Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations
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Early morning kick off -- a stream of important speakers spreading really depressing news.
Herb London, President of the Hudson Institute, very powerful speaker, quoted Orwell - “Things have sunk so low that the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
Jewish blood does not count and that is very obvious in every single decision that is made in teh United Nations today. UN policy is now a policy organized largely by these these Muslim states [OIC] organized for one purpose anti-American activities and anti-Israel activities.
The misguided view of many Americans about the UN, includes many Jews I might add, the business of brotherhood of man, the flags wave, children come in buses to the United Nations thinking this a a place organized for a ostensible purpose - to bring about peaceful understanding among peoples. And yet it is very very different.
The Human Rights council has become laughable................. The Human Rights Council exists for one purpose and that is to support nations that violate human rights."
The UN still has no definition of terrorism. The UN's Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) has never named a single state sponsor of terrorism, individual terrorist or terrorist organization.
The UN has been unable to adopt a comprehensive convention against terrorism. The Organization of the Islamic Conference insists blowing up Israelis and Americans in the name of self-determination doesn't count.
The Security Council serves as the conduit for Palestinian claims that terrorists are martyrs.
Anne Bayefsky, spoke next and presented the abysmal record of Israel bashing, resolution after resolution against the Jewish state.
"The UN human rights system has been irrevocably hijacked, corrupted and lost to those who stand to gain the most from its demise. The death throes have been evident for some time. But in many ways, events, only this last Friday, plunbed new depths of depravity. The General Assembly committee charged with humanitarian affairs whose decisions are rubber stamped by the Assembly plenary declared that Israel would be the only UN member state subject to permament agenda item of the human rights council."
The vote 168 for and 7 against was met with a round of applause."
Jew hating at its finest. This is the "reformed" UN.
"This is the real UN. Less than 50% of members are fully democratic.There are 192 members of the general assembly. 117 belong to the so called non aligned movement (NAM). And the largest single voting bloc of the NAM is made up of the 56 nations of the Organization of the Islamic conference."
Next the Godfather of soul, John Bolton. He was in rare form. He lauded Senator Norm Colemanfor doing an outstanding job (Coleman appeared later in the afternoon but who I missed because of parent teacher conferences) . He described Coleman as an expert on the UN, probing oil for food and recently producing legislation in the Senate to defund the depraved Human Rights Council.
Bolton focused primarily on the relationship between Israel and the United States as it plays out at the UN.
"What is not understood ...................in addition to all the other burdens that Israel bears, many of which Ann described for you, it bears another burden as well and that is in many instances it serves as a surrogate for the United States. People who are unwilling, for whatever reason , afraid of attacking the United States directly, attacking Israel is almost as much fun. A lot of criticism aimed at Israel intentionally or otherwise is also criticism directed at the United States. You can see this as it arises in a variety of different context in the Security Council in particular. A body that was marginal during the Cold War because of the vetoes of the Western bodies and then Soviet Union. And a body that, that despite the end of the cold war, is well on the way to marginalizing itself against the greatest threats of our time - the threat of international terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
"The fact is many of the issues discussed in the context of purported criticism of Israel actually directly affect the United States. There's an important example from the deliberations over at Hezbollah last summer that lead to resolution 1701. I use this as an example, there are many others, but this is a particularly important one for the United States. After the Hezbollah attack across the blue line and Israel's resonse in self defense, Israel was criticized repeatedly for the disproportionate use of force. This is a way of saying, in UN terms, that your exercising your legitimate right of self defense is actually illegitimate because you are doing something more than you need to do to respond in self defense. In fact what Israel started to do but didn't finish was respond not only to the particular attack but to go after the threat posed by Hezbollah .I asked at the time, what would a proportionate response from Israel would have been. Were they required simply to kill 3 hezballah terrorists, kidnap 2 and fire a couple of rockets across the blue line in opposite direction? Is that what they were limited to? .......... Would that argument have meant that in World War II, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that the United States limited to sinking an equivalent number of aircraft carriers and battleships and then we would have had to have stopped.
I mean this is an argument that is so fundamentally fallacious that it is hard to know whether to laugh at it or to try and rebut it seriously. But the point is given American military capacity we are always likely to be met with an argument that we are using disproportionate force when we respond to an attack on our interests ......
