UN Watch's Hillel Neuer Attacks "Humanitarian" Credentials of 'Free Gaza' Flotilla

www.unwatch.org
HumanRightsUN's Channel
02 June '10



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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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Outflank the UN

FresnoZionism.org
23 November 09

Recently a friend sent me this video (the audio is in English with Hebrew subtitles). Many of you may have seen it; the YouTube copy got over 426,000 hits since it was posted in 2007.

It shows Hillel Neuer, director of the UN Watch organization, eloquently denouncing the one year old UN Human Rights Council — which had been created because the previous version, the UN Human RightsCommission had been deemed ineffective, primarily because it was packed with nations notable for their disregard for human rights. The new Council is hardly better — unlike the Commission, Sudan and Zimbabwe are not members, but it still includes Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, and other states that are not exactly exemplars of regard for human rights.

The Council, like its predecessor, specialized in accusations against Israel while ignoring serious violations by others.

Neuer is a good speaker who reminded me of Abba Eban. The tone of the response by the then-President of the Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, is contemptuous as he tells Neuer that any similar comments in the future will be removed from the record.

So why do I bring this up?

Because it is increasingly true that eloquence, logic, and appeal to facts are irrelevant today. Only the point of view matters. Look at the Goldstone Report and the trashy NGO reports from which much of it was copied: patchworks of unsubstantiated accusations, used to support outrageous conclusions — primarily that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. But there is no real evidence for most of the accusations, and no logical connection to the conclusions. The report earns an F even if considered as investigative journalism, not to mention as a legal brief that might have consequences for Israel or IDF officers.

Nevertheless, this hit-piece, mandated by the above-mentioned Human Rights Council to investigate Israel’s crimes alone is actually taken seriously!

(Continue reading ...)

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Sudan?!

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
19 November 09

When last we left the UN clown show, Richard Goldstone’s report had been roundly applauded and approved, and Anne Bayefsky (who has spent a quarter century bird-dogging the UN, a task which few of us could endure for an afternoon, let alone an entire career) had been carted off and her credentials taken for speaking up with righteous indignation about the UN’s latest round of Israel-bashing. The kicker, as reported by Fox News:

Bayefsky is now waiting for the U.N. to return her credentials or to refer her case to the Committee on NGOs, which will meet during January and February and could decide whether to renew her NGO pass — a prospect that has her deeply worried.

“The chances of my getting through that committee are basically nil,” she said.

The nation that chairs the committee, Sudan, is currently engaged in a murderous war on its own citizens and expelled 13 major aid NGOs from the country in March — meaning that a human rights violator that rejects NGOs within its own borders will be overseeing the approval of NGOs at the U.N.

Asked about this apparent inconsistency, a spokeswoman for the U.N. body overseeing the NGO committee said in an e-mail that “the Departments concerned are investigating this matter on the basis of established practice, jurisprudence and thorough review of the facts.”

Well isn’t that par for the course. It’s all there: the high-minded double-talk (what “jurisprudence” justifies roughing up a critic and snatching her badge?) and the inmates running the asylum, and all of it in service of the UN’s one great and constant mission — vilifying Israel. The timing here is far from coincidental:

“The next three weeks are the heart of the entire year at the U.N. General Assembly. The frenzy of anti-Israel activity is going on right now,” she said. “There’s a reason they’re keeping me away — this is no accident.”

This hypocrisy circus is the “international community” whose approbation Obama seeks. The Obami treat the UN with decorum and respect, as if it were a serious organization rather than a gang of thugs that devotes its time to silencing critics, providing cover to terrorists, and averting its gaze from its member states’ own appalling human-rights records. Obama tells us that the world community is one that enjoys shared values. Really. Which goals and values in particular do we share with this crowd?

Bayefsky may miss the “heart of the entire year,” but she’s gotten to the nub of the problem. Unfortunately, the Obami show no sign of taking this or any other incident to heart, nor of reconsidering their role in enabling the UN miscreants.

Related: Banished at Turtle Bay
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