any Israeli retaliation on account of the vote:

"New Zealand also trades with the Arab states, is about to sign a free trade agreement with the Gulf Co-operation Council. There's huge profits being made to export lamb and other dairy products, other food products to the Arab states. If there was to be a big trade payoff, the calculations would be in favour of going with the Arab and the Muslim countries."  [emphasis added]

So there is big money to be made by New Zealand in trade with Arab and Muslim countries.
OK. Make your money but don't tell us you are acting in the name of peace and justice. Nevertheless, a commentator, also on Radio New Zealand, praises his country as a "peacemaker":

A few years ago, after the successful Bougainville peace talks, New Zealand imagined a role for itself as an international peace broker. It was a nice idea that turned out to be harder than it sounded, but it marked an increased New Zealand confidence to act independently, for good purpose.This week's action is a further brave step from New Zealand. It has no obvious ulterior motives, but instead seems an attempt to simply do the right thing. [emph. added; Phil Smith, Radio New Zealand, 24 December 2016]

It seems that our two commentators contradict each other. Was the vote made for mercenary benefit or for the sake of  ''peace" and the "right thing"? Maybe they would claim for both reasons and say that there is no contradiction. But New Zealand has been selling sheep, both already butchered and live --for certain Muslim festivals that require a sheep be slaughtered on the spot-- to the Arabs for many many years, and after all a country needs a market. Even a country that is the epitome of a European colony founded far away from Europe in a land which Europeans had never seen let alone lived in until a few hundred years ago (unlike Israel, a land where Jewish roots go back thousands of years) and is now settled in its overwhelming majority by European settlers.

They say that New Zealand is very English, maybe more English than England itself is today. One thing that the New Zealanders brought with them from Europe is hypocrisy. A good European should never be without some egregious and saccharine sweet sanctimonious hypocrisy.
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UPDATING
12-28-2016 New Zealand Herald (13 November 2016) reported that Kerry was in the New Zealand capital in mid-November talking with the prime minister and foreign minister. New Zealand is a strong partisan of the Arabs. For those concerned about such things New Zealand is a European, British colony. As I wrote above, it is "a country that is the epitome of a European colony founded far away from Europe in a land which Europeans had never seen let alone lived in until a few hundred years ago (unlike Israel, a land where Jewish roots go back thousands of years) and is now settled in its overwhelming majority by European settlers." The New Zealanders, who belong to a colony, have no shame criticizing Israel for building settlements. Here is what is important in the article from 13 November 2016:

One of the closed-door discussions between United States Secretary of State John Kerry and the New Zealand Government today was a potential resolution by the United Nations Security Council on a two-state solution for the Israel - Palestinian conflict. After the talks, Foreign Minister Murray McCully even raised the possibility of the US or New Zealand sponsoring a resolution.

So Kerry and the NZ foreign minister discussed sponsoring a pro-Arab resolution. This contradicts US government spokesman Mark Toner who shamefully lied when denying any US collusion in the resolution produced in the Security Council the other day.

Obama Supports anti-Jewish Racism & anti-Jewish Apartheid at the UN Security Council

Before getting to the outrageous anti-Israel resolution at the UN let us just bear in mind that the UN does not operate to bring peace to the world or even to conflicts limited in scope unless major powers see peace as an interest. And that includes peace in small, individual, limited conflicts. This is so whatever the intentions of the UN's founders may have been.

The US State Department was hostile to the very idea of a Jewish state even before Israel's independence. But since the Six Day War this traditional State Dept policy has been complemented by a narrative that portrays Arabs as perpetually oppressed and persecuted by Israeli Jews. In fact, history says the opposite. Since the rise of Islam, Jews and Christians in Islam-ruled countries have been subject to an inferior status which eventually was named the dhimma and Jews and Christians in the Islamic domain have been named dhimmis who suffered all sorts of legal disabilities and inferiorities. Later a version of dhimmi status was extended to populations in south and east Asia who were neither Jews nor Christians.

Of course, in Christian lands too Jews suffered all sorts of legal disabilities and inferiorities. What we face now is a further legal-like denial of Jewish human rights. Our rights are denied on so-called "legal" grounds. At one time, the so-called "Left" defended people and their rights against cold, inhuman Law that ignored the realities of concrete situations and defended people against oppression by the unfeeling Law. Yet today no one would expect any self-proclaimed "leftist" to defend Jews against the depredations of the Law, often seen by "leftists" in the past as a mere instrument of capitalist, imperialist oppression. Today of course Jewish human and civil rights are denied in the name of Law, in this case International Law. The interpretations made of Law are false of course. And Geneva IV:49:6 does not forbid Jews from moving into the Judea-Samaria area, the so-called West Bank, territory recognized by the international community as the Jewish National Home by the San Remo Conference, 1920, and by the League of Nations, 1922. This status was confirmed in the UN Charter Article 80, when the charter was adopted in 1945.

