This Ongoing War: A Blog: 03-Mar-16: When the UN responds to terrorism, which victims does it entirely ignore?

Thursday, March 03, 2016

03-Mar-16: When the UN responds to terrorism, which victims does it entirely ignore?

Finally (we said to ourselves)! The United Nations makes a comprehensive listing of acts of terror covering these past four very difficult blood-drenched months. Under the title "UN response to acts of terrorism", it deals with dozens of cowardly, ideologically-driven deadly assaults and says what needs to be said.

In its cataloging of these acts of terrorism between November 2015 and February 2016, the UN civil service in Geneva along with the Secretary-General in New York City express concern, sympathy, condemnation, condolences. All that, plus demands that the thugs carrying out these abominable deeds along with those who sent them be brought to justice.

Bravo!

Then - following an alert issued in the March 3, 2016 Newsletter of Human Rights Voices [here] - we took a closer look, and that's when we realized the nature of this scandal. The UN's terrorism experts managed to identify acts of terror (sorted by us alphabetically) in

Afghanistan
Burkina Faso
Cameroon
Chad
Egypt
France
Indonesia
Iraq
Lebanon
Libya
Mali
Nigeria
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Syria
Tunisia
Turkey

but they managed to find none - not a single one - in Israel.

No Arab-on-Israeli attack from the last four months of non-stop violence managed to get across the UN's bizarre terrorism-detecting threshold. No hint of the tragic murders of such Israeli innocents as

and other Israelis whose names and links we regret we were unable to pull together as we quickly prepared this post tonight.

That UN website features a link to another UN resource called "UNITED NATIONS ACTION TO COUNTER TERRORISM" which emphasizes the hypocrisy and double-talk exemplified by the UN statement. Here are the opening words of its home page:

All too often we are reminded that terrorism continues to inflict pain and suffering on people all over the world. Hardly a week goes by without an act of terrorism taking place somewhere in the world, indiscriminately affecting innocent people, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Countering this scourge is in the interest of all nations and the issue has been on the agenda of the United Nations for decades...

It's plainly true that the savagery of terrorism has always been about targeting "innocent people, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time". That's why we often try to remind people that no one is ever caught in the cross-fire when the terrorists do their barbarism. That's because those victims and their innocent lives are the entire goal, the whole target, the reason for the terror. Their suffering is what terror is all about.

How sad for all of us that the bureaucrats and the highly-paid management officials at the UN seem not to understand that the category "innocent people, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time" fully and accurately describes the victims of Arab-on-Israeli terror. If, in the eyes of the UN's experts, they are not victims of terror, is this because they were not innocent enough? Were in a place that was not wrong enough? Their loved ones were exempt from the pain and the suffering?

If their deaths by murder did not happen at the wrong time, is the UN's view that the Palestinian Arab stabbers, bombers, shooters and rammers killed them at the right time?

The struggle to defeat the terrorists is challenging enough without the world's most important union of countries applying politically-inspired cynical double-standards to the matter of who is a victim. Is anyone listening in Geneva or New York City?

UPDATE March 6, 2016: A friendly reader has just pointed us to the fact that the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015 (14 people killed, 22 seriously injured) is also absent from the UN's account. Disgraceful.

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