So although it sounds like a limited point of criticism of Israel to say they're responding with a disproportionate force in answering a Hezballah attack, underlying this criticism is something that relates directly to American security. And that's why there was such intensity in the Security Council and such feeling by Kofi Annan despite his reputation as being friendly to Israel, the VEHEMENCE with which he pushed the attack against the so called disproportionate use of force by Israel, I think, is very revealing.
Now we are going to see this conflation of Israeli and American interests in a variety of contexts as the years go ahead and I want to bring to your attention one in particular that so far has not been the subject of of discussion at the UN or the Security Council ............the Israel raid of September the 6th against a Syrian facility
There has been a veil of secrecy by both the Israelis and Americans.
Based on Bolton's own conversations and his contacts, this facility was a nuclear facility under construction in cooperation with North Korea.
For years JB has been arguing/warning of the threat of North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs. Many thought logistically, North Korea presented little threat tp the Middle East. But North Korea is the largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology.
There is no doubt that this nuclear facility was a serious threat to Israel. And why no serious call for a security council meeting. Clearly the Syrians understoon the implications of admitting to a secret NORK provided nuclear facility.
But why all the secrecy here in America? Why would the Bush administration keep such a secret form the American people? The motivation of our own government - not security concerns, but political concerns. There is no reason to withhold the information from the American people. Other than the release of such diabolical dealings might very well tank the six party talks and sink Annapolis.
Syria/NORK has implications for Iran.
"Iran's increasing hegemony over Syria and the use of Syria as a conduit for aid to Hezballah and other groups that is one explanation, the most powerful explanation, why you heard such silence in the Arab world after the Israeli attack. Here here was a raid on a brother Arab country and there was nothing by way of protest. I think because it was known or suspected in much of the Arab world that indeed it might well have been a North Koran nuclear facility."
And that it was a what better way for the Iranians to avoid the IAEA inspectors
If we take North Korea off the list of the state sponsors of terrorism it would have a remarkable and entirely affect on our alliance with our closest ally in the Pacific, Japan.
North Korea has been kidnapping Japanese citizens and holding them for decades.
What kind of signal does it sent in the Middle East and beyond? To say,well its ok for North Korea to build a nuclear facility with Syria in the middle of the Syrian desert, a state sponsor of terror, and to supply ballistic missiles to both Syria and Iran.
Misguided effort to resolve the North Korean nuclear program that we are about to undertake a decision that will have profoundly negative impact not to just NORK and Japan but to the Middle East as well.
The relationship of the US and Israel is critical in the UN.
Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations, Simon Wiesenthal Center, outlined the rampant antisemitism at Durban.
As the only Jew elected to the NGO Steering Committee of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001, I there witnessed the birth of the new antisemitism.
In the years since that cataclysm in Durban, the blueprint turned the traditional charge of "all that is Jewish is evil" on its head to "all that is evil is Jewish", and a claim that the Holocaust had empowered the Jew in exonerating his multitude of crimes - the greatest being "the Naqba" of Palestinian misfortune.
Shimon Samuels: Hitler called the Jews unza "our misfortune". Then it was "Ungluck". Now it is "Naqba". The prelude to the Holocaust was sounded by the order "Kaufen nicht bei Juden" - "Buy Not from Jews". Today it is "BDS"... Protocols of Durban has replaced the protocols of Zion. Launch to campaign Durbin -it is a racism, limit its funding, take the intitiave of cacus of integrity. Operation pushback."
Yehuda Blum: Oslo was not a direct result of Camp David accords. It's true we have had a cold peace with Egypt, but its better than a hot war. Those that see a link between Camp David and Oslo are wrong. There were very specific differences.
Jerusalem was deliberately omitted from Camp David. Menachem Begin would never have agreed to the accord.
No recognition of the PLO and self determination of the Palestinian people
Third, the autonomy mentioned in Camp david meant personal autonomy for the Arab residents of West Bank and Gaza
Oslso spoke of terrortorial autonomy.
The linkage between the two is dishonest. The left tries to make that connection but it is not so.
Yehuda Blum
Eli Hertz, Myths and Facts and Andrea Levin is executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)
UPDATE: U.S.
Conference: UN Biased Against Israel - Michal Lando
"The United
Nations is not a forum to protect human rights, nor peace and security," said
Anne Bayefsky, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and one of the organizers
of a Sunday conference across the street from the UN billed as the first to
target UN discrimination against Israel. The conference, "Hijacking Human
Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations," which included
professors, ambassadors, and members of Congress, coincided with the General
Assembly's upcoming annual adoption of over 20 anti-Israel resolutions.
(Jerusalem Post)
