Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 7 August 2022. © Richard Kemp
A week ago US President Joe Biden ordered the elimination of Al Qaida boss Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. A few days later Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid ordered the elimination of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) commander Tayseer al-Jabari in Gaza. These were two of a kind: mass killers whose sole purpose was to inflict pain, death and destruction on ordinary decent people to bring about their vision of Islamic conquest.
Commenting on the killing of Zawahiri, UN Secretary General’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN was ‘committed to fighting against terrorism and strengthening international cooperation in countering that threat’.
Of course it was a different story when Israel acted against Jabari. UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland was ‘deeply concerned’ by ‘the targeted killing today of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader inside Gaza.’
Of course he was. No matter that the strike against Jabari and his attack team prevented the deaths of innocent civilians; that is nothing to an organisation that is institutionally biased against Israel. Witness Miloon Kathari, one of the commissioners in the latest UN Human Rights Council kangaroo court investigating Israel, who only a few days ago was forced to make what UN Watch chief Hillel Neuer called a non-apology apology over his antisemitic remarks last month. The commission chairwoman, Navi Pillay, who also has a long track record of anti-Israel bias, previously said Kathari’s remarks were ‘deliberately misrepresented’.
There will be no UN investigation into Zawahari’s killing but there will be into Jabari’s. This time, though, there will be no need for another Human Rights Council witch-hunt; it will simply be folded into Pillay’s permanent commission that has no end and starts with the re-creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Wennesland’s ‘deep concern’ was aggravated by comments from Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’, who managed in one tweet both to condemn Israel and contort its actions into a darkly malign parody of reality — so far, so UN. Conjured from nowhere, she claimed that Israel’s actions were to ‘deter Islamic Jihad’s possible retaliation for its leader’s arrest’, going on to describe the strikes as ‘flagrant aggression’ in breach of international law.
This is pure fiction. Israel has not claimed its operation in Gaza — codenamed Breaking Dawn — is to deter. The government has made it clear that the strikes were to prevent an imminent threat to the Israeli population. It had hard intelligence that PIJ, led by Jabari, was planning attacks across the border from Gaza. Protecting its people Continue reading