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Hamas understands that it can not win on the battlefield, so it tries to win in the court of global public opinion. Gutteres, unfortunately, appears to be the poster boy for these efforts, Middle East Forum Israel’s Nave Dromi writes.
In 2017, shortly after becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres said: “Israel needs to be treated like any other UN member state”.
It was a solid start for someone who promised equality for the one Jewish State. Even in his personal manifesto, released as part of the election process,
Guterres specifically related to the need to eliminate antisemitism in one of the issues of his five-point plan toward the UN’s engagement in a culture of preventing crises.
Unfortunately, Gutteres’ real colours were demonstrated in the days after the massacre that took place on 7 October, when Hamas mass murder and rape squads infiltrated Israel to murder over 1,200 people, injure thousands and kidnap 250 Israelis and people of other nationalities, in the worst single day of bloodshed for the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust.
Before the blood of Israelis was even dry, and weeks before a single boot of the Israel Defense Forces was in Gaza, Guterres could find little to no sympathy for the beleaguered Jewish State.
Loosened lips and real views on display
The UN Secretary-General said the mass murder “did not happen in a vacuum,” because Palestinians have been subjected to 56 years of “suffocating occupation”. He also said that he is “deeply concerned about clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.”
These are the types of expressions or reactions that Gutteres has not used on any other conflict on Earth. Even more startlingly, he was shocked when there was pushback from many Europeans and Americans over his remarks.
However, it appears these comments are not unique, they just received more attention than equally scurrilous remarks, seemingly justifying terrorism, he made in the past.
In June 2022, Guterres spoke at a conference of countries that donate to UNRWA. He said then: “Imagine yourself in this situation, imagine what you would feel and imagine what would happen when someone from ISIS came to you and said, ‘What are you doing, persevering in hope, why don’t you join us and try to do whatever you want’, you know, the things that happen more and more with terrorist organizations around the world.”
It is clear that now Gutteres is in his second and final term, and at the age of 74 with few political pretensions, his lips have been loosened and his real views are on display.
Why adopt Hamas’ lies?
Worse than his initial heartless comments, Gutteres appears to be on a mission to ensure that the State of Israel loses in its war against Hamas, a terrorist organization whose charter aspires to the genocide of Jews all over the world, and other Islamic Republic of Iran proxies.
Chapter VII, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reads: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
Gutteres, in word and deed — ever since Israel started its war of self-defence against terrorists who say openly they would commit the 7 October massacre “again and again” — has tried to bar Israel from prosecuting the war successfully and defeating its enemies, in direct opposition to his own charter.
In the over six months since the attack, Israel has made impressive gains against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It has already killed around 15,000 terrorists and is moving quickly towards their full defeat.
Even if we take the notoriously faked and unreliable numbers of the Hamas-run Health Ministry as fact, the ratio of combatant to civilian is around one-to-one. The international average is one combatant to nine civilians, so Israel is acting nine times better than any other nation at war in recent years.
These are the facts, but one would not know it from Gutteres and many of the bodies under his control, who systematically ignore Israel’s unprecedented warning system to civilians to leave arenas of conflict, and accept and adopt the Hamas lies that only civilians are targeted by the IDF.
Our collective better future is at stake
Gutteres has been quick to accept these lies even when they have been proven untrue, like the now infamous Al-Ahli hospital explosion which was initially blamed on Israel but was in fact caused by an errant Islamic Jihad missile aimed at Israeli civilians, the unfortunate deaths due to a stampede attacking humanitarian aid trucks and the accusations of mass rape of Palestinian women at Shifa Hospital.
The latter was the result of one woman’s claims that she herself has now admitted were lies to gain international sympathy.
Hamas understands that it can not win on the battlefield, so it tries to win in the media, in the court of global public opinion, and in international institutions where it can weaken Israel’s ability to win in its war against genocidal terrorism.
Gutteres, unfortunately, appears to be the poster boy for these efforts. He accepts every Hamas statistic, every Jihadi lie and clears the way for any attack against the Jewish State in the international forums under his control.
It is now clear that Gutteres used sympathy for Israel’s uniquely isolated position at the UN to gain his position and win over friends in Europe and the US, who pay a disproportionate amount of his organization’s budget. However, now he has no need for it; he has shown his only goal appears to be a defeated and weakened Israel.
Thankfully, this doesn’t appear to be working and Israel is on course for victory over terrorism, which can then be turned into peace, security and stability for the people of the region.
If Israel wins, the Palestinian people will be free of their authoritarian Islamist leaders, pragmatic Sunni states in the Middle East and beyond who have common cause with Israel against Iran will sign normalization agreements, and there will be historic peace in the region.
This is the better future that is at stake in this war. It is one that Israel desperately seeks, and one the UN Secretary-General tries desperately to prevent.
Nave Dromi is the director of the Middle East Forum Israel office.
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