UNHRC Betrays Humans Rights and Israel

According to the Prophet, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’.” (Amos 5:24)

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is a gutter overflow with the purpose of smearing and delegitimizing Israel.

In pursuing this agenda, UNHRC has hit upon a strategy of using Jews, like Judge Richard Goldstone, and now pseudo-Jews, like William Schabas, as front men for its Kafkaesque show trials of the Jewish state.

To liken these accomplices of the UNHRC’s willing executioners to Judas is an insult—to Judas. Jewish polemicists have long portrayed Judas, not as the arch-betrayer of the Christian Bible, but as a Jewish patriot and revolutionary (assuming he existed at all). Now, the recently-discovered, Gnostic, “The Gospel of Judas,” portrays him as Jesus’ best buddy and intimate collaborator in orchestrating a faux crucifixion.

There is nothing faux about the crucifixion at the hands of the UHRC of Israel which is the only country designated as a “permanent agenda item” by the UN’s chief global human rights address. Over 40 resolutions have been passed against Israel. Virtually none against anybody else. Syria, a UNHRC chair, was only very very belatedly censured.

The UNHRC, renamed from the Human Rights Commission to the Human Rights Council in 2006, is an organization with a sordid history whose hypocritical invocation of the name “human rights” raises a stink to heaven. The UHRC—40 percent of whose resolutions and almost all of its high-profile probes are devoted to pillorying Israel—was notorious for casting a blind eye to the inhuman rights records of Saddam’s Iraq, the Assads’ Syria, President Omar Bashir’s Sudan, the mullahs’ Iran, the Saudis’ male-only theocracy, China’s Tianamen tank crew and Tibetan sadists, and the geriatric Castro brothers and late Hugo Chavez’s Latin prison farms. Many of these Orwellian regimes served on the UHRC, some even chairing it.

The UNHRC has been and still is a virtual good old boys club controlled by the world’s worst human rights abusers—including Iran, Sudan, China, and Cuba. Their main goals: to protect themselves and their allies from the glare of global spotlight on their human rights abuses; and to assure each other of a whitewashed clean bill of health while piling nonstop one-sided resolutions on Israel condemning the Jewish state—not Hamas terrorists—for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” That first effort culminated in the “Goldstone Report” (2009) seeking to degrade Israel’s ability to defend her civilians from non-state terrorists onslaughts. This Report also sets the stage for more international legal challenges to other democracies struggling against the transitional menace of terrorism. Its contents were so odious that Judge Goldstone ultimately repudiated it, implying he had been duped.

Here is an example of the kind of NGOs to which the UNHRC look for “guidance.” The International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination: (EAFORD) characterized Israel as “the largest open-air prison in the world” and accused it of “loose hordes of marauding gangs of Israeli illegal settlers so as to launch pogroms against Palestinians. It concluded by charging: “It is the turn of the dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians. Their human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market. Israeli physicians, Medical Centres, rabbis and the Israeli army may to be involved, according to reports published in the Swedish press and criminal investigations in the United States. After Israeli physicians remove organs they think marketable, the soldiers bury the bodies in graves that carry only numbers and no names, or place them in sealed caskets and deliver them under curfew conditions to the families and supervise the digging of the graves and burial.”

How has the U.S. reacted? The Bush Administration belatedly disengaged from the HRC but the Obama Administration eagerly reengaged with it. As somebody said of second marriages, the results of Obama’s “smart diplomacy” in this instance were the triumph of hope over experience that may again be headed for divorce court—let’s hope with no alimony paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Israeli government, on the other hand, is considering—in a survival reflex—to boycott IRC’s witch hunt cum kangaroo court cum lynching.

Much of this could be passed over as a “dog bites man story” except for the UHRC’s new decision to appoint William Schabas to head its Gaza probe and the Nathan Guttman’s contribution to the journalism of the grotesque in the “Forward” apologizing for it.

Who exactly is Schabas and why does it matter? He is a Canadian human rights lawyer notorious for his anti-Israel bias. According to Guttman, that doesn’t matter because “his paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Galicia in Central Europe who moved to New York at the turn of the 20th century. . . . Schabas also fondly recalls family meals at Jewish delicatessens.”

In a dubious bit of creative etymology, Guttman adds: “Schabas doesn’t know the exact origin of his family’s name, but he is sure it comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat (shabbas in Yiddish.) It is an unusual name for Ashkenazi Jews, a fact that led one rabbi to suggest that the family may have Sephardic origins as well.”

At the minimum, the Jewish state—before agreeing to cooperate with another UNHRC probe—should insist that Schabas be replaced with a fair-minded Shabbos goy.

See Guttman in the “Forward” at http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/204164/-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-un-war-crimes-co/#ixzz3B2TVavOH