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Geneva – With the war in Iraq ending in American victory, French President Jacques Chirac swallowed his pride and phoned President Bush this week, after two months of cold detachment. Washington termed the exchange as «business as usual» and Paris as «very good.»

After months of moving heaven and earth to keep the butcher of Baghdad in power, now the French understandably fear that they might be left out of the scene in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The Bush administration should confirm those French fears.
The Iraqi-French connection is as legendary as it is appalling. «Under Chirac,» wrote Andrew Neil in London’s Daily Mail, ‘French policy toward Iraq has become a witches’ brew of duplicity, hypocrisy, ruthless self-interest and immorality.»

In 1975, then Iraqi Vice President Hussein traveled to Paris procuring nuclear technology. Then Prime Minister Chirac gave him a personally guided tour of a French nuclear plant. France agreed to sell two reactors to Iraq and to train 600 nuclear scientists and technicians. It also agreed to sell enriched, weapons-grade uranium (93 percent), even though a safer grade was available.

British Parliamentarian Jack Cunningham noted a short time ago that, Iraq being a country awash in oil, Chirac must have known that the reactors and uranium would be used to produce something else than electricity. Hussein later called this deal a «concrete step toward the production of an Arab nuclear bomb.»

In 1981, Israeli pilots bombed the Osiraq reactor before it would become operationally nuclear. Chirac called that Israeli action «unacceptable.» Over the years, France sold Iraq weapons, Mirage fighter planes, air-defense systems and surface-to-air missiles worth billions. This would eventually make riskier the coalition forces’ military intervention during Gulf War I.

Chirac and Hussein developed a close personal relationship, and the French leader was eloquent about it. Chirac said that he was «truly fascinated» by Hussein and called the Iraqi dictator a «personal friend» and a man for whom he had «esteem and affection — a great statesman whose qualities will lead his people toward progress and national prosperity.» Additionally, the European press has speculated that Hussein financed part of Chirac’s 1977 Parisian mayoral campaign.

Chirac became president in 1995 and was reelected last year. According to media reports, he assumed personal charge of France’s Iraq policy, set up a special «policy cell» within his office and secretly dispatched a personal emissary to Baghdad. That envoy was so welcome by Hussein that reportedly he even sat in on many cabinet meetings in Iraq. Chirac’s relations with Iraq prompted jokes in the Middle East.

French policy on Iraq goes beyond the personal rapport that Chirac cultivated with Hussein. France has a lot to lose from this war of liberation and deterrence; that’s why it opposed it as much as it possibly could. Anti-war demonstrators have claimed that this war was about oil. If there is any truth to that, it might apply to France’s interests more than America’s.

France chose the wrong side in this war. Now it must be held accountable for it. It must be made to understand that siding with dictators and terrorists does not pay. And if to make that lesson clear, Americans should return the Statue of Liberty to the French — who seem to have forgotten its symbolism (as Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph ironically suggested) — so be it.

Julián Schvindlerman, a political analyst, is author of Land for Peace, Land for War and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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In December 1969 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2535 B, which for the first time used the word «Palestinians» in U.N. resolutions. Until then they had been called «Arab refugees.» That resolution referred to the «inalienable rights of the Palestinians» and their right to «self-determination.» Subsequently, the U.N. reaffirmed this «right» in many more resolutions.

And so we arrive at this year’s session of the Geneva-based United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), which recently debated under Item 5 of its agenda, «The right of peoples to self-determination and its application to peoples under colonial or alien domination or foreign occupation.»

On the first day, even before the Item 5 deliberations, the chairperson of the UNCHR, Libyan ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji, mentioned the Palestinians’ right to self-determination in her opening speech — a speech that she pronounced in Arabic, «In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.» When Item 5 was addressed, many Arab nations accused Israel of denying the exercise of this right to the Palestinians.

Anyone listening to the Arab delegates’ passionate plea on behalf of the Palestinians might reasonably conclude that Arab countries care deeply about the Palestinians’ plight. Alas, one would be wrong. The Arabs are less concerned about the lack of Palestinian self-determination than they are troubled by Israel’s exercise of her right to self-determination. They simply use the Palestinians as a rhetorical weapon to attack Israel in international forums.

