Only “implied”? Here is the actual quote from Travers’ rabidly anti-Israel interview with Middle East Monitor: “Britain’s foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists.” For some reason, the Irish Times took pains to make Travers sound less strident and more reasonable.

In the same interview, Travers also dismissed British Col. Tim Collins’s BBC-broadcast findings—about weapons hidden in Gaza mosques—as “drivel.” This co-author of the Goldstone Report equally dismissed “all” Israeli photographic evidence of such weapons caches as “spurious in the extreme!”

It is bad enough when yet another of the Goldstone investigators, supposed to be impartial, reveals himself to be irredeemably biased against Israel.

It’s worse when this bias is covered up. Just like its coverage of last summer’s controversy over Obama’s award to Mary Robinson—the former Irish president and UN organizer of the 2001 Durban hatefest—the Irish Times once again rallies in knee-jerk fashion to the side of any Irish citizen applying an imbalanced approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The post Irish Times Softens Controversial Remarks by Goldstone Co-author Col. Travers appeared first on UN Watch.

In 2001, my late husband Congressman Tom Lantos led, at the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the U.S. delegation’s walk out from the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. In a piece he later published about his experiences at Durban, Tom wrote, “To many of us present…it is clear that much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who, in her role as secretary-general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track.”

Even before the conference, Iran, Iraq, and other rejectionist Middle Eastern governments had made clear their intent to commandeer the conference to denounce the policies and legitimacy of the state of Israel, while ignoring ongoing terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens and refusing to criticize human rights abuses in any other specific country in the world.   The United States and several European and moderate Arab delegations made a concerted effort to eliminate this vitriolic language, but those diplomatic initiatives collapsed when Commissioner Robinson spoke in favor of a one-sided approach.  Although Commissioner Robinson did much to nurture the global dialogue on racism leading up to the 2001 conference, her actions at Durban were troubling, to say the least.

Today Mary Robinson is being honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an award that my own husband received posthumously in 2008.  While I am deeply disappointed by the decision to honor former Commissioner Robinson in this manner, I also feel that this provides a good opportunity to reflect on the failures of Durban. As Tom wrote, “One lesson of Durban is clear – strong, principled leadership from the United States and the United Nations is critical in order to prevent hostile forces within the international community from hijacking vital multilateral institutions.”

Earlier this year President Obama rightly decided that the United States would not send a delegation to the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, noting that conference organizers were determined to expressly endorse the unacceptable resolutions of the 2001 Durban Conference.  That may not have been an easy decision for an administration committed to increased engagement, but it was an essential step.  It is my hope that this decision and others like it will help to eventually restore the U.N. Human Rights Council as a force for promoting tolerance and human dignity.

The post Lantos widow on Robinson medal and Durban lessons appeared first on UN Watch.

GENEVA, August 12, 2009 — On the day that former U.N. rights chief Mary Robinson is to receive the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch said that her recent comments in the Irish press resorted to “ad hominem and straw man” arguments that fail to address detailed charges that she fostered anti-Israel bias during the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference on racism.

In an open letter to Mrs. Robinson, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer argues that her response to the 22-page indictment of her record by the late U.S. congressman Tom Lantos, who was a U.S. delegate to the Durban conference, distorted and failed to address his allegations concerning her actions at Tehran and Geneva pre-conference meetings held in 2001.

Robinson claimed last week that Lantos “misunderstood” her role. Neuer sharply disagrees.

“Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never ‘misunderstood’ your role. Known as Mr. Human Rights, he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban,” said Neuer. “He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.”

“Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face—by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.”

Neuer said that as U.N. rights chief Robinson failed to take on the now-defunct U.N. Commission on Human Rights when “the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission, ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel.”

Robinson’s actions also hurt the Palestinian cause, said Neuer. “Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.”

“Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted ‘purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.’ The evidence, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.”

The full letter to Robinson follows below. UN Watch has offered to publish her response.

_____________

Following is an open letter by UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer to Mrs. Mary Robinson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and Secretary-General of the 2001 Durban conference, who is today set to receive the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony.

Letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson

Dear Mrs. Robinson,

Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response.

According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights—for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone—you are being “vilified” by “false accusations.”

In your own words, “certain elements” of the Jewish community—those opposed to your selection—are subjecting you to “bullying.”

Mrs. Robinson, let’s be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations.

Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle—which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference.

Hurling ad hominem epithets won’t make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics’ arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing.

If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are.

1. Your Role at Durban

Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.’s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.

As you know, the Durban conference degenerated into an unprecedented international platform for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hatred, with massive rallies in the streets of Durban organized by Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. One widely distributed flyer showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel.”

The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference. “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand,” he said, “this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as “a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”

This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another “bully.” But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend—meaning never an uncritical one—of the United Nations.

