Why The UN Is Useless, Part 86d
The new Human Rights Council has already shown that it fits right into the political and cultural viewpoint of the General Assembly. It voted yesterday to dedicate itself to the deliberate targeting of the one nation it sees as the largest human-rights problem in the world -- Israel:
The new UN Human Rights Council voted Friday to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session.The resolution, which was sponsored by Islamic countries, was passed by a vote of 29-12, with five abstentions. It effectively revives a practice of the UN's dissolved Human Rights Commission, which also reviewed alleged Israeli abuses every time it met.
Israel protested Friday's vote, calling it a perpetuation of "the old infamous habits" of the widely discredited commission.
The resolution requires UN investigators to report at each council session "on the Israeli human rights violations in occupied Palestine."
The resolution also said the council "decides to undertake substantive consideration of the human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories at its next session and to incorporate that issue in its following sessions."
Once again, we see that the UN has become corrupted by the anti-semitism and the dictatorships of its membership. This goes down the same corrupt path as the panel it replaced, avoiding consideration of real human-rights abusers such as Iran, Cuba, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia. Instead they attack Western democracies by attempting to paint them as evil oppressors when nothing could be further from the truth.
Let's look at Israel as an example, since they have made that their issue. Israel allows full suffrage for its citizens, even the Israeli Arabs. A handful sit in the Knesset, and they have their own political party. Most of the nations on the HRC don't even allow for multiparty democracy, let alone minority rights and freedom of expression. In terms of Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank, certainly some criticism is legitimate, but the overall context of the struggle they face there overwhelmingly shows them as sinned against much more than sinner. The HRC, in either incarnation, has never made an issue of Palestinian terrorism against explicitly civilian targets, making their approach to the conflict completely dishonest.
More than ever, it appears that real reform at the United Nations is impossible. The United States needs to cut funding for the kleptocrats at Turtle Bay and encourage as many of our allies to follow suit -- especially Japan, whose experience in the North Korea standoff might make them open to such a suggestion. When the money stops flowing into their accounts, the UN will get the message much more quickly than they have up to now. Defunding this mess also gives us the moral standing that refusing to enable corruption brings.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on July 1, 2006 11:35 AM | Comments () | TrackBacks (2)
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