A story in the international section of this morning's New York Times advances the notion that the Republican-led Congress is the world's "rudest" because it refuses to play along with some U.N. body called the Inter-Parliamentary Union. This is interpreted in the article at length by a Geneva-based, Swedish-born U.N. bureaucrat as a snub of the worldwide movement toward democracy. But the Times article notes that the Inter-Parliamentary Union is meeting next year at Havana. Which is a sign of just what this union is about. Though the Inter-Parliamentary Union purports to advance human rights and democracy, its members include "parliaments" from countries including Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, Syria and North Korea. The idea that American congressmen elected in a free system should sit as equals with representatives of these despot states is strange. Even stranger is the notion that American taxpayers should subsidize conferences in Havana for representatives of Iraq and North Korea. Typically, instead of making this case on principle, a spokesman for the Republican congressional leadership attributes the American absence from an Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting to the fact that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert "is going to be spending most of his time campaigning."
Friedman on Jerusalem: On the op-ed page of today's Times, columnist Thomas Friedman presses his plan for dividing Jerusalem. In an Orwellian twist, Mr. Friedman argues that Jerusalem must be divided in order to be united. The Friedman column places the Muslim and Jewish claims to Jerusalem on equal planes, while basically ignoring the Christian claim. In fact, as the Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes wrote in the Jerusalem Post of July 19, Jerusalem is of "minor importance" to Muslims. Mohammed flirted with the city for a time as part of an effort to convert Jews to Islam by incorporating Jewish rituals into Islam, but the effort faded when most Jews refused to convert. Friedman also claims that Jerusalem has been divided "since 1967." In fact, it was divided from 1948 to 1967, when the eastern part of the city was under Jordanian rule and the Jordanians desecrated synagogues, refused to allow Jews access to the Western Wall, and used centuries-old Jewish tombstones to construct Jordanian army latrines.
Mr. Friedman writes that a deal between Israel and the Arabs "requires a wrenching compromise on Jerusalem." In saying that, he is going against the words of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who was assassinated after beginning the Oslo process. "In Israel, we all agree on one notion," Rabin said on October 25, 1995, at a Jerusalem 3000 ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. "There are no 'two Jerusalems.' There is only one Jerusalem. For us, Jerusalem is not a subject for compromise."