The history of Arab-PLO and Arab-Palestinian relations is characterized by manipulation, deceit, treason and violence. Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza for almost two decades; yet, neither country granted the Palestinians the right to self-determination. Jordan expelled the PLO from Amman to Beirut in 1970 the Syrians attacked the PLO there in 1976, and when the Israelis sent the PLO packing from Lebanon in 1982, no Arab nation (with the sole exception of Syria) intervened to help the «legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.» Colonel Moammar Gadhafi even called on PLO militants to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Israelis. Naturally, Arafat declined to accept the Libyan’s suggestion.

After its expulsion, no Arab country wanted to host the PLO. Finally, Arafat and his henchmen ended up in faraway Tunisia. In the early ’90s, when Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait froze their financial contributions to the PLO and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers from their lands, even though these Palestinians had never participated in PLO decision making. A sober assessment led Arafat to state in 1985: «Honestly, the problems we face in our relations with some of our Arab brothers are much worse than those we face vis–vis Israel.»

So don’t be misled by the flamboyant declarations of Arab diplomats about Palestinian independence. They don’t care. They never did. Nor do they care about other people’s right to self-determination either, such as Tibetans or Kurds, who hardly received any mention during the Item 5 proceedings of this commission.

In a broader sense, we can affirm that all peoples living under a totalitarian yoke are being denied their right to self-determination. In a statement delivered this week to the UNCHR on behalf of U.N. Watch, I said: «Democracy. Government with the consent by the people. That is the essence of self-determination as a human right. The right to self-determination is not the right to have your own dictator.» I continued: «This agenda item on self-determination has been dominated for too long by this issue — the Palestinians. By focusing on one people, this commission does a disservice to more than 2 billion — yes, 2 billion — people who are ruled without their consent. . . . [Totalitarian] states have no credibility when they pronounce on self-determination for others, having denied it to their own people.»

So long as repressive states such as Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, China and Pakistan sit as members of the UNCHR, the rights     ‘ of the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza will continue to receive much of this commission’s time, coddling and attention. International actors who truly care about freedom and democracy should do all that is in their power to make sure that the legitimate right to self-determination of all the peoples of the world be addressed by this body — and not just the Palestinians’.

Julián Schvindlerman, a political analyst, is author of Land for Peace, Land for War and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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Today, International Women’s Day, will be observed as part of the 47th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which opened this week at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The CSW is focusing on women’s human rights and the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls.

In the Arab/Muslim Middle East, the situation is critical. According to the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, violence against women in the region is widespread. Under Islamic law (Sha’aria), Muslim female heirs receive half the amount of a male heir’s inheritance; Christian widows of Muslims have no inheritance rights. In a Sha’aria court, the testimony of one man equals that of two women. In Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, women cannot travel abroad without the consent of their husbands or fathers. Women are expected to dress properly in public (e.g. covered from head to toe) in Iran, where otherwise they may be sentenced to flogging or imprisonment, and in Saudi Arabia, where the Mutawwa’in constantly harass women to enforce the dressing code.

Saudi women are not allowed to drive and cannot run a business by themselves. They have to enter buses by separate rear entrances and sit in separate sections from where men sit. Saudi girls are not permitted to participate in sport at school and colleges. Saudi women are not even admitted to a hospital for medical treatment without the consent of a male relative. While women have access to education at the university level, certain studies such as journalism, engineering and architecture are off-limits.

In Iran, where the penal code includes mandatory stoning of adulterous women and men, life for young women is so miserable that, according to a New York Times report, some street girls began to disguise as boys to avoid rape or falling victim to prostitution rings. «I wouldn’t have been able to survive in women’s dress. I would have been finished by now,» explained one such girl.

A 2000 study showed that 97 percent of married Egyptian women and 90 percent of Sudanese women have undergone genital mutilation. In Sudan, southern women are forced into slavery and regularly raped.

