Click on the website of the UN News Center, and you’ll find a “Middle East” regional focus link. Except that when you go to check out the news on the Middle East, all of the state killings, violent crackdowns and oppression in Libya, Iran, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, and so forth, are all erased. There’s nothing. Instead, it’s all about Israel. This is not a new scandal — just one that’s made more outrageous by the scale of recent events. UN Watch urges the UN to redress their gross neglect of the rights of 350 million Middle East citizens.
Here’s what we wrote here in 2009:
The home page of the U.N.’s news center displays focus sections on a handful of regions, one of which is the Middle East.
There one might expect to find special features on the brutal beatings, arrests, and show trials now occurring in Iran, reports about women subjugated in Saudi Arabia, and statements about bloggers and other dissidents arrested and jailed in Egypt and Syria.
Guess again: the “Middle East” section, it turns out, is all about Israel — with an endless stream of U.N. reports, resolutions and feature stories about Palestinian suffering from the evil Israelis. Under “Resolutions/Reports,” for example, there are numerous links to the webpage run by the Division for Palestinian Rights, a derivative of the U.N. General Assembly package, adopted on November 10, 1975, that gave the world the “Zionism is Racism” resolution.
The giveaway of what the U.N. officials were thinking, if any was needed, is their choice of URL, the lengthy set of characters and symbols that directs your browser to a web address, and which typically includes a combination of auto-generated gobbledygook — as well as the back-end title given by the author. Here the word used is “Palestine,” and not “Middle East,” which is the purported focus and official title.
It’s only one more example of how the U.N.’s obsessive targeting of Israel, at the expense of millions of human rights victims worldwide, is often achieved by means of euphemism.
