While all eyes have been on the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the United Nations, the PA has been busy pursuing other creative, if less formal and significant, ways to promote the idea and fact of a Palestinian state. Yesterday the Palestinian National Council won “Partner for Democracy Status” in the Council of Europe, the foremost human rights organization on the continent. And today the board of UNESCO, the UN’s main cultural body, voted in favor of the Palestinian’s draft resolution for membership in the organization (similar to their situation in the UN at large, the Palestinians have had observer status since 1974). The resolution will now be submitted to UNESCO’s 193-member General Conference for a vote sometime within the next month.
From Reuters:
To ramp up pressure on the United Nations, Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA) has been looking at alternative institutions that may recognize their sought-after statehood status — a campaign triggered by a breakdown of peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel last year.
[Snip]
In order to gain full membership, so-called “states” that are not members of the United Nations may be admitted to UNESCO with a two-thirds majority of the General Conference.
It was not clear whether Palestine would need to be a recognized state for its UNESCO bid to succeed.
The Palestinian draft membership resolution won by a margin of 40 votes to four, with 14 abstentions. The United States was chief among the “No” votes, alongside Germany, Latvia, and Romania. Not surprisingly, Florida Congresswoman and funds-slasher-in-chief, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has already started flashing her scissors:
It is deeply disappointing to see UNESCO, which has reformed itself in recent years, poised to support this dangerous Palestinian scheme. The U.S. must strongly oppose this move and make clear that any decision to upgrade the Palestinian mission’s status by UNESCO or any other UN entity will lead to a cutoff of U.S. funds to that entity.
(H/T Paul Mutter)
How “unilateral” of Ileana.
More bullying and collective punishment. So the US is complicit in the Israeli plan of enforced impoverisation of Palestine, the destruction of its economic life, and the strategy to reduce Palestinians to total dependence on a society hellbent on on putting them on a drip feed, the drip subject to Israeli whim and however vindictive and vengeful they feel (which is often and a lot). Gaza-like sealed zones outside of which the jailers will jeer and smirk as they trash the most basic of requirements for human life and liberty.
“this dangerous Palestinian scheme”
A danger to whom? The Americans?
Or the danger that may hinder the american jewish state in the middle east to expand?
Susan Rice condemning the Russian and Chinese veto against the European-drafted UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria:
“The united States is outraged that this council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security. Several members have sought for weeks to weaken and strip bare any text that would have defended the lives of innocent civilians from Assads brutality. Today two members have vetoed a vastly water downed text that doesn’t even mention sanctions”.
“Let there be no doubt, this is not about military intervention. This is not about Libya. That is a cheap ruse by those who would rather sell arms to the Syrian regime then stand with the Syrian people.”
What will she say if she has to veto the PA bid for statehood?
She could save money for speech writers and use my suggestion:
The united States is outraged that this counsil has utterly failed to address the urgent moral challenge to protect the brutal israeli apartheid regime against the growing threat of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people and the growing threat of regional democracy that would bring peace and security to the Arab world. (Breathe). We have sought for weeks to pressure, blackmail and even threatened to kill members of this counsil to make them vote against a resolution that would have defended the lives of innocent civilians from Israels brutality. Today we have have vetoed a vastly popular resolution that doesn’t even mention sanctions against israel.
Let there be no doubt, this is about military domination. This is about Israeli and US control of the region. This is our way of telling the world that we will continue to sell arms to the Israeli regime rather then stand with the defenseless Palestinian people.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/01/larry-mcmurtry-rick-perry-hustle/
So far the defining comment about the current Republican presidential stampede was made by the columnist Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: she said Mitt Romney looked like a statue of himself. Promptly another Times columnist, Gail Collins, said that when Governor Rick Perry of Texas loomed over the podium with his big chest he looked like a float; another commentator mentioned that Governor Perry often looked as if he’d had himself stuffed; while, to my eyes, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota looks like a mannequin who has somehow been granted reason and motion—though not too much reason or very rapid motion: it’s when things speed up suddenly that Congresswoman Bachmann tends to fumble.
Clearly the GOP has a problem. Except for those aging sinners Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, all its candidates seem synthetic. It’s become the party of stale air; and now who should come bounding in but another slicked up trashmouth, Governor Perry of Texas, a man whose only salient principle seems to be that all attention is good. Pop off a few times outrageously: the Fed is “almost treasonous”; Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme”; Texas might “leave” the Union “if Washington continues to thumb their nose” at us; climate change is a fraud: this even as the climate changing smoke from some of the most-destructive wildfires in Texas’s history wafts through the statehouse in Austin, a place like many not defended by very many firefighters since the Governor pared them down for budgetary reasons.
Anti-Arab race hatred has metastasized from the Knesset and now infects the US Congress. Maybe Israel can afford to break treaty obligations and renege on promises, but can the United States?
We’re not Israel. The sort of government that jon s. and eee have, and hophmi and DBG aspire to, will destroy the United States. We were never built to be a reich.