Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs Special Session - 2nd August 2006

Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs Special Session - 2nd August 2006
Senator Norris: I admire the ingenuity of the Chairman and his staff in finding a mechanism whereby this might be adopted as a resolution. That also points up the ridiculous situation that we have hog-tied ourselves in this manner. Three days’ notice was given, but there should have been four. We must have the machinery to respond to emergencies.
Chairman: The Senator has only two minutes, and there is no point in his going into that.
Senator Norris: There is, and I wish to do so. We should have some mechanism whereby the committee might adopt a resolution as an emergency motion. It is legitimate for me to say that, having complimented the Chairman on his ingenuity.
I am also very glad that Deputy O’Donnell, a former Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, took up a parallel that I have been raising for some time and for which, as a result, I got walloped in certain newspaper columns. If one accepts the legitimacy of the Israeli attacks on south Lebanon, one would also have to accept the legitimacy of possible attacks by the RAF flattening Drogheda, Dundalk and Dublin in response to attacks on Canary Wharf, London, Brighton and Birmingham. That is the irrefutable logic of the situation, and we should take it on board.
That is the scale of what is going on, and there is something deeply obscene about the mass killing of children. Everyone was horrified at the attack on Qana. The tragedy is that this incompetent and weak Israeli Government, striking a macho pose, has effectively squandered the moral capital so terribly accumulated through the Holocaust. I listened to Sanjeev Gupta of Indian radio making much the same point. He had been very sympathetic to the Israelis, but like many other people in India he found himself asking how the descendants of Holocaust victims could do this to other human beings.
We have the Kafkaesque situation that people are ordered out of their villages and then bombed while desperately trying to make their way through the ruined infrastructure. The only ones now left behind are the very old, the very young, and the incapacitated. Apparently it is appropriate to obliterate those people. A factory in the Beka’a Valley that supplied milk for infants has been bombed. What was the point of that? A UN post was also hit, and military analysts now agree that it must have been deliberate. It is a dreadful thing to say, but I believe it was deliberate. As Mr. Tom Clonan said on RTE the other day, the local villages are blacked out because of the attacks on the generating system. The only building with a generator in the area is that UN building which was floodlit. It had enormous UN markings on it and in order to hit it the co-ordinates had to be deliberately put into the computer that controlled the firing of these rockets. They had the precise co-ordinates, in addition to which they were warned ten times. That, in my opinion, makes it pretty likely that it was deliberate. In the event, the only reason could have been to remove witnesses from the type of horror that was happening and that is exactly what the Americans did in Iraq, as regards embedded journalists. Why did the profession of journalism not draw the line at this and the closing of cities such as Fallujah so that these appalling war crimes could be committed? Let us put it on the record that it was the Americans who initiated this process and dismantled the Geneva Convention, the whole works.
I want to ask whether the Chairman could request an answer from the Department of Foreign Affairs to these two questions in support of Deputy Michael D. Higgins’s second motion. Deputy Michael D. Higgins and I have been arguing for some time for the operation of the human rights protocol attached to the external association agreement with the European Union. This is a very reasonable thing to do. I would like the committee to write to the Minister for Foreign Affairs to inquire whether these articles have any meaning whatsoever. If they do, could we be told what precisely Israel has to do in order to have them triggered? I would have thought the mass killing of those children in Qana, the bombing of the United Nations building in addition to myriad other actions should have led us to demand that appropriate action be taken.
This is not to be aggressive. It is not this nasty and random idea of a boycott which can easily turn into anti-Semitism. I am not thrilled by some of the letters I have received supporting the position that I have taken because they are rotten with anti-Semitism. I do not know how anybody could describe me as an anti-Semite, in any case. Those who do appear to have overlooked the fact that the Arabs are a Semitic race. I would very much appreciate answers to these questions. Do these articles mean anything and if so, what more does Israel have to do? Where is the breaking point and when are we going to do it? If not, then for God Almighty’s sake, let us take these damnable things off the table, take them out of the treaties and let us make it clear that we have no morality and are only interested in money. It is an insult to anybody who believes in human rights to include these provisions in those treaties if they are never going to be operated.
Everything that Olmert and Bush do makes the situation significantly worse. They seem to believe that violence will produce a political solution. It will not and it cannot. It makes matters worse. They have sown dragons’ teeth all over the Middle East. Arafat was not acceptable. He was not a partner for peace. The Israelis invented Hamas to undermine him. Then Hamas got elected and was not a partner for peace. Neither is the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Every time they dig their heels in the situation gets worse. The other side ups the ante. We have gone from the PLO and Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas, and now Hizbollah. Will they never learn?
I am very glad the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Dermot Ahern, indicated there would be some stoppage of some of the worst of the aggressive military materials going through Shannon Airport. However, were we not right, those Members of both Houses of the Oireachtas and the members of this committee who raised queries about the military traffic through Shannon Airport and the CIA rendition flights that came through Shannon on the return leg, although the Government always answered the wrong question on that? Considering the fact that much of these munitions were going through Prestwick without any notice to Prime Minister Tony Blair who is, effectively, President George Bush’s poodle, what chance is there that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, God save the mark, would be told what is going through Shannon Airport?
I reiterate that we were very nice in not condemning Ms Condoleezza Rice. I would like the privilege of doing so on behalf of decent people everywhere. I am revolted by her behaviour and her disgusting language. When she talks about what has been happening in the last two weeks as the “birth pangs” of a new Middle East, one wonders whether she is a woman at all. Does she have any womanly - or indeed human - feelings to use the expression “birth pangs” to describe the slaughter of children?
Hizbollah is undeniably awful but, unlike Israel, it is a maverick organisation rather than a Government. Tragically, its rockets have hit Nazareth and elsewhere, including an entirely Arab town where two Palestinian children were killed. We must unanimously adopt these two strong resolutions. I hope this action may have some effect. It would be far more effective if we were to get serious about human rights.
I wish to make a final point. I hear all this tripe about Hizbollah fighters hiding among civilians. Perhaps they do; terrorists did the same in this country. However, it is illegal in international law to target civilians regardless of whether terrorists may be hiding among them. Why should the Israeli and United States Governments sink to the level of these terrorists? We must call it as it is and we must not collaborate with the outrageous aggression that is the declaration of a one-sided war against the people of Lebanon.