(Video) The U.N., Israel and how the human rights dream has turned into a nightmare

UN Watch..
08 December '13..

Interviewed by i24's One-on-One evening program, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuers explained what lies behind the bias against Israel at the United Nations -- and how the human rights dream of Eleanor Roosevelt has turned into a nightmare. November 19, 2013.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbkGY1paqaM

Visit and learn more at
http://www.unwatch.org/

The UN Watch Youtube channel can be visited at https://www.youtube.com/user/HumanRightsUN/videos

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out! 
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(Video) Antisemitism at UN "Human Rights" Council - March 2012

Eye on the UN..
Anne Bayefsky..
info@eyeontheun.org..
27 March '12..



The blood libel -- the UN's idea of human rights


***the UN "Human Rights" Council in action***


Geneva  - March 2012



For more United Nations coverage see www.EYEontheUN.org.

EYEontheUN brings to light the real UN record on the key threats to democracy, human rights, and peace and security in our time. EYEontheUN provides a unique information base for the re-evaluation of priorities and directions for modern-day democratic societies.


Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page. Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand 
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Ettinger - UN Human Rights Council exposed

Yoram Ettinger..
Israel Hayom..
21 March '12..





The U.N.’s Human Rights Council and human rights constitute an oxymoron. The council – elected by the majority of the U.N. members -- constitutes an authentic reflection of the U.N.

On Friday, the council will conclude a month-long deliberation by submitting four more resolutions condemning Israel.

In formulating one of the resolutions, the council heard testimony from a representative of the Assad regime, which denounces Israel for alleged human right violations in the Golan Heights. At the same time, the Assad regime has already murdered 8,000 Syrian dissidents and rebels, creating tens of thousands of refugees, some seeking asylum in Israel’s Golan Heights.

The council was privy to testimonies from Palestinian representatives, while an increasing number of Palestinians attempt to relocate to Jerusalem, in order to avoid the ruthless rule of the Palestinian Authority. The council never discussed intra-Palestinian violence, which has caused substantially more fatalities than those produced during Israel’s confrontation with Palestinian terrorism. It failed to act against the PLO/Hamas-led hate education, brainwashing Palestinian children to become suicide bombers; rewarding Palestinian mothers for raising suicide bombers; executing rival Palestinians by throwing them off high-rise buildings; spraying them with bullets from the waist down; torturing, maiming and executing Palestinian opponents; abusing Palestinian civilians as human shields; physically abusing critical Palestinian journalists; suppressing Palestinian civil liberties; and systematically and deliberately targeting Israeli civilians with terrorism, missiles and mortars.

Men Behind the Curtain

FFTvideo
03 November '10

Meet some of the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a division of the UN created in 2006 to monitor human rights across the world. Sounds great, except for one thing... LESS THAN HALF of the member states are even free nations. Makes you rethink the credibility of the UNHRC, right?



For more TRUTH, go to: www.fuelfortruth.org.

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At the U.N. Obama Promotes Human Wrongs Against Israel Instead of Human Rights

Anne Bayefsky
FoxNews.com
16 September '10

Wednesday in Geneva during the current session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Obama administration became a willing participant in the U.N.’s imposition of an apartheid-style ban on representatives of the state of Israel. Despite the promises made by the administration that by joining the Council the United States would not become part of the problem, U.S. Ambassador to the Council Eileen Donahoe chose to attend and fully participate in a meeting that deliberately excluded anyone representing the Jewish state.

Israel is the only U.N. state not permitted to be a full member of any of the U.N.’s five regional groups. Throughout the Human Rights Council sessions, these groups hold key planning meetings in which countries negotiate and share important information behind closed doors. Even the Palestinian Authority, though not a state, is permitted into the Asian regional group. Israelis are allowed into the Western European and Others Group (WEOG) in some parts of the U.N. But WEOG members have chosen to exclude them totally in all of their meetings associated with the Human Rights Council. Rather than refusing to participate until such outrageous discrimination comes to an end, Obama administration representatives walked through the door slammed in the face of Israelis and made themselves comfortable.

While Israelis are left standing in the hall during the Council’s regional group meetings, this week for the first time Libya took its seat as a full-fledged Council member. Other full voting members of the U.N.’s lead human rights body include such model citizens as Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, Russia and Kyrgyzstan.

