Terrorism? What's That?
The U.N. has a deeply dangerous definitional problem.
By Claudia Rosett
National Review Online
August 8, 2006
Among the many reasons to beware the United Nations as a vehicle for peace in Israel, Lebanon, or any other part of the globe now threatened by Islamic terrorists, there is one item so obvious that in the current debate over “ceasefires” and Security Council resolutions it has almost entirely escaped notice. Quite simply, while terrorism may be the defining security threat of our time, the U.N. has failed — literally — to define it.
If that sounds like a minor semantic lapse, far removed from the bloody conflict in Israel and Lebanon, it is anything but. The free world faces a war in which victory — if one may be allowed such a blunt word these days — starts with understanding the real nature and tactics of our enemies. So, with top U.N. officials calling for instant peace that would effectively equate “both sides” in the war launched out of Lebanon last month by Hezbollah against Israel, I e-mailed the U.N. Secretary-General’s office recently to ask: Does the U.N. consider Hezbollah a terrorist group?
Back from one of Kofi Annan’s spokesmen came the answer: “The designation of ‘terrorist’ would require a definition of what terrorism entails.”
Let us note that in the case of Hezbollah, the group has entailed enough atrocities to have earned it the nickname, “the A-Team of Terrorism,” even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah’s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina. Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror… Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda.
But because the United Nations has not defined “terrorism,” the U.N. does not regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group.
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Senator Tom Coburn
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
340 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2254 Fax: 202-228-3796
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