By Wayne Madsen
On December 21, 2017, 128-member states of the United Nations General Assembly voted against the United States in condemning the Donald Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Moreover, the General Assembly called on member states not to move their embassies in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, warned the members of the UN that she would be “taking names” of countries voting against the United States on Jerusalem. Not content with acting like some snippety schoolmarm, Haley took the pollyannaish course of inviting countries voting against, abstaining, or absenting themselves from the General Assembly Jerusalem resolution to a “friendship party” in New York in January 2018.
The General Assembly vote followed a resolution sponsored by Egypt in the UN Security Council that also opposed the US decision on Jerusalem. Haley cast a US veto, dooming the resolution, even though the other 14 Security Council members all voted yes.
In an accusatory speech before the General Assembly, rivaled only by previous bombasts by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against the assembly and its majority of nations, Haley whined, “The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.”
In bellyaching about America’s right to sovereignty, Haley held no such pretensions for those nations that voted against the United States and Israel. She threatened those who did not stand with the Trump administration and Israel with the loss of American economic aid, merely because those nations exercised their own rights of sovereignty against diplomatic bluster and bellicosity from Washington.
Revelations to the media by White House insiders later exposed Trump’s ultra-Zionist son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller, another cipher for Zionist influence in the Trump administration, as the chief promoters of the recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.
In the General Assembly vote, the Trump administration and Israel could only rely on seven countries to vote along with them. These seven nations represented either small and poor Pacific island states, all endangered by rising ocean levels and heavily-dependent on international assistance, or small dictatorships propped up by advanced Israeli surveillance and riot-control technology.
Three of the Pacific island states that voted with the US and Israel are former UN Trust Territories that were granted independence by Washington only if they agreed to “Compacts of Free Association” with Washington. These states – the Marshall Islands, Federation of Micronesia, and Palau – are one step ahead of Puerto Rico and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas – in being truly independent from the United States.
The US and Israel can almost always rely on the votes of these three Pacific states in the same manner that the former Soviet Union could always be assured of the votes of two constituent Soviet Socialist Republics – the Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR – that maintained separate seats in the United Nations.
A fourth Pacific state – Nauru – practices “checkbook diplomacy.” Its UN vote and diplomatic recognition are always for sale to the highest bidder. When Australia was looking for an offshore detention center for illegal migrants attempting to reach Australia by boat, Nauru gladly stepped up to host one of Australia’s two Pacific gulags, in return for millions of dollars. In June 2017, Nauru’s President, Baron Waqa, visited Israel and affirmed Nauru’s support for the Jewish state’s policies. Waqa also advanced the ridiculous nonsense that Nauruans represented people descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Waqa also told his Israeli hosts that his ambassador to the UN, Marlene Moses, “doesn’t have to take instructions from us on how to vote at the UN. She knows – and she always supports Israel.” Trump’s ambassador Haley and Waqa’s ambassador Moses appear to have much in common. In return for his knee-jerk support for Israel, Waqa was assured of continued economic and technical assistance from MASHAV, the Israeli international development agency, which, in addition to Nauru, pours plenty of shekels in development assistance to the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau.
A single African country, Togo, voted with Haley on Jerusalem. Togo is governed by one of the few hereditary presidential regimes left in Africa, that of President Faure Gnassingbé, who succeeded his dictator father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, in 2005. Israel can maintain good relations with African states, so long as those states are ruled by dictatorial regimes.
Gnassingbé was forced to postpone an Israeli-African summit scheduled for the Togolese capital of Lomé in late October 2017 after pro-democracy protests brought Togo to a standstill. Without a secure dictatorship to host its summit, Israel decided to delay the event. Another African hereditary presidential dictatorship – Equatorial Guinea – abstained on the Jerusalem vote. A third such dictatorship, Gabon, voted against the United States and Israel.
Two Central American nations ruled by corrupt fascist presidents also stood with the Trump administration and Israel. Honduras, where incumbent president Juan Orlando Hernández recently won a dubious victory, rife with fraud, over his leftist opponent, Salvador Nasralla, who, but for a single letter, shares his last name, to Israel’s consternation, with the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Although the Trump administration was quick to recognize Hernández as the winner, the Organization of American States called for a new election and cited the rampant fraud inherent in Hernández’s vote total.
Israel has been close to Honduras ever since the 2009 military coup that ousted democratically-elected Manuel Zelaya from the presidency. Zelaya charged that Israeli mercenaries supported the fascist coup and that they were spying on him with advanced surveillance and communication jamming equipment while he took refuge inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. Although Israel rejected Zelaya’s charge, found on the roof of the building next to the Brazilian embassy was a C-Guard cell phone jammer manufactured by NetLine of Tel Aviv.
Guatemala, the other Central American nation that voted with Trump and Israel, is ruled by Jimmy Morales, a corrupt former comedian who opted, in one of his acts, to dress up in racist “blackface.” Morales, an “evangelical Christian,” buys into the entire Zionist propaganda line about Israel and, as a result, maintains warm relations with Netanyahu. Israel also provides the Morales regime, as it has for previous Guatemalan fascist governments, with sophisticated surveillance and counter-insurgency systems used against Guatemala’s indigenous peoples and left-wing campesino, labor, and student movements.
A few African nations that receive Israeli economic and security assistance cast abstentions or were absent from the General Assembly vote. These include Benin, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, and Zambia. Caribbean states threatened in the past by Zionist groups with Jewish boycotts of their tourism industries based on anti-Israel voting patterns in the UN also abstained or were absent.
These include the Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Israeli checkbook diplomacy also secured abstentions from the Pacific states of Kiribati, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands, as well as absentees like Samoa and Timor-Leste.
When Haley throws her party for her “friends,” represented will be ambassadors from dictatorships like Honduras, Guatemala, and Togo. For diplomatic optics, Haley also extended her invitation for her sorority-like friendship party to nations that abstained or were absent from the UN vote. Haley apparently does not understand that abstentions are not “no” votes.
However, Haley needs to include a few democracies among her coterie of dictatorships. Rubbing shoulders with the Togolese, Hondurans, and Guatemalans will be the UN envoys from Australia, Canada, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Romania, Paraguay, Argentina, Moldova, and the not-so-democratic Philippines. Not present will be diplomats from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Norway, Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Slovakia, Russia, China, Lithuania, South Korea, Bulgaria, Montenegro, New Zealand, Macedonia, Peru, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Malta, Singapore, Barbados, India, or Iceland. By the time of her party, Haley will have “taken down the names” of her enemies but, aside from scowling like some jilted college co-ed, Haley’s “paper tiger” of retaliation will not pose a threat to any nation.