One wonders how these same Americans--or their parents--would have responded if a socalled "impartial world organization" had sought permission to grill American troops in order to "investigate reports of a massacre" following our costly and hard-won victories at Monte Cassino or Iwo Jima.

Not that the United Nations is exactly seen as an "objective observer" in Israel, of course. David Tell writes in the issue of the Weekly Standard dated May 6, 2002:

"In 1948, when the armies of five surrrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel, in what the Secretary General of the Arab League announced was a 'war of extermination' against the Jews, the United Nations sat on its hands. And did not send a fact-find- ing mission.

"But, oh, how the U.N. has been making up for that oversight ever since. For more than 50 years now, the Jews have been its favorite subject....

"Right up to the present day, [the U.N.] Security Council has de= voted fully a third of its energy and criticism to the policies of a single country--Israel. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which regularly--and unreprovingly--accepts delegations from any number of homicidal tyrannies across the globe, has issued fully a quarter of its official condemnations to a single (democratic) country--Israel....

"No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N. --two of them directly supervised by Kofi Annan's governing secre- tariat--do nothing but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide distribution of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist. The 'Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,' for example, 'investigates' Israel's continued 'practice' of 'occupying' not just the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land with- in its internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders"

How would Americans feel about a similar ongoing "Special Committee," established just to investigate how this country came into possession of Puerto Rico and the Hawaiian Islands?

Mr. Tell then moves on to the question of the Jenin "massacre":

"Rescue workers in Jenin have so far recovered the bodies of six --not the rumored six hundred, but six--women, children, and elder- ly Palestinians. This, in a now ruined central area of the camp where countless armed gunmen rained days of nonstop sniper fire on Israeli foot patrols from the windows of still occupied residences they had booby-trapped with high explosives. This is a 'massacre'?

"And why, even if its death toll had proved to be a hundred times higher, would it warrant a U.N. fact-finding mission? In 1993, just after the events lately made famous by Hollywood's 'Black Hawk Down,' a two-week U.S. bombing campaign against Mogadishu killed a thousand Somali civilians.... But did it ever occur to the United Nations to convene an inquest into the 'human catastro- phe' that was Somalia? It did not."

The Weekly Standard goes on to say:

"The U.N. has spent decades, in the guise of refugee assistance, providing active, organized, and enthusiastic auxiliary services to the most delusional and violent strains of Jew-hating Palestinian irredentism. It bears mentioning, though one rarely hears it men- tioned, the UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Work Agency] camp at Jenin nas been for years what the Palestinians call 'a'simat al- istashidin,' the 'suiciders capital,' from which dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Fatah, Al Aksa, and Tanzim terrorist attacks have been launched, killing hundreds of Israelis.

"UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from Fall through Spring each year, children are taught that all of 'Pales- tine,' from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them.... UNRWA allows its food warehouses to do double duty as munitions dumps.

"UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and counterfeit cur- rency factories are housed in the public shelters it has con- structed in Jenin. UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own administrative offices in Jenin are festooned with graf- fiti celebrating some of the world's most notorious terrorist or- ganizations. Or how some of the world's most notorious terror- ists might have found their way onto the agency's payroll--to the point where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, extreme even in the context of Palestinian extremism, now openly controls the UNRWA workers' union."

Despite the foregoing facts, the United Nations has no shame! Those who run this world organization have unlimited audacity! The Weekly Standard states:

"This same United Nations, the blood of Israeli civilians still wet on its hands, now dares to question the morality of a modest, defensive, and long-overdue Israeli reprisal!"

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports:

"One extremist alone, Thabet Mardawi of the Islamic Jihad, is thought to have dispatched nine bombers from Jenin, killing a total of 20 Israelis and injuring 150. He will not do it again. Israeli sol- diers arrested him in the camp and put him behind bars. They also intercepted 10 suicide bombers who had made farewell videotapes and were ready to strike."

In the April 26 issue of the Washington Times, Paul Greenberg points out:

"The Israelis could have used air power instead of infantry and armor, and, in the style of Americans in Afghanistan, fought much of this war long distance. They could have proceeded to level Nablus' casbah and Jenin's refugee camp with little or no risk to their own troops. In- stead, they opted to fight house by house, block by block, in order to minimize civilian casualties, and they paid the price...."