And so you have no choice but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the Irish Times, is that Lantos “misunderstood” your role.

“The conference was run by the member states, particularly by South Africa as the chair,” you said. “So all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made by governments and I wasn’t present when they were arguing about whether anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I just wasn’t there.”

You weren’t there, Mrs. Robinson? That’s odd, because in the same breath, you proceeded to claim credit for the removal of these proposals: “But I did finally, after the United States and Israel had withdrawn, persuade South Africa to take this language out immediately and to continue with the conference.” It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

In attempting to defend the final text, you say that Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, “welcomed” it. This is a deliberately misleading half-truth, put to frequent use this year by the apologists for Durban II.

The facts tell another story. On September 4, 2001, after he instructed his delegation to walk out of the conference, Peres described the gathering in Durban as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

At the same briefing, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior—a spiritual leader known for his advocacy of pluralism, liberalism and human rights protections for Israel’s minorities—described the Durban draft as “the most anti-Semitic official document put on any table in any official conference since World War II.” Yet you omit to mention any of this.

Yes, a few days later, when the final text emerged, Peres cheered the removal of the worst proposals, a direct result of the diplomatic pressure created by the joint U.S. and Israeli walkout that you continue to condemn. At the same time, his legal adviser, Alan Baker, made clear that Israel hardly gave its blessing to the outcome: “The fact that the Palestinians succeeded in inserting partisan and specific statements concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a declaration of a conference on racism is something that never should have happened.”

Sure enough, when the declaration came before the U.N. General Assembly in March 2002, Peres instructed the Israeli representative to join the U.S. and vote against it. Some endorsement.

Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos’ 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did—and failed to do—during the lead-up.

Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.

Rather, citing one instance after another, he made a compelling case that throughout the year of lead-up meetings you continuously fanned the flames of anti-Israel prejudice, only to cry “Fire!” once they rose up into a great conflagration.

I urge you to respond to Lantos’ detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban:

1. That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001
   In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country—demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” and calling Zionism a “racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas”— your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their “high degree of consensus.”When asked about the inflammatory rhetoric at a news conference, you replied: “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final Declaration.” You went on to add that a “striking feature” of the meeting was the “emphasis on dialogue between civilizations.” That was it. No outrage. No criticism. No moral leadership.

   Your comments, wrote Lantos, “represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

2. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001
   Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. “Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’ Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it.”“Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the ‘need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.’ Robinson was prepared to delve into the arcana of a single territorial conflict at the exclusion of all others and at the expense of the conference’s greater goals. Robinson’s intervention broke all momentum that the U.S. had developed. The Arab countries immediately seized on these statements as a clear indication that the tide had turned again in their favor, dropped all talk of compromise, and began pressing for the continuation of the Middle East discussion in Durban.”

   Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

3. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001
   Finally, at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive role: “As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September 2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted as ‘warped, strange and undemocratic.’”“In a meeting I had with Commissioner Robinson later that same day… [I] told her that the U.S. government was extremely displeased with the way she had handled the conference, and we indicated that we held her responsible for her actions that contributed to its failure.”

   Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never “misunderstood” your role. Known as “Mr. Human Rights,” he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban. He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.

Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face—by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.

1. Your Role as High Commissioner

But the concerns about your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics “misunderstand” what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states, and your own role as the U.N.’s top human rights official.

To be sure, some of your critics, while getting the big picture right, have helped you make this case by conflating your former office with that of the Commission and its resolutions condoning Palestinian terrorism.

I will be the first to defend you on this point: you cannot be held responsible for texts that you neither initiated nor voted upon.

The errors of a few, however, do not detract from the numerous, genuine and well-grounded concerns cited over the years by UN Watch and others.

When the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission—ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel—you could have taken them on.

Unlike the U.S. president’s powers vis-à-vis Congress, you had no power to veto the Commission’s enactments. But you held the moral pulpit of the U.N. human rights system and could have set a different tone for Geneva. Unlike the political body, you were required to be impartial, objective, and non-selective.

Regrettably, however, when it came to Israel, you effectively encouraged the Commission’s anti-Israel obsession—an obsession that epitomized the politicization and selectivity that ultimately doomed the now-defunct body.

Examples abound. To name but a small portion:

• On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a “peaceful assembly.”
• In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner.
• In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis.
• The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.
• In December 2001, as documented by UN Watch, you gave special support to an extremist Palestinian demonstration held on the sidelines of a gathering of Geneva Convention signatories that was convened to condemn Israel.
• At the Commission’s April 2002 special session against Israel, your speech gave more credence to Palestinian propaganda than to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had witnessed Palestinian unloading of an explosive suicide belt from an ambulance.

Unfortunately, whenever we met with you in Geneva to raise such concerns, you rejected them out of hand.

