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UN Chief Says Gaza War based on Failure to Communicate
The UN's top official called the war in Gaza a "mark of collective political failure" on Saturday during a Holocaust memorial service in New York. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who had regained his voice after losing it during his whirlwind diplomatic tour of the Middle East last week, blamed Palestinians, Israelis and the international community equally for the outbreak of violence.Equating Hamas Terror attacks to IDF attempts to stop terror is pretty awful moral equivalence but actually moral equivalence is above average for the UN "I said to all I met, on both sides, 'This must stop,'" Ban told congregants at the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan. Ban appeared as the guest speaker at the Modern Orthodox congregation's annual Holocaust remembrance commemoration. Diplomats from Israel, Germany, Austria and other nations joined him in the ornate sanctuary. Ban responded in his remarks that he had twice rebuked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map." and put him on the double secret probation list too I suppose He did not explicitly name Hamas, but acknowledged that a million Israelis have been living in "a daily state of terror" from rocket fire, including a child and his parents he met in Sderot, but condemned the "appalling devastation" in Gaza. Ban's appearance, his first formal speech at a synagogue, came as Jewish groups in the US decried the planned participation of Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a Nicaraguan diplomat who currently holds the one-year presidency of the UN General Assembly, in a UN Holocaust remembrance ceremony scheduled for Tuesday. D'Escoto, who in November compared Israel to apartheid South Africa at a UN session devoted to the plight of the Palestinian people, attracted criticism from Jewish groups and Israeli diplomats after publicly hugging Ahmadinejad at the UN in September. Posted by: mhw 2009-01-25 |
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