Your U.N. at Work

March 30, 2007
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117522153592554150.html

When it comes to actual human rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council reflexively discharges obfuscation, like a squid and its ink. That notwithstanding, the Council's fraudulence was made perfectly clear last week, when a routine hearing on the Occupied Palestinian Territory was disrupted by candor.
John Dugard, a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, delivered a treatise on Israel's colonialism and apartheid, denouncing the purported way in which the Palestinians are brutally subjugated by a Western-affiliated regime. The envoy was given shows of support from the likes of Council members Cuba and Pakistan, as well as the observer states Sudan, Syria and Iran. The last accused Israel of terrorist activities. Just another day in Geneva.
The U.S. put forward a tepid rejoinder, calling the remarks unhelpful. Enter Hillel Neuer, executive director of the NGO U.N. Watch. Seated before the Council, Mr. Neuer had the temerity to point up its modus operandi. The dictators who run this Council, he said, couldn't care less about the Palestinians, or about any human rights. They seek to demonize Israeli democracy, to delegitimize the Jewish state. He continued, They also seek something else: to distort and pervert the very language and idea of human rights.
Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba furiously responded, For the first time in this session I will not express thanks for that statement, thus violating U.N. protocol. He ruled the remarks inadmissible to the official record, and prohibited further statements in similar tones. In the depths of the U.N., this was of course logical: Mr. Neuer's commentary had been accurate.