Last week, when Jean Ziegler was elected vice-chair of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we were reminded of your legacy. In the year 2000, it was you who invited Ziegler—the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize—to become a U.N. human rights expert. He has since distinguished himself as the most anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel U.N. official in the history of the organization, cynically abusing his mandate.

Did your actions, however selective, at least help Palestinians? No. Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.

Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted “purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.”

The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.

I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety.

Yours truly,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland

The post Watchdog Urges Ex-U.N. Rights Chief Mary Robinson to Answer Allegations appeared first on UN Watch.

Letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson

Dear Mrs. Robinson,

Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response.

According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights — for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone — you are being “vilified” by “false accusations.”

In your own words, “certain elements” of the Jewish community —  those opposed to your selection — are subjecting you to “bullying.”

Mrs. Robinson, let’s be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations.

Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights — by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference.

Hurling ad hominem epithets won’t make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics’ arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing.

If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are.

I.  Your Role at Durban

Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.’s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.

As you know, the Durban conference degenerated into an unprecedented international platform for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hatred, with massive rallies in the streets of Durban organized by Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. One widely distributed flyer showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel.”

The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference. “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand,” he said, “this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as “a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”

This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another “bully.” But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend — meaning never an uncritical one — of the United Nations.

And so you have no choice but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the Irish Times, is that Lantos “misunderstood” your role.

“The conference was run by the member states, particularly by South Africa as the chair,” you said. “So all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made by governments and I wasn’t present when they were arguing about whether anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I just wasn’t there.”

You weren’t there, Mrs. Robinson? That’s odd, because in the same breath, you proceeded to claim credit for the removal of these proposals: “But I did finally, after the United States and Israel had withdrawn, persuade South Africa to take this language out immediately and to continue with the conference.” It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

In attempting to defend the final text, you say that Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, “welcomed” it. This is a deliberately misleading half-truth, put to frequent use this year by the apologists for Durban II.

The facts tell another story. On September 4, 2001, after he instructed his delegation to walk out of the conference, Peres described the gathering in Durban as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

At the same briefing, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior — a spiritual leader known for his advocacy of pluralism, liberalism and human rights protections for Israel’s minorities — described the Durban draft as “the most anti-Semitic official document put on any table in any official conference since World War II.” Yet you omit to mention any of this.

Yes, a few days later, when the final text emerged, Peres cheered the removal of the worst proposals, a direct result of the diplomatic pressure created by the joint U.S. and Israeli walkout that you continue to condemn. At the same time, his legal adviser, Alan Baker, made clear that Israel hardly gave its blessing to the outcome: “The fact that the Palestinians succeeded in inserting partisan and specific statements concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a declaration of a conference on racism is something that never should have happened.”

Sure enough, when the declaration came before the U.N. General Assembly in March 2002, Peres instructed the Israeli representative to join the U.S. and vote against it. Some endorsement.

Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos’ 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did-and failed to do-during the lead-up.

Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.

Rather, citing one instance after another, he made a compelling case that throughout the year of lead-up meetings you continuously fanned the flames of anti-Israel prejudice, only to cry “Fire!” once they rose up into a great conflagration.

I urge you to respond to Lantos’ detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban:

1.   That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001
In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country — demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” and calling Zionism a “racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas” — your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their “high degree of consensus.”

When asked about the inflammatory rhetoric at a news conference, you replied: “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final Declaration.” You went on to add that a “striking feature” of the meeting was the “emphasis on dialogue between civilizations.” That was it. No outrage. No criticism. No moral leadership.

Your comments, wrote Lantos, “represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

2.   That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001
Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. “Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’ Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it.”

“Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the ‘need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.’ Robinson was prepared to delve into the arcana of a single territorial conflict at the exclusion of all others and at the expense of the conference’s greater goals. Robinson’s intervention broke all momentum that the U.S. had developed. The Arab countries immediately seized on these statements as a clear indication that the tide had turned again in their favor, dropped all talk of compromise, and began pressing for the continuation of the Middle East discussion in Durban.”

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

3.   That You Opposed the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001
Finally, at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive role: “As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September 2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted as ‘warped, strange and undemocratic.'”

“In a meeting I had with Commissioner Robinson later that same day… [I] told her that the U.S. government was extremely displeased with the way she had handled the conference, and we indicated that we held her responsible for her actions that contributed to its failure.”

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never “misunderstood” your role. Known as “Mr. Human Rights,” he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban. He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.

Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face — by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.

II.  Your Role as High Commissioner

But the concerns about your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics “misunderstand” what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states, and your own role as the U.N.’s top human rights official.

To be sure, some of your critics, while getting the big picture right, have helped you make this case by conflating your former office with that of the Commission and its resolutions condoning Palestinian terrorism.

