Commentary Magazine..
12 November '14..
There will be those who will argue that Israel is once again shooting itself in the foot by announcing that it will not cooperate with the investigation being conducted into this past summer’s war with Hamas by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Critics of the decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu will say that by snubbing the inquiry, Israel is losing its chance to give input to the proceedings and ensuring that only its enemies will play a role in the final outcome. But the claim that Israel will have a fair chance to defend itself before the UNHRC is a joke. The UN agency has a long record of bias against Israel but by choosing a chairman of the panel that had already put himself down on record as a virulent opponent of Israel, it should have forfeited the respect of even those few who take the group seriously.
It should be remembered that the last time the UNHRC appointed a commission to investigate an Israeli campaign in Gaza, it produced the Goldstone Commission, a compendium of one-sided libels aimed at delegitimizing Israel’s right of self-defense so egregious that even its chairman, South African jurist Richard Goldstone (who was chosen largely out of a desire to put a Jewish label on an anti-Israel product) eventually repudiated it.
This time the UNHRC hasn’t even bothered to pretend that it wanted fairness as it did with the appointment of Goldstone, and chose instead a Canadian law professor who has made a name for himself as an enemy of Israel. William Schabas has already gone on record saying that Hamas was not a terrorist organization and that Netanyahu should be indicted for war crimes. Yet he claims that he could still be impartial. As the Times of Israel reported, even Schabas admitted that his record indicates his bias:
“I do not hate Israel and do not want to engage in a debate regarding my previous positions on Israel,” Schabas told Saudi-owned daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat in an interview. “I have had positions in the past concerning Palestine and Israel and they have nothing to do with my mission now. I will put my opinions aside during the investigation and they will have no bearing on it.”
But whether or not Schabas conquers his prejudices during the course of his work probing Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, there is no reason for anyone, in Israel or anywhere else, to take anything the UNHRC says seriously. Its membership is composed of countries that are themselves some of the worst human-rights violators in the world. In appropriating the banner of human rights, these tyrannies have long made a mockery of the concept and instead seem to prove that anti-Semitism is alive and well in the halls of the UN. The vast majority of its work has always been concentrated on efforts to smear Israel or otherwise deny its rights while at the same time ignoring some of the most egregious human-rights catastrophes going on elsewhere.
It should be remembered that the Gaza war began with a Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli teenagers and then escalated as the Islamist group rained down thousands of rockets on Israeli cities and used tunnels under the border to attempt murders and kidnappings. Israel fought back and did its best to silence the rockets and close the tunnels but found that just as it did in 2008-2009 in the war the Goldstone Commission investigated, Hamas used the civilian population as human shields. While, as with that war, many if not most of the fatalities were Hamas fighters, the international press and so-called human-rights groups put the onus for the tragedy on Israel rather than on the terrorist group.
But while Hamas’s war crimes deserve the scrutiny of the world, the UNHRC remains resolute in its lack of interest in doing anything about the mass slaughter in Syria where the Bashar Assad regime and some of his Islamist opponents have slaughtered more than 200,000 persons (as opposed to the 2,000 Gazans—civilians and terrorists—who died during the summer war).
As with Goldstone, nothing Israel does or says, no matter how transparent it tried to be about its operations, would influence the likes of Schabas or his UNHRC colleagues. Their only purpose is to use this conflict as an excuse for bashing the Israelis and judging them by a standard applied to no other country, let alone one at war. While Israel can’t stop this farce, it can and should refuse to grant it even the veneer of legitimacy.
Rather than questioning Israel’s refusal to play along with its enemies, a better topic of discussion would be why the United States continues to legitimize the UNHRC with its membership. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s infatuation with the world body causes it to continue to treat the Human Rights Council as a legitimate institution. That should end. But even more important, the international press and decent people everywhere should refuse to treat the UNHRC or its probes as anything but a sick joke.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/11/12/ignore-the-un-human-rights-farce-william-schabas-gaza-hamas-israel/
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