Kofi Annan knows no shame. His point man to deal with Hezb'allah has an anti—Semitic and anti—Israel history. The Jerusalem Post writes:

UN Secretary—General Kofi Annan has decided to appoint his former special adviser Lakhdar Brahimi to mediate a possible agreement for swapping Lebanese prisoners in return for freeing the reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Brahimi recently publicly expressed his support for talking directly with Hizbullah. [....]

In an op—ed article published in The New York Times after the end of the war, Brahimi called on the international community to open talks with Hizbullah, arguing that it would be a much more effective policy than ignoring the group. In a separate interview during the war, he claimed that Israel had killed more Lebanese children than Hizbullah fighters and said that Israel "can't say this is collateral damage."

Brahimi was the foreign minister of Algeria in the early 1990s and later served in several senior UN roles, among them special representative to Afghanistan after the war. He also compiled a report in 2000 dealing with the problems of the UN peacekeeping missions.

Ed Lasky   9 06 06