I will be the first to defend you on this point: you cannot be held responsible for texts that you neither initiated nor voted upon.

The errors of a few, however, do not detract from the numerous, genuine and well-grounded concerns cited over the years by UN Watch and others.

When the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission-ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel — you could have taken them on.

Unlike the U.S. president’s powers vis-à-vis Congress, you had no power to veto the Commission’s enactments. But you held the moral pulpit of the U.N. human rights system and could have set a different tone for Geneva. Unlike the political body, you were required to be impartial, objective, and non-selective.

Regrettably, however, when it came to Israel, you effectively encouraged the Commission’s anti-Israel obsession-an obsession that epitomized the politicization and selectivity that ultimately doomed the now-defunct body.

Examples abound. To name but a small portion:

• On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a “peaceful assembly.”
• In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner.
• In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis.
• The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.
• In December 2001, as documented by UN Watch, you gave special support to an extremist Palestinian demonstration held on the sidelines of a gathering of Geneva Convention signatories that was convened to condemn Israel.
• At the Commission’s April 2002 special session against Israel, your speech gave more credence to Palestinian propaganda than to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had witnessed Palestinian unloading of an explosive suicide belt from an ambulance.

Unfortunately, whenever we met with you in Geneva to raise such concerns, you rejected them out of hand.

Last week, when Jean Ziegler was elected vice-chair of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we were reminded of your legacy. In the year 2000, it was you who invited Ziegler — the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize — to become a U.N. human rights expert. He has since distinguished himself as the most anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel U.N. official in the history of the organization, cynically abusing his mandate.

Did your actions, however selective, at least help Palestinians? No. Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.

Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted “purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.”

The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.

I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety.

Yours truly,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland

The post What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? appeared first on UN Watch.

Letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson

Dear Mrs. Robinson,

Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response.

According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights — for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone — you are being “vilified” by “false accusations.”

In your own words, “certain elements” of the Jewish community —  those opposed to your selection — are subjecting you to “bullying.”

Mrs. Robinson, let’s be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations.

Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights — by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle — which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference.

Hurling ad hominem epithets won’t make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics’ arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing.

If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are.

I.  Your Role at Durban

Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.’s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.

As you know, the Durban conference degenerated into an unprecedented international platform for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hatred, with massive rallies in the streets of Durban organized by Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. One widely distributed flyer showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel.”

The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference. “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand,” he said, “this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as “a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”

This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another “bully.” But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend — meaning never an uncritical one — of the United Nations.

And so you have no choice but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the Irish Times, is that Lantos “misunderstood” your role.

“The conference was run by the member states, particularly by South Africa as the chair,” you said. “So all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made by governments and I wasn’t present when they were arguing about whether anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I just wasn’t there.”

You weren’t there, Mrs. Robinson? That’s odd, because in the same breath, you proceeded to claim credit for the removal of these proposals: “But I did finally, after the United States and Israel had withdrawn, persuade South Africa to take this language out immediately and to continue with the conference.” It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

In attempting to defend the final text, you say that Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, “welcomed” it. This is a deliberately misleading half-truth, put to frequent use this year by the apologists for Durban II.

The facts tell another story. On September 4, 2001, after he instructed his delegation to walk out of the conference, Peres described the gathering in Durban as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

At the same briefing, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior — a spiritual leader known for his advocacy of pluralism, liberalism and human rights protections for Israel’s minorities — described the Durban draft as “the most anti-Semitic official document put on any table in any official conference since World War II.” Yet you omit to mention any of this.

Yes, a few days later, when the final text emerged, Peres cheered the removal of the worst proposals, a direct result of the diplomatic pressure created by the joint U.S. and Israeli walkout that you continue to condemn. At the same time, his legal adviser, Alan Baker, made clear that Israel hardly gave its blessing to the outcome: “The fact that the Palestinians succeeded in inserting partisan and specific statements concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a declaration of a conference on racism is something that never should have happened.”

Sure enough, when the declaration came before the U.N. General Assembly in March 2002, Peres instructed the Israeli representative to join the U.S. and vote against it. Some endorsement.

Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos’ 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did-and failed to do-during the lead-up.

Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.

Rather, citing one instance after another, he made a compelling case that throughout the year of lead-up meetings you continuously fanned the flames of anti-Israel prejudice, only to cry “Fire!” once they rose up into a great conflagration.

I urge you to respond to Lantos’ detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban:

1.   That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001
In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country — demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” and calling Zionism a “racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas” — your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their “high degree of consensus.”

When asked about the inflammatory rhetoric at a news conference, you replied: “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final Declaration.” You went on to add that a “striking feature” of the meeting was the “emphasis on dialogue between civilizations.” That was it. No outrage. No criticism. No moral leadership.