(Read full article)

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Why Is U.S. Supporting Sham U.N. Human Rights Council?

Anne Bayefsky
eyeontheun.org
22 June '10

(An excellent summary of the latest session, with the favorite topic of every UNHRC session, of course, not forgotten.)

The U.N. Human Rights Council ended its latest three-week session on Friday by abandoning human rights victims the world over and contributing to the spread of anti-semitism. With the United States now a member of the Council, the Obama administration is neck deep in the Big Muddy but telling Americans to push on.

President Obama’s decision to join the Council, the U.N.’s lead human rights body, was one of his first foreign policy moves. It has been an unmitigated disaster – for human rights.

Kyrgyzstan

On Friday, the United States delegation in Geneva teamed up with the government of Kyrgyzstan to protect the authorities instead of the people. In the face of what the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has called an “immense” humanitarian crisis, the Council adopted a U.S.-Kyrgyz initiative as trivial as its title suggests: “technical assistance and cooperation on human rights in Kyrgyzstan.”

Southern Kyrgyzstan is engulfed in ethnic violence that has affected more than one million people, left 400,000 homeless and thousands of dead and injured according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the ICRC. The Kyrgyz government is failing to provide protection and to stop the violence, with numerous reports that government security forces are contributing to the targeting of Uzbeks.

(Read full article)

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The perfidious UN

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
09 June '10

The Gaza flotilla imbroglio has provided the UN with the pretext for a new wave of anti-Israeli incitement. The Security Council instantly summoned an emergency meeting, which merely served as an arena to slander Israel and endorse a US-modified resolution demanding an investigation of its actions. The bias of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was even more blatant. It immediately condemned Israel, and only subsequently demanded an investigative commission which, like the notorious Goldstone Report, would simply be a kangaroo court.

The idealists who founded the UN and crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would turn in their graves were they aware that the noble institution they created has been hijacked by rogue states.

Today the majority of the 189 UN members consistently turn a blind eye to the abuse of human rights and outright massacres, frequently even among their own citizens.



(Almost perfect timing for Isi's article as today, Thursday, June 10th, the UN Human Rights Council will convene and Iran's human rights reviewed. Let's do our part to make sure that the regime is held accountable for its numerous abuses of the rights of its citizens.Let's do our part to make sure that the regime is held accountable for its numerous abuses of the rights of its citizens. Ask what your country's UN delegates in Geneva are doing for human rights in Iran. Please post and pass on this video to as many people as possible. Y.)

Examples abound: Russia’s response to the Chechnya insurrection in which Grozny was razed to the ground leaving 700,000 corpses; China’s brutal suppression of dissent in Tibet; the genocidal killing of more than a million Christians and animists by the Islamic government in Sudan; the barbaric crimes committed by Saddam Hussein against his own people.

UN international initiatives have also culminated in disaster. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the UN recalled its peacekeeping force, facilitating the brutal massacre of more than a million Tutsis. Subsequently, a UN force mandated by the Security Council provided a safe haven for the Hutu killers. This was under the watch of secretary-general Kofi Annan, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

During the cruel ethnic war in Yugoslavia, a UN battalion in July 1995 handed over 8,000 Muslim civilians to the Serbs, who promptly slaughtered them. In fact, it was only after 250,000 people had been killed that the Americans bypassed the Security Council and intervened to end the conflict.

THE MOST damning UN humbug is the ferocious hatred directed against Israel, the sole UN affiliate whose right to exist remains under threat. Efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state serve to unite the Islamic world, rogue states and Third World countries. They effectively resurrected the rescinded notorious Soviet UN resolution which bracketed Zionism with racism, harnessing the entire bureaucracy of the UN to portray Israel as the primary source of the evils threatening mankind.

(Read full article)

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The UN Farce Continues

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
14 May '10

Anne Bayefsky — who had a “j’accuse moment” and was roughed up by the UN thugs when she criticized the Goldstone Report before having her credentials snatched – reports on the latest outrage:

On Thursday, the General Assembly elected 14 members to its top human-rights body, the U.N. Human Rights Council. U.N. human-rights policymakers now include Libya, Angola, Malaysia, Qatar, and Uganda. On a secret ballot, a whopping 155 countries, or 80 percent of U.N. members, thought Libya would be a great addition.