If one were to create an «horror index» to measure the abuse to which women and girls are subjected in the Arab and Muslim world, the «honor-killing» phenomenon would rank close to the top. In Jordan alone, about 25 percent of all killings committed there in 2001 were of the type.

Yotam Feldner of the Middle East Media and Research Institute described some cases: ‘Kifaya Husayn, a 16-year-old Jordanian girl, was lashed to a chair by her 32-year-old brother. He gave her a drink of water and told her to recite an Islamic prayer. Then he slashed her throat. Immediately afterward, he ran out into the street, waving the bloody knife and crying, I have killed my sister to cleanse my honor. Kifaya’s crime? She was raped by another brother, a 21-year-old man.»

An Egyptian, who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter and then cut her corpse in eight pieces, explained that he killed her because he had «to put an end to this shame.» A Palestinian who hanged his sister with a rope said: »Society taught us from childhood that blood is the only solution to wash the honor.»

Taking perverse advantage of the societal stigma that «tainted» women carry in Palestinian society, Fatah men have seduced young women into illicit relationships to then blackmail them into recruitment for suicide operations — thus letting these women «redeem» themselves, Palestinian sources have told Israeli officials. So far, more than 20 young Palestinian women have committed terrorist attacks, including suicide-bombings, against Israelis.

With Iran and Sudan (Egypt until last year) sitting as members of the Commission on the Status of Women, it remains unclear to what extent the commission will manage to avoid politicization and stay focused on the matter concerning violence against women. For the sake of the scores of suffering women of the Middle East alone, let’s hope they succeed.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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Follow the demographic trend in the Middle East, and you will realize that the region is in big trouble.

In the year 1000, the region’s population was about 30 million, and it remained stable until 1800. Between 1800 and 1900, it grew by 75 percent, reaching 58 million. During the 20th Century, it grew by another 565 percent, with the population today totaling 386 million.

Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, observes that «the population increase over 1,000 years is essentially concentrated in a 150-year period between 1875 and 2025. This anomalous period of population growth has been a time of tremendous social, political and economic turmoil.»

In 2000, more than 40 percent of Middle Easterners were under age 15. Phyllis Oakley, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, pointed out that by 2015 the world’s largest proportional youth populations will be living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the West Bank and Gaza (as well as Mexico and Sub-Saharan Africa). In other words, the Middle East today has one of the largest youth populations in the world.

What kind of future are Arab rulers shaping for their 150 million children? What type of role models are they providing? Sadly, an indicator can be found in a recent initiative by Egypt’s First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, under whose patronage a book was published telling the stories of the «heroes of the Intifada,» with an emphasis on Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide-bomber. Another indicator: The Lebanese newspaper Al-Anwar reported about a computer game that Hezbollah is developing: It will portray radical shi’ites as heroes and will give Arab boys the chance to fight Israelis in virtual reality. The CDs will be on sale later this month and available in Arabic, English, French and Farsi.

If rulers and leaders are failing so miserably, what about the intellectuals then? As U.S. diplomat Hume Horan asked, «Where are the Arab Reinhold Neibuhrs, Christopher Dawsons, Karl Barths, Martin Bubers? Where are the politically engaged intellectuals who can help a young Arab make coherent, responsible sense of a troubling modern world? They scarcely exist in the Arab world. The few that even try are threatened, jailed, forced into exile — or worse.»

New Republic Editor-in-chief Martin Peretz similarly asked about the Palestinians in particular: ‘ ‘ What hero of the struggle have the Palestinians produced? No Gandhi, certainly. No Mandela. And no Weizmann or Ben-Gurion, either. Their present hero is Saddam Hussein. Do they envision a classless society? No. A transparent society, a democratic society, an accountable society? No, no and no again. Will they transform and free the lives of women, of despised tribes, of gay people, of skeptics? Not a chance. By what vision then will they judge themselves? Nobody says because nobody knows.»

In fact, we know. And herein lies the problem — and the solution. When Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, remove from their classroom walls the pictures of suicide-bombers; when they erase from their school curricula praise for jihad; when they stop the inciting rhetoric of blood and martyrdom in their Friday sermons at the mosques — then the pernicious hatred that Arab leaders have inculcated in the minds and hearts of an entire generation of young Arabs may begin to recede.