Your comments, wrote Lantos, “represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

2.   That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001
Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. “Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’ Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it.”

“Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the ‘need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.’ Robinson was prepared to delve into the arcana of a single territorial conflict at the exclusion of all others and at the expense of the conference’s greater goals. Robinson’s intervention broke all momentum that the U.S. had developed. The Arab countries immediately seized on these statements as a clear indication that the tide had turned again in their favor, dropped all talk of compromise, and began pressing for the continuation of the Middle East discussion in Durban.”

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

3.   That You Opposed the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001
Finally, at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive role: “As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September 2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted as ‘warped, strange and undemocratic.'”

“In a meeting I had with Commissioner Robinson later that same day… [I] told her that the U.S. government was extremely displeased with the way she had handled the conference, and we indicated that we held her responsible for her actions that contributed to its failure.”

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never “misunderstood” your role. Known as “Mr. Human Rights,” he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban. He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.

Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face — by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.

II.  Your Role as High Commissioner

But the concerns about your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics “misunderstand” what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states, and your own role as the U.N.’s top human rights official.

To be sure, some of your critics, while getting the big picture right, have helped you make this case by conflating your former office with that of the Commission and its resolutions condoning Palestinian terrorism.

I will be the first to defend you on this point: you cannot be held responsible for texts that you neither initiated nor voted upon.

The errors of a few, however, do not detract from the numerous, genuine and well-grounded concerns cited over the years by UN Watch and others.

When the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission-ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel — you could have taken them on.

Unlike the U.S. president’s powers vis-à-vis Congress, you had no power to veto the Commission’s enactments. But you held the moral pulpit of the U.N. human rights system and could have set a different tone for Geneva. Unlike the political body, you were required to be impartial, objective, and non-selective.

Regrettably, however, when it came to Israel, you effectively encouraged the Commission’s anti-Israel obsession-an obsession that epitomized the politicization and selectivity that ultimately doomed the now-defunct body.

Examples abound. To name but a small portion:

• On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a “peaceful assembly.”
• In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner.
• In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis.
• The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.
• In December 2001, as documented by UN Watch, you gave special support to an extremist Palestinian demonstration held on the sidelines of a gathering of Geneva Convention signatories that was convened to condemn Israel.
• At the Commission’s April 2002 special session against Israel, your speech gave more credence to Palestinian propaganda than to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had witnessed Palestinian unloading of an explosive suicide belt from an ambulance.

Unfortunately, whenever we met with you in Geneva to raise such concerns, you rejected them out of hand.

Last week, when Jean Ziegler was elected vice-chair of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we were reminded of your legacy. In the year 2000, it was you who invited Ziegler — the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize — to become a U.N. human rights expert. He has since distinguished himself as the most anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel U.N. official in the history of the organization, cynically abusing his mandate.

Did your actions, however selective, at least help Palestinians? No. Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.

Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted “purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.”

The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.

I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety.

Yours truly,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland

The post What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? appeared first on UN Watch.

Letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson

Dear Mrs. Robinson,

Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response.

According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights—for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone—you are being “vilified” by “false accusations.”

In your own words, “certain elements” of the Jewish community—those opposed to your selection—are subjecting you to “bullying.”

Mrs. Robinson, let’s be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations.

Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle—which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference.

Hurling ad hominem epithets won’t make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics’ arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing.

If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are.

1. Your Role at Durban

Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.’s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.

As you know, the Durban conference degenerated into an unprecedented international platform for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hatred, with massive rallies in the streets of Durban organized by Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. One widely distributed flyer showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel.”

The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference. “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand,” he said, “this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as “a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”

This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another “bully.” But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend—meaning never an uncritical one—of the United Nations.

And so you have no choice but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the Irish Times, is that Lantos “misunderstood” your role.

“The conference was run by the member states, particularly by South Africa as the chair,” you said. “So all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made by governments and I wasn’t present when they were arguing about whether anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I just wasn’t there.”

You weren’t there, Mrs. Robinson? That’s odd, because in the same breath, you proceeded to claim credit for the removal of these proposals: “But I did finally, after the United States and Israel had withdrawn, persuade South Africa to take this language out immediately and to continue with the conference.” It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

In attempting to defend the final text, you say that Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, “welcomed” it. This is a deliberately misleading half-truth, put to frequent use this year by the apologists for Durban II.

The facts tell another story. On September 4, 2001, after he instructed his delegation to walk out of the conference, Peres described the gathering in Durban as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

At the same briefing, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior—a spiritual leader known for his advocacy of pluralism, liberalism and human rights protections for Israel’s minorities—described the Durban draft as “the most anti-Semitic official document put on any table in any official conference since World War II.” Yet you omit to mention any of this.

