DPI has taken the ball and run with it, after the 2005 UN General Assembly resolution “rejecting” Holocaust denial. After all, Shashi Tharoor, DPI’s Under-Secretary-General for “strategic” communications, was part of the engine that brought Holocaust-awareness to the UN, some 60 years after the end of World War two.
It is not completely irrelevant that Tharoor was planning his campaign to become the next SG at the time.
Tharoor had been startled, several years earlier, after then-out-of-office but still-politically- significant Israelis
(notably, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Yuli Tamir) attended for the first time what would have been an otherwise totally routine DPI seminar on the peace process. Tharoor was chairing a panel session when Lipkin-Shahak asked, from the audience, why there was a map of Palestine at the entrance to the room, in a UNESCO facilty in Paris. Why, asked Lipkin-Shahak, was there interpretation of the session into Arabic (as well as into the UN’s five other official languages) — but not into Hebrew? Why, someone asked, had so few (or no) Israeli journalists been invited (with expenses paid by the UN, of course) to the event?
Tharoor, visibly surprised, passed a note to good-girl Therese Gastaut, sitting dutifully behind him in the second row of seats at the podium. Gastaut scurried out of the room, and returned minutes later. She passed a note back to Tharoor. He then replied to the latter question, saying that there were two Israeli media represented in the session. A “journalist” then arose in the audience to reply: Oh, but those two are really accredited to other media (one was with Agence France Presse, I remember this guy saying), so their work for the Israeli papers was secondary stringing — and didn’t count.
OK, that was maybe not the beginning, but it was the start of one of the major efforts — and perhaps his biggest achievement — of Kofi Annan’s term as UN SG. As Salim Lone wrote in an opinion piece published in the Guardian in August to promote Tharoor’s campaign to become SG, and as Eve Epstein confirmed in her article the Jewish Daily Forward at the end of December, one of Kofi Annan’s main aims in office was to make Israel — and its boosters in the organized Jewish communities — feel comfortable in the UN.
(And Eve Epstein was there, at this meeting in Paris, as a New York Public Relations consultant hired by Therese Gastaut, to give DPI big-wigs some pro-organized-Jewish sensitivity training).
Part of the idea was to provide a counter-balance to the UN’s commemoration of the International day of Palestinian Rights on 29 November — the anniversary of the 1947 adoption of UN GA Resolution 181, which authorized the creation of two states, one “Jewish” and one “Arab”, in the British Mandate of Palestine (which Britain had told the UN it was fed up with, and wanted to leave asap).
Palestinians have been saying, where is the second state?
The Israeli Government and its organized supporters want the UN to stop this “discriminatory” annual commemoration — also organized by DPI. The U.S. has for years withheld a portion of its assessed UN dues to protest the 29 November day. And, part of the current drive for UN “reform” is a review of “mandates” — for the Special Committee on Palestinian Rights, and for the DPI programme to support that Committee, as well as the 29 November day, and other related “outreach” activities concerning “Palestine”. One former DPI staffer told me that he had a big fight just to use a photo of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in a DPI brochure. Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton — a straight guy, despite his politics — made loud protests about the use of a Palestinian flag (and no Israeli flag) at the 29 November exhibits at UNHQ. Bolton, and others, also complained about a map of the Palestine Mandate that didn’t show the subsequently-created State of Israel.
The first UN GA Resolution on the Holocaust, of November 2005, “Requests the Secretary-General to establish a programme of outreach on the subject of the ‘Holocaust and the United Nations’ as well as measures to mobilize civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education, in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide; to report to the General Assembly on the establishment of this programme within six months from the date of the adoption of the present resolution; and to report thereafter on the implementation of the programme at its sixty-third session.”
One major concern at the time, which seems to have been settled, was concern over preservation of the Nazi concentration camp sites. The 2005 resolution “Commends those States which have actively engaged in preserving those sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labour camps and prisons during the Holocaust.”
As a result, UNSG Kofi Annan had a Jewish-community liaison in his executive officer (Edward Mortimer, who has returnd to the world of British journalism). DPI has a new Holocaust information website, a link with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and much more.
DPI DIDN’T KNOW BETTER (but I’m sure they will just explain that they didn’t have the budget to know this, since they are so “overstretched”) — and a new exhibition opening today at UNHQ is entitled “The Holocaust against Roma and Sinti and present day racism in Europe†,
Anybody who knows anything about the Holocaust knows that this would be a big NO-NO: the word “Holocaust” should be used to refer only to the Jewish suffering under the Nazis which, it is important to say, was a unique event in history.
Other suffering is acknowledged — but it has to be called something else.
Those responsible in DPI are apparently not the only ones who are not aware of this: in the New York Commemoration, “General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Al Khalifa (of Bahrain) called for paying tribute to all victims – the needless deaths of millions of Jews and the suffering endured by the many minority groups that were also victims”… Nobody has briefed her properly, either.
Actually, depending on how you read it, the first UN GA Resolution on the Holocaust in 2005 could be said to somewhat fudge the issue, by “Reaffirming that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice”.
Anne Bayefsky has written an article, published in The National Review, on the UN and Iran. In it, she says: “On Friday, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution which ‘condemns…any denial of the Holocaust.’ It doesn’t mention Iran by name, nor contain the word ‘Jew’ or ‘anti-semitism’ — any one of which would certainly have made its adoption much more difficult, if not impossible. The resolution was cosponsored by 103 U.N. states. That leaves 89 — including every Arab state — refusing to cosponsor. It also leaves the U.N.’s lead human-rights agency, the Human Rights Council, dedicated to the continuing demonization and demise of the Jewish state. And it stands side-by-side with the U.N. Department of Public Information opening an exhibit today entitled “The Holocaust against the Roma and Sinti.†Despite this being only the second anniversary of the U.N. day of commemoration, the U.N. has already used the undoubted suffering of others — deserving of attention — as a backdoor to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the unparalleled annihilation of six million Jews. ” http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWE1ODQ3YzQ4MjkzYTA4NmExZWFkMDIwYWRjMTY0Nzk
Meanwhile, DPI’s chief “strategic” communicator Shashi Tharoor (who was not elected SG, as we all now know, despite being India’s official candidate — but he did somehow mysteriously come in second in the Security Council secret balloting)returned from a break in India to chair Monday’s International Commoration of the Holocaust at UNHQ/NY. (Tharoor is one among 58 Assistant Secretaries-General and Under Secretaries General who had to submit their resignations to new UN SG BAN by 15 January — but I’ll bet that Tharoor will stay on in some capacity or another.)
According to a DPI press release on Monday’s event in New York: “Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor, who moderated the event, said it had two key purposes: ‘Of course, we meet to mourn that part of our human family that is missing – to remember the individuals and tell each other their stories. But we also meet to unearth the lessons we can draw from their lives and their fates’.” He said the first among those lessons ‘is that, just as human beings have an almost infinite power to destroy, they also possess an enormous capacity to learn, to grow and to create’.”
Too bad that Tharoor could not have this perspective about his own staff in DPI….