Obama’s diplomats, sitting in the General Assembly Hall throughout the election, made no attempt to prevent the farce or even to object. On the contrary, Ambassador Susan Rice left the hall before the results were announced in order to hightail it to the microphone. Attempting to spin what was a foregone conclusion, she refused to divulge those states which the U.S. supported. When pressed, she said only that the Obama administration regretted some states on the ballot, but “I am not going to name names. I don’t think that it’s particularly constructive at this point.”

Which is worse — allowing another Muslim thugocracy into the clown show that is the Human Rights Council or the cowardice of Rice and the Obama team, which won’t come clean on precisely which thugocracies it is sucking up to? Rice’s remarks are beyond parody:

(Read full post)

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Obama and Israel: Showdown at the UN?

16 April '10
Anne Bayefsky interview to FOX NEWS.com

QUESTION: Should we believe the administration that they are not pursuing a change in US policy towards Israel voting at the Security Council?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The issue of the Obama administration’s use of the United Nations as a tool to blackmail the state of Israel is not confined to the Security Council. The Obama administration's affinity with an organization that is systematically focused on the demonization and delegitimization of Israel means that the issue is UN-wide. Whenever Israel is threatened by another UN resolution, or report, or meeting that adopts or discusses a condemnation of anything and everything Israel does, the U.S. is faced with the question as to how to respond. This has always been true, but the situation has been greatly magnified under the Obama administration.

For example, President Obama jumped on board the UN Human Rights Council within months of taking office, knowing full well that the Council is one of the worst - if not the worst - example of Israel-bashing across the UN system (as well as being completely disreputable in terms of its membership and lack of interest in the vast majority of human rights violations around the world). U.S. membership gives increased credibility to this UN body and its production-line of anti-Israel resolutions, sessions, and reports, notwithstanding their poisonous consequences. And every time another anti-Israel move is generated by the Council - which happens almost round the clock - the U.S. must decide how far it will go in standing up to the condemnations. Or from another perspective, as a Council member the administration is handed one more diplomatic sword to dangle over Israel.

At the same time, given that it is the Security Council alone that has the authority to make international law and take action - even military action - to implement that law, the five veto-wielding members have considerable influence. The track record of Obama’s foreign policy for the past year indicates that the administration is prepared to use any leverage at its disposal to boss Israel around, whatever the stakes to Israelis. At bottom, the Obama administration has swallowed the lethal fiction that deems Israel responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict. This fiction originated with Arab-rejectionists of a Jewish state and has been cultivated at the United Nations over six decades. Such a position is a U.S. first, and it is why many now understand Obama to be the most anti-Israel president in the history of the US-Israel relationship.

Until now, American presidents have stuck by the fundamental principle that Israel is a sovereign state whose democratic government has responsibility for its own national security and the welfare of its citizens and, hence, that peace will only come through direct negotiations between the parties. Direct negotiations are key because the process of negotiation itself scuttles continued Arab and Islamic resistance to Israel’s existence. The UN approach, however, has been to impose a solution on the parties – a solution drafted in Riyadh, Cairo, Damascus and Ramallah. Myriad numbers of UN resolutions demand that Israel agree to indefensible borders, accept the return of millions of Arab refugees and their non-refugee descendents to Israel – a development that would make Jews a minority in their own land, and prevent any Jew from living on land that Arabs claim for themselves; that is, they demand the immediate creation of what is in effect “apartheid Palestine”. Every resolution, report, and session of the Security Council, now and in the future, is intended to implement in one form or another that scheme – an imposed outcome crafted to Israel’s serious disadvantage. Now these efforts will be coupled with the Obama administration’s own embrace of the same UN ideology: imposing on Israel whatever America wants (even on unrelated fronts) regardless of its disadvantage to Israel. From the Obama administration’s perspective, therefore, UN fora will facilitate its new foreign policy agenda. The United States can play good cop to Israel at the UN, with the bad cop consisting of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and the Non-Aligned Movement, which the OIC controls.

So no, I believe this administration is hell bent on bending Israel to its will, regardless of the fact that Israel is a democracy on the front lines of a war where the enemy threatens liberty and freedom for all. And the administration is very likely – unless Congress stands up now – to use the United Nations to do its dirty work.

