Category Archives: United Nations

Letter to Kofi Annan

United Nations

There follows a letter to the UN Secretary-General from the Anti-Defamation League regarding the disgraceful actions of the new “Human Rights Council”. Please visit the ADL site to sign the letter.

Dear Secretary-General Annan:

On the eve of the first session of the new Human Rights Council in Geneva, you rightly said: “I hope we are not going to see a situation where the Human Rights Council focuses on Israel, but not on the others.”

Sadly, that is exactly what has happened.

The obsession with Israel which discredited the old Human Rights Commission has been transferred to the new Human Rights Council.

We have had a resolution condemning Israel but ignoring Palestinian acts of terror and violence. Condemnation of Israel is to be a fixed item on the agenda at all future Council meetings.

We urge you to speak out again. Tell the Human Rights Council that its fixation with Israel is not acceptable.
Make the Human Rights Council understand that its agenda should be about promoting human rights, and not the narrow interests of its member states, many of which themselves have appalling human rights records.

Mr. Secretary-General, if we cannot have a Human Rights Council which does not make a mockery out of the noble concept of human rights, then perhaps we should not have one at all. The choice is clear: reform or disband.

Sincerely,
Anti-Defamation League

Business as usual at the UN

United Nations

UN Watch reports that in its inaugural session the UN Human Rights Council demonstrates that it is hardly an improvement over its predecessor:

Despite some encouraging indicators, the Council failed to adopt a single statement for the victims of gross atrocities in Darfur and for millions of other victims around the world.

We gave high marks for the Council’s attitude toward the participation of NGOs and for its initial steps toward creating new mechanisms.

However, the Council’s decision, adopted just this evening, to single out Israel as the only country in the world subjected to censure — and then to convene an emergency Special Session to one-sidedly condemn Israel again — shows that we are back in the dark days of selectivity and politicization that, as Kofi Annan said, led to the demise of the Council’s predecessor, the discredited Human Rights Commission. In Geneva, tragically, it’s business as usual.

An act of war

Arab/Israeli Conflict, United Nations

For years while Arafat was in charge of the Palestinian Authority (PA) the world lived with the fiction that the terrorist attacks on Israel were conducted by militant groups outside of Arafat’s control, while Arafat himself promised continually to rein in the terrorists. (He was of course the terrorist par excellence, but bizarrely feted by the UN as a statesman.) Now that Hamas is the leading party in the Palestinian administration this fiction is no longer tenable. For example, the BBC reports on the story of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in an attack in which two other soldiers were killed:

Militant groups in Gaza have demanded the release of Palestinian children and women from Israeli jails before giving information about a missing soldier.

It is the first such statement since the suspected abduction of Israeli tank gunner Gilad Shalit during clashes on the Gaza border on Sunday morning.

The signatories included the armed wing of the governing party Hamas.

(Note the BBC’s quaint reference to “clashes on the Gaza border,” when in fact the Hamas-led terrorists entered Israel via a tunnel to carry out a premeditated attack.)

The gist of the story is that Hamas – now the “governing party” in the PA – is directly attacking Israel. By any definition this is an act of war, and now there is no Arafat-inspired fiction to separate the PA from the terrorists. The Palestinian Authority has lost any claim it might have had to international legitimacy and it is only Israeli restraint that keeps it in power. Forget the UN’s deliberations (always strangely slow in condemning the Palestinians). Every state has the right to self-defense and the Israelis have for too long held back in the hope of peace. If this is not an act of war then the PA president Mahmoud Abbas must demonstrate this by turning in the terrorists – starting with his own government.

Israel “behind both world wars”

Anti-Semitism, Middle East Politics, United Nations

Israel is blamed for many things, but bizarrely Syria has now accused Israel – founded in 1948 – of being behind both World War I and World War II! It happened at a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday, called to discuss terrorism. As reported in the Jerusalem Post:

The [Israeli] ambassador said Israel has “an intimate awareness of the need to fight international terrorism,” and stressed that there can be no justification for terrorism.

Syria responded that Israel was the one precipitating a third world war, saying that “If we examine the matter, we will find that Israel was behind the eruption of both World War I and World II.”

It could not of course have been the State of Israel, which did not exist. Perhaps Syria meant the Jews, the supposed hidden hand behind every catastrophe to strike the world. Clearly, the sophisticates who maintain that being anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic are completly different things should know that countries like Syria and Iran know no such distinction.

AFI acts against BBC bias

Anglicans for Israel, Arab/Israeli Conflict, Media, United Nations

A letter to Mark Thomson, Director-General of the BBC, from Simon McIlwaine of Anglicans for Israel:

Dear Mr Thomson

I wish to complain about the outrageous allegation on the BBC website that: “All Israeli settlements within land occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war are judged illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this. ”

This is utter rubbish! As a solicitor, I would be intrigued to know the authority for this proposition.

The Settlements are Not Illegal! Lawful owners of land have not been wrongfully deprived of it.

By contrast, however, Jordan expelled Jews from land they had lawfully bought in what is now called “the West Bank” after launching a war against Israel in 1948.
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