The way the United Nations is handling the materials - videotapes and articles found in the kidnap vehicles, associated with the abduction of three Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese frontier ten months ago infuriates every Israeli.
The soldiers' relatives accuse the world organization of gross inhumanity, deceit, actively abetting the abductors, withholding the video and other evidence for seven months and cynically covering up a crime and its abettors among UNIFIL personnel.
They demand possession of - and not just permission to inspect - all 53 articles found at the scene. They also claim that the 'real tape' is being withheld.
After an Israeli protest, the UN offered Israeli officers access to seven of these articles at UN headquarters on Wednesday. The families brusquely turned down a subsequent UN offer to allow them to view the tapes, in which faces have been blacked out, and the seven articles in Geneva next week.
The UN says the families' demands cannot be met without laying itself open to providing Israeli with intelligence data. Israel, for its part, invokes its right and that of the families to know what happened. The dispute has reached an impasse.
Far from being a well-meaning, impartial, just, peace-seeking and humane body, the United Nations has repeatedly proved itself to be a coalition of cold and cynical interests run by an unfeeling, hidebound bureaucracy. More crimes have been committed in its name than averted.
The 1995 massacre of thousands of Moslems in Srebrenica, Bosnia is a case in point. In its own report, the UN pointed the finger of guilt not only against the Serbs and Bosnians, but also against the incumbent UN Secretary General, the Egyptian diplomat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali for exposing the victims to their fate. The same man was found as playing a role in the Ruwanda genocide of 1996, by withholding protection from the Tutsi tribesmen.
As for serving as a hotbed of espionage, another secretary general, Kurt Waldheim, later president of Austria, was found guilty not only of Nazi war crimes, but of serving the Soviet KGB during his term of office. A long line of Russian, American, Swedish and Norwegian secret agents have used the UN Center in New York as their base of operations, including the notorious Aldrich Ames and Philip Hanssen.
Therefore, the last thing the families of the three Israeli soldiers fighting for information on their fate will find in the world organization is justice and humanity. Their misdirected clamor as orchestrated by the Israeli government will not benefit their case and may even put off would-be helpers.