QUESTION: What signal would it send to Israel’s enemies that the US is no longer vetoing anti-Israel resolutions?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The Obama administration may imagine that the threat of withholding the veto at the Security Council, or the failure to oppose vigorously any one of a constant stream of anti-Israel UN concoctions, will be good for the United States. It will be dead wrong. First, Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. And second, an effort by the Obama administration to use the UN as a tool to blackmail Israel or undermine Israel’s independence and security is a double-edged sword.

The use of the US veto did not only send a message that the United States was standing by the legitimacy, welfare and security of the Jewish state – whose citizens are surrounded by non-democracies who have no regard for their own peoples’ human rights. The veto also sent a message that the best interests of the United States could not be dictated by the Security Council and the UN.

Sitting on its hands and refusing to exercise the veto, while the likes of Russia and China and Lebanon (which is currently a member of the Council) revel in a hate-filled denunciation of Israel, will diminish respect for the United States. The refusal to exercise the veto will be read as weakness, as will any attempt by the Obama administration to deflect criticism by claiming “the UN made me do it.” True, the Obama administration is closer to the UN – and to the UN’s fictional narrative of why there is no peace and democracy in the Arab world – than any previous US administration. But if the Obama administration lets the Security Council do its dirty work, Americans will feel cheated. The spectre of non-democratic thugs writing American foreign policy will appeal to very few on these shores. The good cop-bad cop routine will be transparent and the idea that the real friends of the United States are the non-democratic bullies at the UN won’t hold water.

For more United Nations coverage see www.EYEontheUN.org. .

The Ruins of Byblos

Joel B. Pollak
American Thinker
31 March '10

Imagine, for a moment, that Iran and Syria had begun feuding publicly over the fate of the ruins in Byblos, Lebanon. Imagine that some Syrian-backed party in the Lebanese government had begun restoring the buildings of the early Islamic period, leaving evidence of Persian rule for a time of greater budgets and ambitions. Imagine, then, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Syrian insult.

What would we think, as outsiders with a vested interest in weakening Syria's alliance with Iran? We would, of course, seize the moment. We might take the opportunity to topple the brutal Syrian regime -- or, more likely, offer inducements to dictator Bashar al-Assad to encourage him to open his country to the Western world. Either way, we would see a superficial spat over a few buildings as evidence of a deeper, emerging divide.

Imagine further that a prominent Syrian figure on the international stage -- or someone of Syrian descent, like Syrian-American novelist Mona Simpson, for argument's sake -- had stepped forward to lead a U.N. fact-finding mission on Syria, which aimed to document "brutal violations of human rights and suppression of democracy." Barred from entry by the regime, the mission would still interview dissident exiles and international NGOs.

Now imagine that in the wake of the lengthy, strident report produced by Simpson and approved by the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Human Rights Council had passed five resolutions condemning Syria and established a new U.N. body to monitor compliance with the Simpson report. Would we not feel a sense of momentum, an expectation that the regime would soon crack? Would we not try to ratchet the pressure ever higher?

That is exactly what Israel's enemies feel at the moment, watching President Barack Obama join international condemnation of Israel over a housing project in Jerusalem, watching a prominent Jewish intellectual like Richard Goldstone accuse Israel of crimes against humanity, watching the U.N. Human Rights Council devote the bulk of its efforts to attacking Israel's right to defend itself from genocidal terrorist groups on its borders.

(Read full article)
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UN propagates Israeli organ theft allegation

Just Journalism
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

The International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD), a Libyan-founded non-governmental organization, has submitted a document to the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council--the body that commissioned the Goldstone Report, which alleged Israel was guilty of war crimes in Gaza--to investigate allegations that 'Israeli physicians, Medical Centres, rabbis and the Israeli army' may be stealing the organs of 'dead, kidnapped and killed' Palestinians for sale on the black market. The document has been circulated by the Human Rights Council as Agenda item 7 for the body’s thirteenth session (A/HRC/13/NGO/23), and although it has been covered by the Jerusalem Post and Canada’s National Post, no British media outlet has so far reported on it.

EAFORD was accredited as an NGO by the UN in 1981, and its focus, judging by its website and publications, is on equating Zionism with racism and South African apartheid.

Its present submission had been screened for publication by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a post currently held by Navanethem Pillay, and granted the certified logo of the United Nations.

By way of introduction, EAFORD accuses Israel of 'ethnic cleansing and massacres' against the Palestinians, 'occupy[ing] the rest of Palestine,' creating 'largest open-air prison in the world,' whose 'consequences amount to an act of siege and economic genocide.'