An investigation published in the April 29 issue of the Boston Globe concludes that Palestinian allegations "that a large-scale massacre of civilians was committed [in Jenin] appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes."

In interviews with civilians and fighters in Jenin, the Boston Globe found that "None reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed." On the other hand, referring to the deaths of Israeli soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, a 14-year-old Islamic grenade-thrower, said, "This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us."

The Boston Globe quotes a spokesman for the Israeli army reporting that Palestinians are now moving bodies of people not killed in the Jenin fighting into graveyards around the camp "to score points with the U.N. committee."

And the planned subterfuge doesn't stop there. The Associated Press, on April 28, reported that, in an effort to project a moderate image in advance of the arrival of the hoped-for U.N. investigative team, the Palestinian Authority has orchestrated a painting-over of radical graffiti inside the settlement, such as the one declaring: "Osama bin Laden is a hero."

It has replaced them with placid slogans in English for the succession of VIP visitors now parading through the camp, the Associated Press reports.

The new, polite English graffiti, according to the Associated Press Report, is "very different from the venemous and warlike graffiti that has for years threatened 'rivers of blood' or 'opening the gates of Hell' on the walls of every town, village, and regugee camp."

But was the literal whitewashing even necessary, given that all proposals for a U.N. team would have prominently featured U.N. "observer" Terje Larsen?

Ah, Mr, Larsen! Is he an undistinguished anti-Israeli partisan, or is he just plain nuts?

On Thursday, April 18, Mr. Larsen toured the scene of that week's battle in Jenin, and proclaimed an area bulldozed by Israeli tanks (described by the Times of London as an area "the size of two football pitches"), "Not any objective can justify such action, with colossal suffering."

Mr. Larsen considers his analysis of the level of devastation and his perception of its lack of justifiability "appropriate," in spite of the fact that the Israeli operation was geared to wipe out the world's most concentrated nest of extremist terror bombers. Ah! Does he base this analysis and perception on his long career of decorated military service?

Well, no. As it turns out, Mr. Larsen is actually a Norwegian university sociologist and former trade union official.

It may also be worth recalling that the United Nations, Mr. Larsen's employer, was founded in 1945 by the three victor nations of World War II--The United States of America, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain.

The reason these nations were running the world in 1946, and were thus able to create an international body through which they hoped world peace could be promoted, is that they had just defeated the Axis powers.

Has Mr. Larsen never viewed photographs showing what Berlin looked like by the time the Red Army reached the Reichstag in 1945? Has he never seen photos of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki--Yokyo and Dresden, for that matter--looked like by the time the peace terms were signed in Tokyo harbor?

If "Not any objective can justify" the "colossal suffering" of a few hundred Palestinian families (who must have known they were living in a nest of terror bombers) being evicted and a few score of them (most armed and shooting back) killed, does this pathetic cretin hold that the levels of devastation seen in Germany and Japan in 1945 were also completely "unjustifiable," even for the objective at hand? (He did say, "not any objective," remember.)

Mr. Larsen thus shamelessly insults and betrays the brave servicemen who won the Second World War, liberating Norway from Nazi oppression while they were at it, we might add.

If there is some life after this one, we may at least hope Mr. Larsen finds his reward there, experiencing for eternity the typical life of an inmate of Auschwitz or Buchenwald or of one of the Japanese army's "comfort women"--or else constantly and eternally reliving the emotions of a peace-loving Israeli civilian who has just watched his innocent wife and child torn limb from limb by a hate-filled homicide bomber as they were about to sit down to their Passover supper. Any of these outcomes in another life would be a just reward for Mr. Larsen, due to his twisted sense of justice and distorted views of events in this world. If he believes the buldozing of an area 120 yards square in one corner of the Jenin refugee camp was an inappropriate level of devastation to accomplish the military goal at hand--or "any" objective, for that matter--it must surely follow that he also believes the leveling of Berlin and Tokyo were equally unacceptable tactics to adopt in successfully bringing down those hideous regimes.

Doesn't it?

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