Yes, a few days later, when the final text emerged, Peres cheered the removal of the worst proposals, a direct result of the diplomatic pressure created by the joint U.S. and Israeli walkout that you continue to condemn. At the same time, his legal adviser, Alan Baker, made clear that Israel hardly gave its blessing to the outcome: “The fact that the Palestinians succeeded in inserting partisan and specific statements concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a declaration of a conference on racism is something that never should have happened.”

Sure enough, when the declaration came before the U.N. General Assembly in March 2002, Peres instructed the Israeli representative to join the U.S. and vote against it. Some endorsement.

Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos’ 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did—and failed to do—during the lead-up.

Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.

Rather, citing one instance after another, he made a compelling case that throughout the year of lead-up meetings you continuously fanned the flames of anti-Israel prejudice, only to cry “Fire!” once they rose up into a great conflagration.

I urge you to respond to Lantos’ detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban:

1. That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001
   In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country—demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” and calling Zionism a “racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas”— your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their “high degree of consensus.”When asked about the inflammatory rhetoric at a news conference, you replied: “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final Declaration.” You went on to add that a “striking feature” of the meeting was the “emphasis on dialogue between civilizations.” That was it. No outrage. No criticism. No moral leadership.Your comments, wrote Lantos, “represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

2. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001
   Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. “Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’ Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it.”“Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the ‘need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.’ Robinson was prepared to delve into the arcana of a single territorial conflict at the exclusion of all others and at the expense of the conference’s greater goals. Robinson’s intervention broke all momentum that the U.S. had developed. The Arab countries immediately seized on these statements as a clear indication that the tide had turned again in their favor, dropped all talk of compromise, and began pressing for the continuation of the Middle East discussion in Durban.”Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?
3. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001
   Finally, at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive role: “As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September 2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted as ‘warped, strange and undemocratic.’”

“In a meeting I had with Commissioner Robinson later that same day… [I] told her that the U.S. government was extremely displeased with the way she had handled the conference, and we indicated that we held her responsible for her actions that contributed to its failure.”

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge? The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never “misunderstood” your role. Known as “Mr. Human Rights,” he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban. He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.

Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face—by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.

2. Your Role as High Commissioner

But the concerns about your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics “misunderstand” what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states, and your own role as the U.N.’s top human rights official.

To be sure, some of your critics, while getting the big picture right, have helped you make this case by conflating your former office with that of the Commission and its resolutions condoning Palestinian terrorism.

I will be the first to defend you on this point: you cannot be held responsible for texts that you neither initiated nor voted upon.

The errors of a few, however, do not detract from the numerous, genuine and well-grounded concerns cited over the years by UN Watch and others.

When the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission—ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel—you could have taken them on.

Unlike the U.S. president’s powers vis-à-vis Congress, you had no power to veto the Commission’s enactments. But you held the moral pulpit of the U.N. human rights system and could have set a different tone for Geneva. Unlike the political body, you were required to be impartial, objective, and non-selective.

Regrettably, however, when it came to Israel, you effectively encouraged the Commission’s anti-Israel obsession—an obsession that epitomized the politicization and selectivity that ultimately doomed the now-defunct body.

Examples abound. To name but a small portion:

• On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a “peaceful assembly.”In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner.
• In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis.
• The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.
• In December 2001, as documented by UN Watch, you gave special support to an extremist Palestinian demonstration held on the sidelines of a gathering of Geneva Convention signatories that was convened to condemn Israel.
• At the Commission’s April 2002 special session against Israel, your speech gave more credence to Palestinian propaganda than to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had witnessed Palestinian unloading of an explosive suicide belt from an ambulance.

Unfortunately, whenever we met with you in Geneva to raise such concerns, you rejected them out of hand.

Last week, when Jean Ziegler was elected vice-chair of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we were reminded of your legacy. In the year 2000, it was you who invited Ziegler—the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize—to become a U.N. human rights expert. He has since distinguished himself as the most anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel U.N. official in the history of the organization, cynically abusing his mandate.

Did your actions, however selective, at least help Palestinians? No. Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.

Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted “purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.”

The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.

I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety.

Yours truly,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland

The post Issue 199: Letter to Mary Robinson appeared first on UN Watch.

In my 2008 Azure essay, Ziegler’s Follies, I argued that the man is an impostor who embodies the debased culture of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Among other things, the article documented how in 1989 Ziegler co-founded the “Moammar Qadaffi Human Rights Prize” with $10 million from the Libyan regime. Award recipients have included Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In 2002, while Ziegler continued to serve as vice-president of “North-South 21,” a Libyan front group based in Geneva that manages the prize, the award was given to convicted French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy — and to Ziegler himself.

Interestingly, it was then High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson who, in the year 2000, proposed him for his initial U.N. job as the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food. (See Sept. 2000 article below by Swiss news agency ATS.) Ziegler used this position for seven years to attack his favorite targets while utterly neglecting starving people around the world.