EAFORD then proceeds to state the following:

(Read full article)
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Wall Street Journal: “Real Truth Tellers” will be at UN Watch’s Geneva Summit, not UN Human Rights Council

UN Watch
Wall St. Journal
07 March '10

Friend and Faux on Human Rights

Iran bids to join the U.N.’s rights body.

Some of the world’s most courageous champions of human rights will convene today, Monday, March 8, in Geneva, seat of the United Nations’s Human Rights Council. But don’t expect the Council itself to welcome these distinguished visitors.

The Geneva Summit-organized by groups such as U.N. Watch and Freedom House, and chaired by Poland’s Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel-will bring together political dissidents from China, Iran and Burma, rights activists for the Tibetan and Uighur peoples, a survivor of the North Korean gulag, plus a former Sudanese slave named Simon Deng who plans to speak about “the gross human-rights abuses by radical jihadists and the Islamic government in Khartoum.”

As for the U.N. Council’s meeting, the main drama (apart from the ritual Israel-bashing) will be Iran’s bid to get elected later this spring as a member. Among its presumptive qualifications, says Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, is that last June’s elections were “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom.”

(Read full article)
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Guess who missed Iran's atrocities?

Steve Huntley
Chicago Sun-Times
26 February '10

For months, the streets of Tehran ran red with blood. After June's fraudulent presidential election, Iran's security forces and paramilitary thugs arrested, beat, shot and murdered protesters whose only crime was to be fed up with dictatorial rule. Those unfortunate enough to land in prison were raped, forced to lick toilet bowls, tortured by, for example, having their fingernails ripped out, and killed, some from abuse and some from show executions. All this is common knowledge because the whole world is watching, right?
Well, not exactly. Though the horrors of a theocratic-military regime brutally crushing dissent were spread via media around the world, all that has happened in Iran seems to have escaped the notice of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Thanks to a just-released report by U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based monitor of the United Nations, we know the council has not introduced, much less adopted, a single resolution condemning Iran. Nor has it held a single special session on the crisis. Nor has it mandated any investigations.

As reprehensible as the council's neglect of innocent Iranians is, it is not an isolated case. An analysis of 30 council resolutions showed that a majority, 18 of them, "turned a blind eye to the world's worst violations" of human rights, reports U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.

For instance, the U.N.'s rights agency cited Sudan in 2009 for "progress" on human rights -- you know, Sudan, home of the Dafur genocide. It ignored such infamous human rights abusers as Russia, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Nicaragua and Egypt, among others. In one resolution, the council launched a frontal attack on free speech by defining any discussion of terrorism committed in the name of Islam as a form of "defamation of religion" and "Islamophobia."

It's not that the council doesn't see bad actors in the world, it's just that the bad actor nearly always turns out to be -- you guessed it -- Israel. More than 80 percent of its condemnatory resolutions -- 27 out of 33 -- have been aimed at the Jewish state. A council double-standard offers cover to Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist murderers.

(Read full article)
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Top UK military commander says Israeli advice key to British strategy against suicide bombers in Afghanistan, warns of “dark forces” in the BBC

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
22 February '10

A rare voice of sanity in the British establishment, Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, has mounted another devastating defence of Israel. In a speech at the annual dinner (which I attended) of the UK’s Zionist Federation in London last night, Kemp even revealed that prior to his deployment in Afghanistan a four hour briefing by a top Israeli general had been instrumental in formulating British tactics and strategy on how to deal with Taliban suicide bombers.

To my knowledge, such an intimate strategic relationship on such a sensitive matter has never before been revealed. If it has, it has certainly not received widespread coverage in the UK press.

Kemp’s counter-orthodoxy views on Israel rose to global prominence in October last year when, against the background of the Goldstone Report, he appeared before the UN Human Rights Council to say of Operation Cast Lead: “..Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”

(Read full post)

Related: UK Commander Challenges Goldstone Report
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The Middle East Comes to Irvine

Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
09 February '10

Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., tried to give a speech at UC Irvine but was shouted down by Muslim protesters, who apparently weren't equipped to argue with Oren, just drive him from the stage. All this is par for the course, but I did find this one bit of information amusing:

The Muslim Student Union said in its statement: "We strongly condemn the university for cosponsoring, and therefore, inadvertently supporting the ambassador of a state that is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined."

