Message to Red Cross: About Time
Editorial
The New York Times
December 9, 2005
It really is too bad that Syria and a number of other Arab states are still fighting the same tired old battles they've waged since 1948 to keep Israel out of international organizations. Damascus, for example, still seems to think it's worth spending its rapidly dwindling diplomatic capital on trying to bar Israel's entry into the relief agency movement represented by the Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols. We're just glad the rest of the world has finally come to its senses and approved a step that will allow Israel to become a member.
It is long overdue. For decades, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has had member organizations from almost every country but Israel, an exclusion that did much to diminish the organization's moral standing. The stated excuse was that the Israeli society, Magen David Adom, used the Red Shield of David as its emblem, but the currently used emblems approved by the Geneva Conventions are only the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.
Clearly, Israel wasn't going to adopt a cross or a crescent as an emblem, as they are often viewed as heavy with religious connotations. But this really should have been an easy problem to fix - it certainly was not beyond all those brains in Geneva to figure out how to add another emblem to the mix. After all, they managed to add the crescent to satisfy the Islamic states, which then blocked any attempt to add the shield, most recently in 2000.
Since then, the American Red Cross has been withholding about $5 million a year in dues to the movement. The Bush administration has also been pressing the case, including at this week's negotiations in Geneva.
The first step was to revise the Geneva Conventions to add a new symbol, a diamond-shaped object called the Red Crystal, to its list of recognized symbols for medical and relief workers. Individual nations could add a cross, a crescent or a six-pointed star within that shape. The Islamic states failed to block the change this time, thankfully. It is now up to the international federation's individual members to amend their own statutes accordingly. There is now no conceivable reason, other than intolerance, for them to fail to do that.
The New York Times
December 9, 2005
It really is too bad that Syria and a number of other Arab states are still fighting the same tired old battles they've waged since 1948 to keep Israel out of international organizations. Damascus, for example, still seems to think it's worth spending its rapidly dwindling diplomatic capital on trying to bar Israel's entry into the relief agency movement represented by the Red Cross and Red Crescent symbols. We're just glad the rest of the world has finally come to its senses and approved a step that will allow Israel to become a member.
It is long overdue. For decades, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has had member organizations from almost every country but Israel, an exclusion that did much to diminish the organization's moral standing. The stated excuse was that the Israeli society, Magen David Adom, used the Red Shield of David as its emblem, but the currently used emblems approved by the Geneva Conventions are only the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.
Clearly, Israel wasn't going to adopt a cross or a crescent as an emblem, as they are often viewed as heavy with religious connotations. But this really should have been an easy problem to fix - it certainly was not beyond all those brains in Geneva to figure out how to add another emblem to the mix. After all, they managed to add the crescent to satisfy the Islamic states, which then blocked any attempt to add the shield, most recently in 2000.
Since then, the American Red Cross has been withholding about $5 million a year in dues to the movement. The Bush administration has also been pressing the case, including at this week's negotiations in Geneva.
The first step was to revise the Geneva Conventions to add a new symbol, a diamond-shaped object called the Red Crystal, to its list of recognized symbols for medical and relief workers. Individual nations could add a cross, a crescent or a six-pointed star within that shape. The Islamic states failed to block the change this time, thankfully. It is now up to the international federation's individual members to amend their own statutes accordingly. There is now no conceivable reason, other than intolerance, for them to fail to do that.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 6:56 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home