United Nations

Atop the mount which must not be named

Featured image Ilan Ben Zion reports at the Times of Israel: Islamic authorities managing the Temple Mount attempted to have a veteran Israeli archaeologist ejected from the Jerusalem flashpoint holy site on Sunday for using the term “Temple Mount” in a lecture to American students. Waqf guards brought him to Israeli police at the site to complain, and the police, while saying there were no legal grounds to eject him, advised him »

MEMRI strikes again, I think

Featured image The Obama administration denied that it coordinated the introduction and passage of the infamous United Nations Security Council resolution that allocated to the Palestinian Arabs all the land taken by Israel in its defense in 1967, including the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. The Obama administration goes so far as to concede that it its abstention allowed the passage of the resolution. It hasn’t explained why it abstained rather than voted »

Misreporting on Trump and the United Nations

Featured image The Associated Press reports on incoming U.N. head Antonio Guterres, and takes the opportunity to editorialize on Donald Trump. As is so often true these days, some of what the AP reports as fact is flat-out wrong: Antonio Guterres takes the reins of the United Nations on New Year’s Day, promising to be a “bridge-builder” but facing an antagonistic incoming U.S. administration led by Donald Trump who thinks the world »

British PM repudiates Kerry’s attack on Israel

Featured image British Prime Minister Theresa May has criticized John Kerry’s oration on the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kerry called Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.” And, of course, he condemned Israeli settlement building as a threat to the “two-state solution.” May responded that her government “[does] not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the »

Kerry 12-28-16

Featured image Michael Ramirez (@Ramireztoons) carefully observed John Kerry’s rant against our friend and ally Israel at the State Department yesterday. President Obama’s public relations minions are on their prevarication tour to defend the betrayal of Israel by the United States in the United Nations. Kerry’s rant at State was a key stop on the tour. In his cartoon on Kerry’s rant Ramirez homes in on the Obama doctrine as applied in »

Netanyahu responds to Kerry

Featured image Secretary of State John Kerry spoke at what seemed like Castroite length in defense of the infamous UN Security Council resolution that passed with the abstention of the United States this past Friday. The text of Kerry’s speech is posted here. Elliott Abrams capably parses it here. Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to Kerry’s speech in Hebrew (accessible in the video posted here) and in English. The brief excerpts of Netanyahu’s »

Israel postpones vote to build in East Jerusalem, for now

Featured image The Jerusalem city planning committee was scheduled today to vote to permit the building of 618 new housing units in East Jerusalem, an area populated mostly by Palestinians. However, with John (“Foghorn”) Kerry about to deliver an oration about his vision of “peace” in the Middle East, the planning committee postponed the vote. Members of the committee said it delayed the vote at the request of Prime Minister Netanyahu. According »

Michael Oren explains

Featured image Michael Oren is the former Israeli ambassador to the United States during the first term of the Obama administration. We interviewed Oren about the memoir of his tenure as ambassador Ally: My Journey Across the American Israeli Divide in the Power Line podcast posted here. It is a highly illuminating memoir. Oren currently serves as Israel’s Deputy Minister for Diplomacy. He is first and foremost a prominent historian, certainly the »

Obama’s vindictiveness and anti-Israel ideology drove the U.N. resolution

Featured image Critics of President Obama’s decision not to block (and, perhaps, to advance) the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel say that it was solely an attempt to harm Israel — an effort motivated by vindictiveness and/or raw ideological dislike of Israel. Those who disagree with this assessment should be able to point to a positive objective Obama reasonably could think his decision might advance. In theory, I can think of »

Martin Karo: A modest (statutory) proposal

Featured image Reader Martin Karo is a Philadelphia attorney. Mr. Karo has submitted a modest if lawyerly proposal for the consideration of President-elect Donald Trump and the 115th Congress. He writes: After the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, declaring that all Israeli building and activity in any territory captured in the 1967 war (the third war imposed on the Israelis) is illegal under international law, Donald Trump immediately vowed that »

Charles Hill: What Obama has done

Featured image Charles Hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, Senior Lecturer in International Studies, and Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale, where he is one of the principal teachers and presiding spirits in the Directed Studies program for freshmen as well as the year-long course on Grand Strategy for university students. Before undertaking his career as a teacher, Professor Hill »

Obama’s U.N. perfidy

Featured image Anne Bayefsky is a leading human rights advocate. She is Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and President of Human Rights Voices. Bayefsky has written this article for Fox News called “Diplomatic terrorism at the UN, courtesy President Obama.” I have taken the liberty of posting it below, with emphasis added by me to certain passages. The vicious condemnation of Israel at the UN Security »

Tom Cotton on Obama’s parting shot at Israel

Featured image Our friend Sen. Tom Cotton issued this statement about President Obama’s decision to “abstain” from voting on the U.N. Security Council’s anti-Israel resolution — a decision that enabled the resolution to pass: President Obama is personally responsible for this anti-Israel resolution. His diplomats secretly coordinated the vote, yet he doesn’t even have the courage of his own convictions to vote for it. This cowardly, disgraceful action cements President Obama’s richly »

Obama’s parting shot at Israel [UPDATED]

Featured image Donald Trump’s success in blocking a U.N. resolution condemning Israel was short-lived. Yesterday, as we discussed here, Egypt pulled the resolution in response to Trump’s expression of disapproval. Today, however, four Security Council members revived it for consideration. They were New Zealand, Malaysia, Senegal, and Venezuela, a failed socialist state. President Obama opted not to block resolution. The U.S. abstained. Therefore, it passed. Scott has more about this here. Obama’s »

Obama rhymes-with-bucks Israel

Featured image President Obama checked off another item on his “rhymes with bucket list” today in the United Nations. The United States abstained in a 14-0 vote by the UN Security Council condemning all Israeli building and activity in the West Bank as “illegal,” including building in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and Israel’s sovereign access to the Western Wall. The Security Council resolution had been put forward by New Zealand, Malaysia, »

Israel Denounces “Shameful” Obama Administration

Featured image Paul wrote yesterday about how President-elect Trump went to bat for Israel, opposing an anti-settlement United Nations resolution that the Obama administration had decided not to veto. Today Israel’s government shed more light on what happened, and made clear its feelings about the Obama administration: An Israeli official on Friday accused President Barack Obama of colluding with the Palestinians in a “shameful move against Israel at the U.N.” after learning »

Time to Put the United Nations Out of Business?

Featured image What, exactly, is the U.N. good for? Hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered in Syria, and no one looks to the U.N. for a solution, just as no one expects the U.N. to do anything about ISIS or al Qaeda. Wars have raged in Congo and across much of Africa, and the U.N. has done little but embroil itself in an unending series of sexual exploitation scandals. The Middle East »