To the Muslim Student Union, the fact that the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more than all the other countries of the world combined means that Israel is worse than all the other countries of the world combined. To more rational, less prejudiced people, this fact means that the UN Human Rights Council is not a serious organization, but one under the control of dictators and despots. (See: Banned Speech: The UN Council That Created the Goldstone Report)

Related Article/Video: 12 arrested for disrupting Israeli ambassador
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Who's demonizing who?

Ben-Dror Yemini
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost
07 February '10

The New Israel Fund is angry. It thinks that it is okay to cooperate with the Goldstone commission, even though it was formed by an automatic majority of the benighted countries that control the UN Human Rights Council. The NIF thinks it is okay that Israel cooperate with the commission, even though there is no country in the free world that supported its formation. It thinks it is ok to disseminate unsubstantial accusations against Israel. It thinks it is okay to take part in the demonization campaign being staged by certain NGOs. And it is absolutely legitimate, in a democratic country, to do all these things.

But there is something else that is also legitimate: To reveal the truth about the fund and the groups that falsely claim to be “human rights” organizations. If some of the political organizations supported by the fund do not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state – don’t cry human rights.

Tell the truth: the denial of rights is to Jews only. The Palestinians have a right to a state of their own, as do the Croats, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks and other nations – but not the Jews.

The New Israel Fund provides support (though not funding – editor, JPost), for example, the Zochrot organization. This is a nonprofit organization that openly strives to destroy Israel by means of the “right of return.” Not that there is any such right, and not that there ever was another precedent for a mass “return” after a population swap in the wake of war – but this does not bother the New Israel Fund. It will always jump in under the slogan of “human rights.”

All this doesn’t mean Israel is exempt from criticism. After all, out of the hundreds of allegations, there are a few of substance. But if many sane people loathe the human rights organizations, it’s not because they loathe human rights. Just the opposite. It’s because the sane majority is fed up with ‘human rights’ becoming the weapon of benighted forces.

(Read full article)
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Rank hypocrisy and transparent double standards

David Harris
In the Trenches/JPost
07 February '10

I know I shouldn't be surprised any longer, but I still can't help it.

In a recent edition of The New York Times, after seeing 25 column inches on page 4 devoted to an article entitled "Israel Rebukes 2 in Attack on U.N. Complex," I read a short news item two pages later. It wasn't quite eight lines long, the fourth of five items under "World Briefing."

Here are the first two (of three) sentences:

A human rights group criticized Jordan on Monday for stripping the citizenship of nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin in recent years. Concerned about increasing numbers of Palestinians, who make up nearly half the population, Jordan began in 2004 revoking the citizenship from Palestinians who do not have Israeli permits to reside in the West Bank."

Apart from the scanty news coverage of what is, after all, an important story - thousands of people losing their citizenship as a country seeks to tilt its delicate demographic balance - there is, of course, another issue.

Apart from the group that blew the whistle on this years-old policy, where is the outcry?

When Israel is accused, however unjustly, of any alleged misdeed against the Palestinians, the din is immediate and deafening. But when fellow Arabs are shown to be inflicting real damage on the Palestinians, there's hardly a peep.

Since the story surfaced nearly a week ago, I've looked in vain for editorials, columns, op-ed pieces, or letters-to-the-editor on the citizenship policy. Couldn't find a thing.

(Read full article)
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Blaming Israel First

Business as usual at the U.N.

Peter Berkowitz
The Weekly Standard
Vol. 15, No. 17
January '10

Tel Aviv

With the possible exception of the U.S. armed forces, no military in the history of warfare has made greater efforts in the face of grave national security threats to avoid the use of force or has tried harder, when obliged to fight, to protect noncombatants than the Israel Defense Forces. With the possible exception of the U.S. armed forces, no military has investigated itself as rigorously as the IDF. With the possible exception of the U.S. judiciary, no courts have done more to hold their military accountable than Israel’s. And with the possible exception of America, no democracy has gone further in wartime to legitimize dissent than Israel.

It is therefore a bitter irony, fraught with consequences for the legitimacy of international law, that—with the same possible exception—no country’s military, judiciary, and democracy have been the target of greater vilification for alleged human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity than Israel’s.

The continuing controversy over the Goldstone Report is a case in point.

