The UN and Israel

Hillel C. Neuer
July 26, 2006
The National Post (Canada)
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=22ee2b99-fe77-4a21-b1c2-ff5745b36647

GENEVA - The war between Israel and Hezbollah has prompted many international leaders and commentators to support a deployment of an expanded UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. This idea should be rejected for a variety of reasons. The most important is this: The UN is not a neutral actor in the Middle East. Time and again, it has been co-opted by Israel's enemies.
Examples abound. But perhaps the best lies with the United Nations agency touted as the new face of the world organization: the UN Human Rights Council.
The new body was established this year as a replacement for the discredited Commission on Human Rights. Ottawa assured Canadians that this would be a more effective international human rights body. After only three weeks in operation, however, the council reverted to the hypocrisy of its predecessor.
The first disappointment came during the Council's inaugural two-week session, which opened on June 19. Western countries, seeking to focus the body on establishing basic mechanisms, naively proposed to omit mention of specific geopolitical situations. Predictably, the UN's Arab and Muslim blocs objected. At the Council, as everywhere at the UN, their goal was to censure a single country: Israel.
In meetings leading up to the Council's inauguration, the 56-country Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) insisted on a special agenda item to knock Israel, just like at the old commission. The Europeans surrendered, as always, with a last-minute compromise. Yes, the OIC would get its Israel-bashing day. However, the listing on the official agenda would be obscured so as to hide the blatant bias.
The result: the session's only substantive debate, while featuring a few references to the crimes in Darfur and dissidents elsewhere, was dominated by demonization of the Jewish state.
Thus emboldened, the OIC and its allies promptly bagged four additional victories, each another dagger in the council's credibility:
- The OIC subverted the resolution extending the mandates of the independent human rights experts. Adding a footnote, the text singled out the Special Rapporteur on Palestine -- whose instructions allow for examination of only Israeli violations -- as the sole investigation lacking an express year of expiry. The entire Western group -- including Canada -- voted for the tainted text.
- The same resolution retained Switzerland's Jean Ziegler as the Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Ziegler is the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize -- a distinction he won himself, in 2002, together with convicted French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy.
- In its only resolution naming a specific country, the council officially denounced Israel. The decision, drafted by the OIC, orders reports on Israel that prejudge it as guilty, and forces Israeli violations to be written on the agenda at all future sessions.
- The council adopted another OIC-written resolution, against defamation of religions -- i.e., cartoons of Mohammed. Canada and EU countries voted No, but never challenged the hypocrisy of countries such as Saudi Arabia -- whose textbooks preach hatred against non-Muslim infidels -- pronouncing themselves on the issue of religious intolerance.
So concluded the inaugural session of the world's top human rights body.
Only it didn't end there. Just as the gathering adjourned, the Arab League demanded a Special Session to censure Israel again. Days later, the council duly convened to produce yet another resolution slamming the Jewish state, and creating an urgent fact-finding mission -- one headed by the Special Rapporteur on Palestine, John Dugard, who zealously embraces his one-sided mandate.
Indeed it was Dugard who opened the session, offering every sympathy for Corporal Gilad Shalit; and indeed for all Israel's young soldiers compelled to serve in the army of an occupying power. He felt no shame in twisting the fate of a serviceman -- captured within, and while defending, his country's own borders -- into a cynical stab at Israel's morality.
This is the same man who has lauded Palestinian terrorists for their new determination, daring, and success.
Real change at the United Nations will require moral clarity and courage -- the kind that Stephen Harper exhibits when he identifies Hezbollah and Hamas as the true source of Middle East instability and warfare. So long as the UN eschews such clarity, and remains the diplomatic plaything of terror apologists, the idea of the United Nations safeguarding Israel's security -- in Lebanon or anywhere else -- will remain a pipe dream.