If Ziegler gets out of line as VP of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we can at least take comfort knowing he will be called to order by the lady they chose as Chair: Halima Embek Warzazi. She’s best known for being an apologist at the Council for Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds.

Here’s what I wrote about her for a 2005 article in The New Republic Online:

This past August, at the opening address of the subcommission [as the Advisory Committee was then known], Warzazi’s remarks singled out two countries only. First she blasted America (for, among other things, its treatment of Al Qaeda terrorists and violating “the right to life”) and then ended by asking audience members to reflect on how Israel might remind them of Nazi Germany. Warzazi mentioned no other country. Perhaps she’s just an overzealous activist for Middle East victims? If so, this concern was not apparent on September 1, 1988, when a measure was introduced at the subcommission to censure Saddam for gassing the Kurds of Halabja. Warzazi jumped in and sprung a “no action” motion, successfully killing the resolution. (Her move was supported, it so happens, by the same Cuban, Alfonso Martinez, who now sits with her in adjudicating human rights allegations.) Nor were humanitarian motives much in evidence in the remainder of Warzazi’s lengthy statements during this past year’s subcommission, where she failed to utter a single word for the victims of Darfur. “Everyone is talking about Sudan,” she told me.

Martinez continues to sit today on the Advisory Committee. Ziegler, Warzazi, and Martinez: this is the all-star line-up that guides what is called the world’s foremost human rights body.

___________________________________

When Mary Robinson named Qaddafi’s man at the U.N.

“Lutte contre la faim dans le monde Jean Ziegler nommé rapporteur spécial de l’ONU,” Sept. 3, 2000, Agence Télégraphique Suisse (ATS / SDA).

Genève — La Commission des droits de l’homme de l’ONU a nommé Jean Ziegler au poste de rapporteur spécial pour le droit à la nourriture. Le sociologue genevois a confirmé dimanche la nouvelle parue dans le quotidien “Le Matin” et le “SonntagsBlick”.

Les Nations-Unies souhaitent inscrire le droit à la nourriture dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. L’ancien conseiller national est chargé de préparer cette norme. Il entre en fonction immédiatemment, et a trois ans pour parvenir à synthétiser les points de vue des Etats membres sur ce nouveau droit.

Joint par téléphone, M. Ziegler a expliqué avoir été approché par Mary Robinson, Haut-commissaire aux droits de l’homme de l’ONU. Le droit à la nourriture a été proposé à l’instigation de Cuba et de la majorité des pays du tiers-monde. L’objectif est de “retirer au marché la fixation des prix agricoles”, précise-t-il. La démarche rencontre des résistances, notamment de la part des Etats-Unis.

Le sociologue estime que sa nomination est due à “la conjonction entre la volonté de la Suisse de le voir épouser cette charge et son engagement en faveur du tiers-monde”. Il s’est déclaré “impressionné” par le soutien personnel que lui ont apporté les conseillers fédéraux Adolph Ogi et Joseph Deiss.

M. Ziegler a été soutenu, lors du vote, par les blocs africains et sud-américains ainsi que par la France. Il a récemment publié le livre “La faim dans le monde expliquée à mon fils”. Il y explique que près de 100 000 personnes meurent de faim chaque jour dans le monde, et que près de 900 millions souffrent de malnutrition.

The post Qaddafi’s man at the U.N., Mary Robinson’s legacy-hire, reelected as VP appeared first on UN Watch.

In my 2008 Azure essay, Ziegler’s Follies, I argued that the man is an impostor who embodies the debased culture of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Among other things, the article documented how in 1989 Ziegler co-founded the “Moammar Qadaffi Human Rights Prize” with $10 million from the Libyan regime. Award recipients have included Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In 2002, while Ziegler continued to serve as vice-president of “North-South 21,” a Libyan front group based in Geneva that manages the prize, the award was given to convicted French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy — and to Ziegler himself.

Interestingly, it was then High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson who, in the year 2000, proposed him for his initial U.N. job as the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food. (See Sept. 2000 article below by Swiss news agency ATS.) Ziegler used this position for seven years to attack his favorite targets while utterly neglecting starving people around the world.

If Ziegler gets out of line as VP of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we can at least take comfort knowing he will be called to order by the lady they chose as Chair: Halima Embek Warzazi. She’s best known for being an apologist at the Council for Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds.