If they go the extra mile and begin to extol the virtues of life, peace, freedom and coexistence in their schools, media and mosques; and if they allow genuine independent thinkers to voice their views free of censorship or intimidation — then the seeds for societal change would have been planted. And who knows? Generations from now we might even find on Arab classroom walls portraits of the first Egyptian Montesquieu, Palestinian Locke or Saudi Jefferson.

If and when that happens, Middle East population statistics no longer will scare us.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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Next Tuesday the Israelis will elect a new prime minister, or, more accurately, an old primer minister.

If polls are to be believed, and barring dramatic events during the weekend, in all likelihood, Ariel Sharon will be reelected as primer minister of Israel.

If readers are then left wondering what’s the purpose of this national election in the fist place — especially at a time when Israel is under a frenzied Jihadistic campaign of terrorist attacks, and with the war on Iraq perilously looming on the horizon — they should find solace in the fact that most Israelis share the feeling.

This explains to a great extent why the Labor Party probably will not be the voters’ favorite choice next week. Labor’s decision last October to leave a national unity government at times of war, and forcing the current elections on a population now queuing to get their gas masks, did not seem to have won the heart of most Israelis. The fact that Labor abandoned a government to which it had been invited after it was badly defeated by a Likud leader who won by landslide may shed more light on the voters’ prospective decision. This leader was chosen precisely to handle the violence and mayhem that Labor’s brainchild — the unbelievably nave and reckless Oslo process — brought about.

Furthermore, now Labor leaders seem comfortable criticizing a government to which they themselves had been part of for the last two years. After two months in the opposition, Labor seems to have forgotten the extent to which it shares responsibilities for the failures of the Sharon administration.

As pice de resistance, Labor crowned as its new leader a man who epitomizes all that was wrong with Oslo: an appeaser of Palestinian terror and incitement, willing to make concessions under fire, who, to top it all, rejected out of hand joining a Sharon-led government when polls show that most Israelis favored such governmental union. You don’t need a Sherlock Holmes to discover why Labor will likely loose next Tuesday.

Now let’s turn to the Likud. All the dirt that emerged from the primaries’ corruption scandals (where bribery allowed politicians’ chauffeurs and personal secretaries to become candidates to Parliament) left voters frustrated and, according to recent polls, cost the party around 10 seats in the coming elections. Its leader, Sharon, has to be credited for cultivating close personal relations with President Bush, for showing unexpected ideological flexibility and thus garnering centrist votes, and for advocating and managing to keep for a relatively long period of time national unity during this most difficult war.

But Sharon made a strategic mistake by discrediting — both domestically and internationally — the so-called military option without even trying it.

Sending F-16s to bomb terrorists hide-outs in Rammallah, destroying weapons factories in Gaza, and selectively targeting Palestinian terrorist leaders all over the territories, may have been necessary military measures. But they were certainly insufficient, and, in the end, these limited actions played all too well in the hands of Israel bashers who all they needed to vent their dislike of Israel was to see on CNN those Appache helicopters circling the skies of Tulkharem.

The famous and controversial former Israeli general was voted into office in 2001 to do one thing only: to crush Palestinian terror and restore security for all Israelis. Sharon knows how to do it. He did it very well in the past. And while circumstances may have changed and different approaches are indeed in order, all he has been able thus far to offer Israelis in the realm of security is a perpetuation of the unlivable status quo. Which is why he doesn’t seem to be that great of an electoral option either.

To their left, Israelis see Labor candidate Amram Mitzna: an appeaser of terror and advocate of failed policies. To their right, they see Likud candidate Ariel Sharon: an old general who failed to deliver the security he promised.

So, in the final analysis, next Tuesday Israelis will end up losing, irrespective of who the next premier will be. Israelis are choosing between bad and worse. They are, politically speaking, between a rock and a hard place.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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Something did not go as expected at the latest «International Quds Day» in Iran. Introduced in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against Israel, the event has been held yearly on the last Friday of Ramadan. It has traditionally been a festival of anti-Zionist diatribe and pro-Palestinian fervor.

