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The Unfinished Business: General Assembly resolution 3376 (XXX) of November 10, 1975 and the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People |
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The Caracas, Venezuela conference was organized by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. This Committee was created on the very same day that the UN General Assembly adopted the infamous resolution 3379 (XXX) of November 10, 1975 which said Zionism is racism. While Resolution 3379 was rescinded, Resolution 3376 which created the Committee dedicated to propagating this message, was not.
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It was a meeting of this Committee at UN Headquarters on November 29th, which used a map excluding the state of Israel as its backdrop. Although Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, declared "the map that was displayed at the event is not an official U.N. map," Edward Mortimer, the UN Director of Communications, confirmed to The Forward that the map had been used by the UN since 1978. It was official UN secretariat staff who, for thirty years, brought the map out for official public sessions and preserved it between meetings in the official UN Division for Palestinian Rights.
For the 1975 UN Committee, however, the display of such a map was just another day. At the same November 29th UN meeting the only NGO speaker invited by the UN organizers touted the "clear emphasis from NGOs on boycotts, divestments and sanctions campaigns." This message, advocating the political isolation and ruin of Israel, was webcast around the world in the six UN official languages. The meeting was organized, and the invitation issued, by the same 1975 UN Committee.
For three successive days, from November 29 through December 1, 2005, the UN publicly screened a highly controversial film which had been condemned in France for fostering anti-semitism. Entitled "Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel," its very name indicates the filmmakers push a one-state solution to the conflict – a euphemism to the end of a Jewish state. Says one Arab interviewee in the film, who is treated sympathetically after describing his racist Jewish neighbors: "All Jews seem to care about is work and money." Shown in the Dag Hammerskjöld theater at UN Headquarters, the event was sponsored once again by the same 1975 UN Committee.
Maps, conferences, films, are still only a fraction of the Committee's output. This year, as in the past, the Committee proposed three resolutions condemning Israel to the General Assembly, all of which were adopted in December.
The UN Reform Summit called for the review of all mandates older than five years. The UN's composition renders the prospect of serious review of the mandate of this 30-year old Committee nil. 115 members of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement have an automatic majority of the 191-state General Assembly, and its largest single block is the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.
The only potential for change lies with the possibility that the United States will refuse the two-year budget which is now before the General Assembly, or insist on a very short 3-4 month extension, and call for the vote on the extension of the mandate of this Committee.
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