So Law is being used as a bludgeon against the Jews and their rights. And it is a false interpretation of law at that. But the hatred of Jews endemic in the State Department and in the Obama White House is palpable and cannot be quenched by a reasonable study of the relevant international law or its honest interpretation.

Obama has shown himself to be the enemy that we knew he was back in 2008 when he ran in the presidential primaries. He colluded with the four Security Council member states that promoted the evil resolution. He wanted it, and according to an account on Israel TV by Oded Granot, US and Palestinian Arab representatives were discussing this step as far back as March of this year.

Jews in the Diaspora need to worry about this resolution too because if the rights of Jews to reside in the ancestral homeland of the Jews can be denied --a right guaranteed by international law in the Jewish National Home principle as well as in the League of Nations Mandate-- then their rights of residency and other rights can be denied in the countries where they live, including in the United States.


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Relevant Articles on the Stab in the Back at the UN
Melanie Philips [here]

Phyllis Chesler  [here]

Benny Avni, New York  Post [here]

Wall Street Journal [here]

Washington Post    [here]

Comment by Gov. Mike Huckabee
Obama gives Israel middle finger; gives Iran wet kiss; he's hates Israel for building bedrooms more than Iran for building bombs. [here]

Italian Jewish Response to the UNESCO Big Lie & Western Collaboration In It

Fiona Diwan, editor of the Bulletin of the Jewish Community of Milan, had some sharp words for UNESCO over its sinister vote "revising" the known history of Jerusalem and the Jewish role in that history. She also had sharp words for her own government and other EU and Western governments that collaborated in that vote by voting in favor or by merely abstaining. By abstaining they refused to take an honest stand on the integrity of known history. The West stays on the route towards barbarism.

Fiona Diwan in Mosaico, il Bollettino of the Milan Jewish Community, November 2016, no. 11:
Every month, here on earth, we cannot even count the pieces of archeological evidence and the discoveries of Jewish, Biblical, Hasmonean, and Herodian antiquities. However, France and Italy pretended not to know that. and were ready to exhibit the most scandalous silence when they abstained from the vote on the motion at UNESCO labeled "occupied Palestine," in which last month any tie between the Temple Mount and Judaism and Christianity was definitively denied. Among so many things that it did, the motion cancelled the Hebrew names of all the places on the Temple Mount in order to keep only the Arabic names. By now, everything has been written about this ignominious text. It is a text that falsifies history, denies the ancestral tie between Jerusalem and the Jewish people, once again giving in to the pressures and the intellectual terrorism of the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority. I want to point out that England, Holland, the United States, Germany, Lithuania, and Estonia voted against the motion.
We hoped that Italy and a France would have been more courageous by rejecting this buffoonish text. We would never have thought that at the session of the definitive vote, they would have chosen to abstain, thereby endorsing UNESCO's perverse calling in the delegitimization of Israel. Because, obviously, this is what was at stake. A delegitimization that runs in parallel with the demonization of Israel and the new European antisemitism with an Arab-Muslim matrix and its demographic explosion on the continent of Europe.

Ogni mese, quaggiù, non si contano le evidenze archeologiche e le scoperte di antichità giudaiche, bibliche, asmonee, erodiane. Eppure Francia e Italia hanno fatto finto di non saperlo, pronte a esibire il più scandoloso silenzio quando si sono astenute al voto della mozione Unesco denominate "Palestina occupata," con cui si è negato il mese scarso, in via definitive, qualsiasi legame tra il Monte del Tempio, l'ebraismo e il cristianesimo.  Tra le tante cose, la mozione cancellava i nomi ebraici da tutti i luoghi del Monte del Tempio per mantenere solo quelli in arabo. Su questo testo ignominioso si è ormai scritto di tutto, un testo che falsifica la storia, nega il legame ancestrale tra Gerusalemme e il popolo ebraico, cedendo, una volta di più, alle pressioni e al terrorismo intellettuale degli stati arabi e dell’Autorità palestinese. Voglio qui ricordare che Inghilterra, Olanda, Stati Uniti, Germania, Lituania e Estonia avevano votato contro. Speravamo in una Italia e Francia più coraggiose nel rigettare questo testo buffone. Mai avremmo pensato che, in sede di voto definitivo, avrebbero scelto l’astensione avallando così la vocazione perversa dell’Unesco alla delegittimazione di Israele. Perché, ovviamente, di questo si tratta.
 Una delegittimazione che corre in parallelo con la demonizzazione di Israele e col nuovo antisemitismo europeo di matrice arabo-musulmana e la sua esplosione demografica in terra d’Europa. [testo qui]

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The Italian daily newspaper, Il Foglio, sponsored a demonstration against the UNESCO in Rome, in front of the UNESCO offices, I believe. It was rather well-attended for an event of this kind.
See the video at the link [qui]