Here’s what I wrote about her for a 2005 article in The New Republic Online:

This past August, at the opening address of the subcommission [as the Advisory Committee was then known], Warzazi’s remarks singled out two countries only. First she blasted America (for, among other things, its treatment of Al Qaeda terrorists and violating “the right to life”) and then ended by asking audience members to reflect on how Israel might remind them of Nazi Germany. Warzazi mentioned no other country. Perhaps she’s just an overzealous activist for Middle East victims? If so, this concern was not apparent on September 1, 1988, when a measure was introduced at the subcommission to censure Saddam for gassing the Kurds of Halabja. Warzazi jumped in and sprung a “no action” motion, successfully killing the resolution. (Her move was supported, it so happens, by the same Cuban, Alfonso Martinez, who now sits with her in adjudicating human rights allegations.) Nor were humanitarian motives much in evidence in the remainder of Warzazi’s lengthy statements during this past year’s subcommission, where she failed to utter a single word for the victims of Darfur. “Everyone is talking about Sudan,” she told me.

Martinez continues to sit today on the Advisory Committee. Ziegler, Warzazi, and Martinez: this is the all-star line-up that guides what is called the world’s foremost human rights body.

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When Mary Robinson named Qaddafi’s man at the U.N.

“Lutte contre la faim dans le monde Jean Ziegler nommé rapporteur spécial de l’ONU,” Sept. 3, 2000, Agence Télégraphique Suisse (ATS / SDA).

Genève — La Commission des droits de l’homme de l’ONU a nommé Jean Ziegler au poste de rapporteur spécial pour le droit à la nourriture. Le sociologue genevois a confirmé dimanche la nouvelle parue dans le quotidien “Le Matin” et le “SonntagsBlick”.

Les Nations-Unies souhaitent inscrire le droit à la nourriture dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. L’ancien conseiller national est chargé de préparer cette norme. Il entre en fonction immédiatemment, et a trois ans pour parvenir à synthétiser les points de vue des Etats membres sur ce nouveau droit.

Joint par téléphone, M. Ziegler a expliqué avoir été approché par Mary Robinson, Haut-commissaire aux droits de l’homme de l’ONU. Le droit à la nourriture a été proposé à l’instigation de Cuba et de la majorité des pays du tiers-monde. L’objectif est de “retirer au marché la fixation des prix agricoles”, précise-t-il. La démarche rencontre des résistances, notamment de la part des Etats-Unis.

Le sociologue estime que sa nomination est due à “la conjonction entre la volonté de la Suisse de le voir épouser cette charge et son engagement en faveur du tiers-monde”. Il s’est déclaré “impressionné” par le soutien personnel que lui ont apporté les conseillers fédéraux Adolph Ogi et Joseph Deiss.

M. Ziegler a été soutenu, lors du vote, par les blocs africains et sud-américains ainsi que par la France. Il a récemment publié le livre “La faim dans le monde expliquée à mon fils”. Il y explique que près de 100 000 personnes meurent de faim chaque jour dans le monde, et que près de 900 millions souffrent de malnutrition.

The post Qaddafi’s man at the U.N., Mary Robinson’s legacy-hire, reelected as VP appeared first on UN Watch.

The evidence is clear. As described by the late Tom Lantos, throughout the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference Mary Robinson was part of the problem, not the solution. At preparatory sessions in Tehran and Geneva she consistently justified and encouraged a selective focus on Israel. While she did make statements against anti-Semitic manifestations at the conference itself, these were too little and too late. Robinson may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but she is its preeminent symbol.

The problem was not just Durban. UN Watch interacted with Robinson when she was U.N. rights chief in Geneva from 1997 to 2002 and closely monitored her tenure. Though she did speak out aptly in various instances, Robinson consistently displayed one-sided criticism of Israel matched with indifference to Palestinian terrorism.

The U.S. government rightly stood up for principle in April when it opposed any reaffirmation of the flawed 2001 Durban declaration. Whatever her other accomplishments, Robinson’s actions in the Durban process and the bias she displayed throughout her tenure as UN human rights chief were not worthy of this award.

The post Mary Robinson’s problematic actions not worthy of award appeared first on UN Watch.

The evidence is clear. As described by the late Tom Lantos, throughout the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference Mary Robinson was part of the problem, not the solution. At preparatory sessions in Tehran and Geneva she consistently justified and encouraged a selective focus on Israel. While she did make statements against anti-Semitic manifestations at the conference itself, these were too little and too late. Robinson may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but she is its preeminent symbol.

The problem was not just Durban. UN Watch interacted with Robinson when she was U.N. rights chief in Geneva from 1997 to 2002 and closely monitored her tenure. Though she did speak out aptly in various instances, Robinson consistently displayed one-sided criticism of Israel matched with indifference to Palestinian terrorism.

The U.S. government rightly stood up for principle in April when it opposed any reaffirmation of the flawed 2001 Durban declaration. Whatever her other accomplishments, Robinson’s actions in the Durban process and the bias she displayed throughout her tenure as UN human rights chief were not worthy of this award.

The post Mary Robinson’s problematic actions not worthy of award appeared first on UN Watch.