December 13, 2005
The American ambassador to the United Nations (UN), John Bolton, has again pushed for reform of the UN. In a speech in New York, Bolton said that to expect the treatment of Israel as a normal nation at the UN was a "fantasy." Bolton said that last week America tried to have the Security Council issue a statement condemning the terrorist bombing in Netanya, but that Algeria objected to naming Syria as the source of the attack and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as the group that carried it out, even though the group had already claimed responsibility. "It became clear Algeria simply wasn't going to budge," he said, adding that the American reaction was, "If this body cannot summon up the political courage to state the truth, we'll just do it on our own - and it's something we plan to do quite regularly in the future." At an event sponsored by the UN and attended by its leading officials, Bolton said, a map of the Middle East had not even included the State of Israel. "We're going to do something about that." He said it would be a part of something called "management reform at the UN," and that a lot of "underlying attitudes - anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, and, let's be clear, anti-American - still persist at the United Nations." Bolton added: "We want to abolish the UN Human Rights Commission and replace it with something that actually defends human rights and does not have Libya as its chairman."