Not the latest one.

In response to the calls by the regime’s leaders to mark the event, Iranian students — still angered by the death sentence handed down for university Professor Hashem Aghajari and frustrated by the lack of freedom in their country — rejected the government’s appeal and actually called for a boycott of what they termed a «sham and mandatory demonstration.»

The statement, issued by the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, was strong in content, daring in tone and valiant in essence.

The communique referred to Iran’s political and clerical rulers as «the usurpers of political power,» «supporters of the culture of terror and violence» and «promoters of anti-Semitism.» It stated that «the people of Iran want to establish peaceful relations with the United States and believe that both the nations of Israel and Palestine have the right to exist.» It condemned the «pro-war factions» of Iran as well as the «Palestinian terrorist groups» and «Hezbollah thugs.» They called the International Quds Day «outdated» and said that observing it in support of violence was «a lunacy that is neither advantageous to the Palestinian nation nor does it coincide with the national interests of the people of Iran.»

To fully appreciate the intensity of this denunciation, one has to consider the place and context in which this statement was issued: in the Islamic Republic of Iran — where human rights are systematically violated, where religious coercion is rampant, where women are treated like cattle and political dissidents like bugs, and where boys and girls are subjected to public whippings for «sins» such as drinking alcohol, attending parties and listening to Western music. And in this land of oppression, a group of students goes public against the «rulers of tyranny» who show «disregard for the demands of their own people as well as public opinion in the West.»

Talk about courage.

Now contrast this with what’s going on at university campuses in the United States. To be sure, most American students are politically active and ideologically committed — but to the wrong causes, it seems. Many students are busy with pressure-campaigns to get their universities to divest from companies that do business with Israel. At rallies, some display highly offensive placards against Israel and the Jews.

That these students rarely have launched similar campaigns and demonstrations protesting human-rights violations in China, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria, or for that matter the Palestinian Authority, does not add much to their intellectual credibility. «The defense of peace and calm in the Middle East is not attainable through the support for terrorists and war-mongering groups,» wrote the Iranian students, which is basically what some American students are doing by supporting ideologically and morally those who launched war against Israel and encourage terror against its people.

How ironic. It’s in Iranian, rather than American, campuses that Palestinian terrorists are being called for what they are — and it’s not «freedom fighters,» «militants,» «activists» or any other sanitized terminology so widespread in the halls of academia in the West.

The Iranian students are teaching their American colleagues a lesson in ideological integrity. Whether the latter would learn it remains to be seen. But American students would be well advised to answer their Iranian friends in their hour of need. In a sentence that captured it all, the Iranian student movement told the ruling mullahs and the free world (they translated their manifesto into English): «Leave Palestine Alone, Think About Us.»

Anyone listening in Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, et al?

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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Saddam Hussein’s record is well known: He took part in a coup d’etat in the ’60s; became president 11 years later and has oppressed his own people since; attacked Iran and gassed thousands of Iraq’s Kurds in the ’80s; invaded Kuwait and launched missiles against Israel in the ’90s; and is currently financing Palestinian suicide bombers and embarked on an insane procurement program of weapons of mass destruction while playing hide-and-seek with the international community.

He poses a threat to global peace and must be removed from power. So says the United States.

But why should I believe President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has not yet confirmed America’s fears, when U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan says that Iraqi cooperation «seems to be good,» and when one of Hussein’s generals, Hossan Muhammad Amin, reassuringly declares: «Really, we have no weapons of mass destruction»?

Instead of getting tangled with the issue of Hussein’s deadly arsenal, I suggest that the dictator of Baghdad be deposed for a different reason — an artistic one. Let me explain.

Hussein is certainly the villain in the current drama, but he is also a man of many talents — an artist, if you wish. He has a taste for paintings, sculpture and architecture — as can be appreciated in the Mother of All Battles mosque in the outskirts of Baghdad, inaugurated last year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War. Creatively enough, the mosque’s minarets were built to resemble ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads. According to The Sunday Telegraph, the Scud-shaped minarets are 37 meters high, and there are four more minarets next to the mosque dome that look like huge machine-gun barrels, each 28 meters high. Taken together, 28/4/37 give Hussein’s date of birth. The mosque has a holy shrine housing a 605-page Koran, which was written, according to Iraqi propaganda, with the blood of the elected dictator himself.

