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Hezbollah now has more than 50,000 deadly missiles aimed at Israeli civilian population centers

The United Nations’ Confusion About Terrorism



United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon confirmed earlier this month the appointment of Jean-Paul Laborde from France as Executive Director of the UN's Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate. One problem with this appointment from the get-go is that Laborde does not believe there needs to be a definition of terrorism in order to deal with it. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are terrorist movements, according to the new UN Executive Director of Counter-Terrorism.
Under any rational definition of terrorism, both Hezbollah and Hamas would easily qualify as terrorist organizations. They commit violence deliberately directed at killing or maiming civilians to achieve their objectives through force, coercion and intimidation. But United Nations bureaucrats like Mr. Laborde do not accept the truth about Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, they make their own subjective judgments as to whether the cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder of civilians is legitimate resistance or terrorism. Their judgments are driven entirely by political and ideological considerations. This fatal flaw in the UN's approach to dealing with terrorism came into sharp relief during a press conference at UN headquarters in New York on June 26th in which four commanders of UN peacekeeping missions participated. Major-General Paolo Serra from Italy, who is the Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), was one of the participants. He was peppered with questions regarding UNIFIL's obliviousness to the heavy presence of Hezbollah forces and arms within the area that UNIFIL is mandated to monitor. His response was essentially "see no evil, hear no evil."

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UNIFIL, under Major-General Serra's command, is supposed to help enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which was adopted in August 2006 and brought about an end to the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The resolution, among other things, required “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon” except for “the Lebanese State.” The disarmament was intended to include Hezbollah. In addition, UNIFIL was mandated to “assist the Lebanese armed forces in taking steps towards the establishment, between the Blue Line [the UN published border demarcation between Lebanon and Israel] and the Litani river, of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in this area.” UNIFIL was authorized to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces to ensure that such areas are not utilized for hostile activities of any kind. On its website, UNIFIL declared that “UNIFIL deals with all parties even-handedly and does not ignore any violations.” Major-General Serra repeated this declaration of impartiality at the June 26th news conference. I tested the truth of this declaration by asking Major-General Serra why UNIFIL officers routinely criticized Israel for conducting overflights into Lebanese territory but ignored Hezbollah's storage of significant stockpiles of arms at civilian locations within areas of UNIFIL’s deployment of its forces. Other UN correspondents followed up on my question. The bizarre answer we received was that Israel's alleged violations were easy to detect because they were out in the open. However, Hezbollah's forces do not wear identifying uniforms and do not operate in an "open way," the UNIFIL commander said. Major-General Serra claimed that no evidence has been presented to him to support allegations of reinforcement and rearmament of Hezbollah within UNIFIL's area of patrol south of the Litani River. Maybe he did not receive the evidence personally since he became commander in 2012, but back in 2011 Israel released a map detailing what it says were nearly 1,000 underground bunkers, weapons storage facilities and monitoring sites built by Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, many of which were located south of the Litani River where UNIFIL is supposed to be patrolling. Apparently, Major-General Serra has not done his due diligence in researching the historical record of Hezbollah violations of Security Council Resolution 1701. Yet he had no problem criticizing Israel for using air reconnaissance in Lebanon to continue monitoring Hezbollah’s re-armament, which UNIFIL has utterly failed to do itself, and to enable Israel to better defend its civilian populations against a surprise attack. Terrorists do not generally wear uniforms, unless they were stolen from a government's army or police to create confusion. They do not advertise themselves by operating out in the open. Rather, they operate stealthily, using civilian homes, schools and other civilian buildings to hide their weapons until they need to use them. Hezbollah now has more than 50,000 deadly missiles aimed at Israeli civilian population centers, with the prospect of adding chemical weapons and highly precise missiles with greater reach deep inside Israel. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said his jihadists were “ready to receive any game-changing weapons" from Syria and has threatened to kill tens of thousands of Israelis. That is terrorism under any reasonable person's definition, but apparently not in the halls of the United Nations.


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Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist -- Bio and Archives

Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.


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