The UN Human Rights Council adopted yet another resolution on Israel, “regretting” that the Jewish state skipped a mandated review of its human rights record, and accusing it of “non-cooperation.”
Israel’s 2012 decision to sever all ties with the the UNHRC, which maintains a permanent agenda item exclusively on Israel at every one of its sessions, meant that it would also miss its scheduled Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a process that examines all 193 countries for one day every four to five years.
The one chosen earlier this month, by a draw of lots, to be one of three overseers of Israel’s review was newly elected member Venezuela, the Iranian-allied dictatorship of Hugo Chavez. A jury of brigands is not justice, it’s a travesty.
A chorus of reflexively UN-apologetic voices have lashed out at Israel’s decision to skip the UPR, accusing the Jewish state of wreaking apocalyptic damage upon a supposedly precious world institution.
In reality, the UPR is — for the most part — a mutual praise society.
Though the New York Times today praised the UPR’s “universal and collaborative characteristics,” saying it provided “a platform to scrutinize and discuss the situation of human rights in even the most closed and repressive regimes,” it apparently forgot that earlier it had reported on how Qaddafi’s Libyan regime came out of its review with top marks:
Until Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s violent suppression of unrest in recent weeks, the United Nations Human Rights Council was kind in its judgment of Libya. In January, it produced a draft report on the country that reads like an international roll call of fulsome praise, when not delicately suggesting improvements. Evidently, within the 47-nation council, some pots are loath to call kettles black, at least until events force their hand.
Former Amnesty USA director Suzanne Nossel called the report “abhorrent.”
It’s not for nothing that despots walk into this court with confidence and ease. See our report on yesterday’s lavish UPR party put on by the United Arab Emirates.
What is more, those accusing Israel of desecrating the temple are the same who systematically turn a blind eye to the council’s persistent and pathological lynching of Israel: the special agenda item and special day against Israel at every session; the lopsided amount of resolutions against Israel, often amounting to more than the total adopted on the rest of the world combined; Israel’s exclusion from any of the council’s regional groups; and the completely biased mandate of the council’s permanent investigator on Palestine, Richard Falk, who endorses Hamas and the 9/11 conspiracy theory.
For a council that does such things on an ongoing basis to then accuse Israel of undermining principle is the height of audacity and hypocrisy; the complainants come with unclean hands — very unclean hands.
