Imprimir

Instead of receiving a Nobel Prize for Peace, they should have got the Nobel Prize for Collaborating with Terror,» said Likud Knesset member Zeev Boim regarding the distinction awarded the United Nations a few days ago. He said this protesting the role played by the international organization vis-vis Israel and Hezbollah some time ago, when the United Nations essentially sided with the terrorists who had crossed the international border and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers.

Boim’s observation is appropriate, but not only because of that regrettable incident. Since the early 70s, the United Nations has adopted various measures toward legitimizing global terror, thus paving the way for grave conceptual confusion to emerge among world public opinion. The genesis of this irresponsible historical attitude began with the organization’s first definition of terrorism.

In 1972, upon request of then-Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, the General Assembly met to discuss the question of international terrorism and measures to prevent it. After Western pressures to effect the meeting and Arab counter-pressures to avoid it, the issue was referred to the Legal Committee. On Dec. 18, 1972, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3034 titled: «Measures to prevent international terrorism which endangers or takes innocent human lives or jeopardizes fundamental freedoms, and study of the underlying causes of those forms of terrorism and acts of violence which lie in misery, frustration, grievance and despair and which cause some people to sacrifice human lives, including their own, in an attempt to affect radical changes.»

This definition not only justified the phenomenon under study by pointing out its putative causes («which lie in misery, frustration, grievance and despair»), but it also justified its perpetrators («which cause some people to sacrifice human lives, including their own»).

The Ad hoc Committee on Terrorism was later established; among its members: Syria and Iran, terror-sponsor states. On Dec. 16, 1977, based on the committee’s recommendations, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 32/147, which justified the use of terror by any group that called itself a national liberation movement.

In the same vein, in 1979 the U.N. International Convention Against Hostage-Taking left outside the definition of hostage-taking every act «committed in the cause of armed conflict… in which people are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.» This controversial definition of terror and its variants was further promoted within the framework of many more U.N. resolutions, conferences and meetings.

The prevailing perception of terror within the United Nations slowly but gradually had turned into conventional wisdom in the court of public opinion. Just as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jane Kirkpatrick once remarked: «Thanks in large part to this relentless campaign, much of the world is now confused about who is the aggressor and who is the victim, who is the terrorist and who is the victim of terrorism.»

Thus one can see the legal and conceptual base upon which the current differentiations concerning condemnable and justifiable terrorism (depending on the victims’ nationality) made by so many Arab leaders — as well as some Western liberals – rest. The present simplistic and confusing approach to the phenomenon of international terrorism premised on a naive attempt to «understand» the motives of the worst kind of criminals undoubtedly is a result of the process described above.

Amid the avalanche of images, information and analyses since Sept. 11, what is conspicuously absent is the debate about the moral responsibility that the United Nations has for its reckless legitimization of terror.

The Free World long ago should have raised an accusatory finger submerging the United Nations in a state of perpetual institutional shame.

That, instead, it chose to reward the organization with the Nobel Prize for Peace should be seen as a political scandal and a moral obscenity of epic proportions.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.