«Over three years, the president gave us a total of 28 liters of his own blood, which has been mixed with chemicals to produce this handwritten Koran,» explained Dahar al-‘Ani, the mosque’s director of information.

But it is perhaps in the realm of literature where Hussein has excelled. In 2000, the sensational novel Zabiba and the King appeared in Iraq. Although it was anonymous, it was rumored that Hussein had authored it. The Iraqi media, writers and poets all praised it generously, Iraq’s television began to prepare a 20-part series of the novel (casting famous Iraqi actress Hind Kamil), and the Iraqi National Theater announced that a grand musical based on the book was in the making (adapted by Palestinian poet Adeeb Nasir).

Western reactions to the novel were diverse. A British journalist called it «an allegory of the confrontation between the Iraqi leader and the evil West, which combines romance, patriotism and adventure with openly sexual accounts.» In a review published in the Middle East Quarterly, Ofra Bengio, an expert on Iraq, said that Zabiba «is boring and incoherent . . . not written in the best Arabic style . . . clearly the work of an amateur . . . propaganda disguised as a novel — and poorly disguised at that.» For its part, the CIA studied the text in an attempt to access Hussein’s mind.

So here’s my suggestion. Remove Hussein, and everyone will benefit, primarily Hussein himself, who would have plenty of time to write more novels and design new mosques while serving his life sentence in prison. As a plus, Blix and Annan would be freed from the difficult task of searching for weapons in an expanse the size of Central America, the Iraqi people would enjoy a breath of freedom at last, and the planet would be free of the clear and present danger that the Iraqi leader represents.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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In 1987, Egyptian author Said Ayyub published a book titled The Anti-Christ, in which he claimed that all the popes of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther King and Napoleon Bonaparte were Jewish.

In 1990, another Egyptian writer, Izzat Arif, published The End of Saddam, where he accused the dictator of Baghdad of being a Jew. In 1995, the Syrian newspaper Ath-Thawara said that Yasser Arafat agreed to negotiate with Israel because he himself was a Jew. And last year, a Palestinian sheik claimed that Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, had been a Jew pretending to be a Muslim.

Just when I thought I had exhausted my capacity for surprise at Arab conspiracy theories about the Jews, I was struck by a new, creative one. Perhaps I was even more astonished because I did not hear it in the streets of Tripoli, in the bazaars of Damascus or even, at the McDonalds of Cairo, where I invited for lunch the Egyptian taxi driver who was driving me around, only to be treated to an anti-Jewish diatribe. (No, it wasn’t because he preferred Burger King.)

I heard the latest canard in Geneva, a perfectly civilized city in the heart of Europe. I was attending a lecture by a Swiss journalist on the post-9/11 world. His views didn’t sit well with three Arabs seated in the front. After interrupting him repeatedly, one of the Arabs, a Palestinian journalist, stood up and began to say that Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim. Challenged, she raised her voice and claimed quite matter-of-factly that bin Laden was – you guessed correctly – Jewish! She shouted that preposterous line a few more times as she stormed out.

This scene came on the heels of a no-less-disturbing event that had taken place at the same conference hall just a few moments before. A Western-looking journalist stated that he had been in New York on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and that to his surprise, the subways in New Jersey were all empty — empty of Jews, that is. Furthermore, he claimed that he saw that all the Jewish stores in the area were closed.

So confident was this gentleman that he quietly ignored the many dismissive laughs that his statement brought and felt comfortable enough to join the audience for cocktails.

A year ago, I wrote that anti-Semitism should not be disregarded when addressing European attitudes toward Israel. Since then, scores of anti-Semitic attacks have been recorded in Europe: Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, synagogues set on fire, yarmulke-wearing Jews beaten, Molotov cocktails thrown at Jewish institutions, and Jewish school buses stoned.