(Read full article)
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Hardliners realise Britain is a soft touch

George Walden
timesonline.co.uk
17 December 09

The Tzipi Livni fiasco illustrates how slavishly this country follows hypocritical UN edicts

As a piece of legal grotesquerie, the attempted arrest of the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has its funny side. The biggest joke lies in the role of the UN. It was the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the report by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone on the Gaza conflict, in which Israel as well as Hamas was accused of war crimes.

The fun lies in the membership of this august body, and guardian of all our rights. Currently those empowered to sit in judgment on the Israeli democracy include Cuba, China, Russia, Kirghizstan, Djibouti and Qatar. In a non-democracy, of course, Ms Livni would have had no bother; with no elections to dislodge her she would still be a minister, and so exempt from arrest. There must be a lesson there.

The joke gains resonance when we remember that in 2003 the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission elected a Libyan to its chair. It is of course due to Israel being surrounded by similarly backward and corrupt regimes, such as Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as to Israeli recalcitrance, that the Middle East remains in a permanent state of tension and Palestinians suffer.

So the Livni affair is a joke on democracies everywhere, though especially on us, which makes it a sombre matter. The move to get her arrested is part of the climate of creeping anti-Semitism in this country. We do not go in for the hard stuff yet, but whether it is subtly but relentlessly bent TV reporting of the Middle East conflict, or attempts in British universities to deny Israeli academics the freedom of expression notionally protected at the UN by countries such as Cuba or Libya, institutionalised anti-Semitism, assisted now by the law, is gaining ground.

Yet it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of the business. Something in our culture and mind-set exposes us to asinine legal anomalies of this kind, and not just where Israel is concerned. While Ms Livni is absent from London, known Islamist terrorists are free to walk the streets, or to sit cosily at home filling in claims for benefits, because the law has made it impossible to convict them without endangering our sources of information.

(Full article)
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Israel-bashers hold a double standard on rights abuses

ONE OF the simplest ways to influence public opinion is to present a common enemy. Today, the favourite bogeyman in international affairs is the state of Israel

Ronald S. Lauder
The Irish Times
07 December 09

Israel-bashing is growing in popularity in many areas. At international sporting events, Israeli athletes are sometimes avoided, sometimes prevented from taking part by immigration officials, and sometimes not even invited. British, Canadian and South African trade unions have been calling for boycotts of Israeli goods. Universities and trade unions campaign for a boycott of Israeli scholars and businesses, and for international sanctions.

The founder of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein, recently exposed this hypocrisy when he criticised his own organisation for treating Israel like a pariah state.

The height of cynicism is the attempt by many Islamic countries to delegitimise Israel, to deny it the right to exist. Such propaganda has been ongoing for years and is characterised by both expediency and hatred. This battle is increasingly fought by the governments of these countries in international forums, in particular the United Nations. By levelling false, sometimes slanderous, accusations against Israel and its democratically elected government, they try to undermine its legitimacy.

The UN, it seems, reserves most of its ire for the most liberal, free and progressive country in the Middle East. A country that guarantees and upholds religious freedom and offers all of its citizens, including its Arab minority, the same civil rights, is pilloried by those who blatantly disregard the values of the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights.

In an interview with this newspaper last week, UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay from South Africa referred to “propaganda which portrayed the [UN Human Rights] council as biased and a venue for bashing Israel”. Propaganda? Not really. The human rights council in Geneva, dominated by vanguards in human rights such as Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, is almost obsessed with Israel’s alleged misconduct. Yet it overlooks, or downplays, crimes committed by Hamas and other terrorist groups. The council’s one-sided resolution on the Goldstone report speaks volumes.

In 2006, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan criticised the human rights council for “disproportionate focus on violations by Israel”, while neglecting other areas with “graver” crises. Things haven’t exactly improved since then – quite the contrary. In fact, at the general assembly in New York, no other Middle Eastern country is denounced in speeches and resolutions as often as Israel.

On most UN bodies, an inbuilt majority of non-democratic countries gives the Israel-bashers a free rein. Sometimes they are even backed by democratic countries. It was sad to see that Ireland was one of five European governments that supported the Goldstone report recently.

Israel-bashing enjoys widespread support in western media, as well as in universities, NGOs, trade unions and international organisations. Yet these critics often turn a blind eye to the realities in the Middle East.

(Read full article)
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