Israel’s Foreign Minister Says UN Chief Not Fit to Lead

Eli Cohen, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, addresses the media at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, during a press conference about the hostages held in Gaza since the Israel Hamas war. (AP)

17:06-14 November 2023 AD ـ 02 Jumada Al-Ula 1445 AH

Israel’s Foreign Minister Says UN Chief Not Fit to Lead

Israel's foreign minister said on Tuesday that United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was not fit to head the global body, saying he had not done enough to condemn militant group Hamas and was too close to Iran.

His comments, made at a press conference inside the UN building in Geneva, represent an intensification of Israel's criticism of the UN in the same week that the latter mourned the killing of more than 100 of its staff in Gaza.

"Guterres does not deserve to be the head of the United Nations," Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said.

Cohen was meeting in Geneva with the World Health Organization and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) alongside families of Israeli hostages.

"I think that Guterres like all the free nations should say clearly and loudly: free Gaza from Hamas. Everyone said Hamas is worse than ISIS. Why can he not say it?" he said.

A spokesperson for the United Nations in New York did not immediately provide a comment.

Guterres has previously said there was something "wrong" with Israel's military operation which has killed more than 11,000 so far in retaliation for attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7 which killed 1,200 people. A further 240 people were seized from Israel, including infants, the injured and the elderly.

Cohen, who met with ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric earlier on Tuesday, said he expected the neutral body to do more to gain access to the hostages.

"I think that the minimum is the Red Cross will meet the hostages; the minimum is they receive a proof of life; and the minimum (is) that they will transfer the medicine to the hostages who are needing it," he said.

Spoljaric said the UN was trying to gain access, but said it first needed agreements in place.

"Please know that the ICRC cannot force its way in to where hostages are held," she said.

Health Minister Uriel Menachem Buso said that he would present evidence to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later on Tuesday that Hamas is using hospitals for military purposes. Hamas denies its fighters are present.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

Asharq Al Awsat

15:43-7 January 2025 AD ـ 08 Rajab 1446 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

15:43-7 January 2025 AD ـ 08 Rajab 1446 AH

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."

Israel’s Foreign Minister Says UN Chief Not Fit to Lead

Israel’s Foreign Minister Says UN Chief Not Fit to Lead

Most Viewed

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

لم تشترك بعد