True, most of these attacks were perpetrated by Muslim immigrants, but it is equally true that their Muslim brothers in the United States and Latin America have not resorted to violence against their co-nationals.

Contrary to Latin and North Americans, Europeans seem to have created the proper political and cultural ambience for Muslims to feel comfortable enough to attack Jews with impunity.

We see this at the popular level, where street demonstrations have turned especially crude when it comes to rallying for the Palestinians as in Ireland or as in Italy, with demonstrators dressed like suicide-bombers. In elite circles, the Jose Saramagos and the Daniel Bernards lead.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote that as he was about to leave for Riyadh, a Kuwaiti official told him to set his watch back 100 years. I should be pardoned for falling for the temptation of borrowing this piece of advice, and recommend anyone traveling to Europe these days to set their clocks back, too — but just 69 years, to 1933.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

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All it takes for a baseless statement to be accepted at face value at the United Nations is for an Arab diplomat to utter it. Just observe the evolution of the newest diplomatic charge by Arab leaders: the United Nations, it turns out, is biased in favor of Israel.

• Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz protested in May that, while sanctions were imposed on Iraq for noncompliance, they were not imposed on Israel for its violations of U.N. resolutions.
• In September, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara asked why should the world demand that Iraq adhere to U.N. resolutions while Israel was allowed to be above international law.
• A few days later, the representative of the Arab League to the United Nations complained that the world community was ignoring Israeli violations of U.N. resolutions while pressing for their enforcement on Iraq.

To see how inaccurate this comparison is, one has to understand the different legal weights that U.N. resolutions carry.

The main distinction is between U.N. General Assembly resolutions and U.N. Security Council resolutions. The former have political (and in the eyes of public opinion, even moral) authority, but are not legally binding. The latter do create legal obligations for the states they refer to, but — as United Nations Watch, a Swiss NGO, reported — the implementation of these obligations vary depending upon the chapter of the United Nations Charter under which they are adopted.

Thus, resolutions adopted under Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter, entitled «Pacific Settlements of Disputes,» require negotiation. Such is the case, for instance, of U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, adopted in 1967 and 1973 respectively, which call for an Israeli withdrawal from disputed territories in the framework of a negotiated comprehensive peace settlement.

In opposition to this, resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, entitled «Action With Respect to Threats to Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression,» can be enforced by third parties. Moreover, as noted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the United Nations can authorize under Article 42 of its Charter the use of military force if a Chapter VII resolution is violated.

Here comes the trick. All U.N. Security Council resolutions that involve Israel were promulgated under Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter. All but two U.N. Security Council resolutions related to Iraq’s invasion and subsequent occupation of Kuwait were adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter.

This crucial legal distinction means that there is no legitimate basis for the trendy comparison between Iraqi and Israeli compliance, or lack of thereof, with U.N. resolutions.

Now, if the charge that the United Nations is biased against Iraq is unfounded, the implication that the international body is biased in favor of Israel is just bizarre.

Discrimination against Israel in the U.N. system is rampant.

In a constellation of 190 member-states, Israel is the sole nation prevented from winning a seat at the New York-based U.N. Security Council. The Geneva-based U.N. Commission of Human Rights devotes disproportionate attention to real or putative Israeli violations of human rights under a special item of its agenda during its annual meeting; the remaining 189 states are collectively examined under another agenda item.

Furthermore, Israel is the only country ever to have been branded a «non-peace loving state» by the U.N. General Assembly, which is driven by the Arab-Muslim bloc.

As a matter of fact, in more than 50 years, the United Nations voted in favor of Israel just two times: in November 1947 (partition of Palestine) and in May 1949 (admission of the Jewish state to the United Nations). It would be hard to find a single pro-Israel resolution since, with the notable exception of the 1991 resolution that revoked one from 1975 that compared Zionism to racism.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is aware of this reality. A few years ago, after citing the appalling U.N. record on Israel, he said that «it has sometimes seemed as if the United Nations serves all the world’s peoples but one: the Jews.»
But of course, don’t confuse Arab diplomats with these facts.

Julián Schvindlerman, a political analyst and journalist, is associate executive director of UN Watch, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee in Geneva.