A UN Council for Terrorist Rights: Yair Lapid, Times of Israel, Mar. 21, 2016— We stand here, Jews and non-Jews. From Israel and from across Europe, to protest the fact that instead of doing what they’re supposed to do, the United Nations Human Rights Council is encouraging murder, encouraging terror, encouraging injustice.
You Can’t Make it Up. UN Names Democratic Israel as World’s Top Human Rights Violator: Anne Bayefsky, Fox News, Mar. 29, 2016—According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel. On March 24, 2016, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet – Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women.
The Always Reliable United Nations: Elliott Abrams, National Review, Mar. 28, 2016— The United Nations, always fully reliable when it comes to hating Israel, has done it again.
Canada Polishes its Good-Guy Badge: Konrad Yakabuski, Globe & Mail, Mar. 20, 2016— Canada is back at it. Justin Trudeau already has his eye on a seat on the United Nations Security Council, even though he may no longer be in office by the time Canada’s candidacy comes up for a vote in 2020.
Venice Jews Mark 500th Anniversary of World’s First Ghetto: Hana Levi Julian, Jewish Press, Mar. 28, 2016— The Jews of Venice are appealing on behalf of the Muslim immigrants who are reaching the shores of Italy as they prepare to mark the half-millennial anniversary of the first ghetto.
Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, Pakistan Fail to Silence Hillel Neuer; Defended by USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada (Video): UNWatch, Mar. 11, 2016
In Historic First, UN's Ban Ki-moon Apologizes to Israel for Labeling Jerusalem "Occupied": Breaking Israel News, Mar. 30, 2016
March Madness, the Anti-Semite Bracket: Ruth R. Wisse, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 23, 2016
Roseanne Barr Denounces BDS Movement's 'Fascist Narrative' in Jerusalem: Truth Revolt, Mar. 30, 2016
A Dozen Diverse Visions of Israel: Alexandra Wolfe, Wall Street Journal, Mar, 4 2016
A UN COUNCIL FOR TERRORIST RIGHTS
Yair Lapid
Times of Israel, Mar. 21, 2016
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We stand here, Jews and non-Jews. From Israel and from across Europe, to protest the fact that instead of doing what they’re supposed to do, the United Nations Human Rights Council is encouraging murder, encouraging terror, encouraging injustice. And we are not willing to remain silent anymore. That is not a Council for Human Rights. Instead, it has become a Council for Terrorist Rights.
In the past decade the Council has passed 55 resolutions regarding human rights violations throughout the world: the entire globe. With all of its endless conflicts. In the same decade, in the same ten years, the Council has passed sixty two resolutions against Israel. Seven resolutions more about Israel than about the entire rest of the world. During that decade, Israel was constantly under attack from terrorists who set out to kill civilians: women, children, the elderly.
Our enemies mock the core concept of what it is to be human, while at the same time we are trying to protect a democratic state while adhering to the highest standards of international law. We face fundamentalist Islamic terror organizations who want to murder Jews just because they are Jews. We face Iran and its terror subcontractors, which has declared again and again that its goal is the total destruction of Israel. And we face sixty two resolutions by an organisation which deceives the world by calling itself a Human Rights Council.
Four hundred thousand murdered in Syria, tens of thousands murdered in Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan — and the Council condemns Israel. Women are raped in Rwanda, Sudan and all across the Middle East — and the Council condemns Israel. People are beheaded and women are forced into slavery in Iraq — the Council condemns Israel. Three million people are displaced in Syria — the Council condemns Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only ranked forty-ninth in the number of casualties in conflicts across the world. But there is only one country – only one – which the rules of Human Rights Council dictate has a special agenda item. Let me introduce you to Agenda item 7, which states that every time the Council is in session it has to discuss – even if nothing happened, even if no evidence has been presented — the human rights situation in Israel.
Why? Because they no longer even try to conceal their support for the terrorism of Hamas, of Hezbollah and of the knife attackers in our streets. Because they no longer even pretend to be objective. Because they no longer even try to hide the fact that they are anti-Israel, anti-Jews and anti-justice. Today in Geneva, the Council has six more anti-Israel discussions on the agenda. Six more. Each one more ridiculous than the next. More hostile than the next. And with less foundation in fact than the next. Regarding our enemies – the biggest perpetrators of human rights violations on this planet — as usual, there will be no resolution, no condemnation, not a single word.
In the past six months, terrorists have stalked the streets of Israel, shooting at our children, stabbing women and the elderly, carrying out car ramming attacks. Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin weren’t soldiers. They were a couple driving home with their four young children. The parents were killed. The children injured. Dafna Meir, a mother of six, was killed while she stood at the doorway of her house, protecting her young daughter so she wouldn’t be murdered as well. Alon Bakal was shot to death in Tel Aviv. He was 26. A volunteer in a humanitarian organization. He was what they call a ‘human rights activist.’.
And how does the UN Human Rights Council respond when a human rights activist was murdered? They support the murderer. The treatment of Israel by the Council is far beyond bias. It’s obsessive. It’s insanity. I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. Let me tell you something about anti-Semitism: Anti-Semites, in this era, never admit that they are anti-Semitic. They always give it a different name. They say it’s something else. So we learned, in the past two thousand years, that it doesn’t matter what they say. It only matters what they do. And what they are doing here today, in the United Nations Human Rights Council is pure, old fashioned, anti-Semitism… [To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
YOU CAN’T MAKE IT UP. UN NAMES DEMOCRATIC ISRAEL AS WORLD’S TOP HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATOR Anne Bayefsky Fox News, Mar. 29, 2016 |
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According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel. On March 24, 2016, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet – Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women. On the same day, the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its month-long session in Geneva by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states.
There were five Council resolutions on Israel. One each on the likes of hellish countries like Syria, North Korea and Iran. Libya got an offer of “technical assistance.” And countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and China were among the 95 percent of states that were never mentioned. No slander is deemed too vile for the U.N. human rights bodies that routinely listen to highly orchestrated Palestinian versions of the ancient blood libel against the Jews.
In Geneva, Palestinian representative Ibrahim Khraishi told the Council on March 24, 2016: “Israeli soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian children. They shoot them dead. They will leave them to bleed to death.” And in New York, Palestinian representative Haifa Al-Agha told CSW on March 16, 2016: “Israel…is directing its military machinery against women and girls. They are killing them, injuring them, and leaving them bleeding to death.” Operating hand-in-glove with governments and the U.N. secretariat are the unelected, sanctimonious NGOs, to which the UN offers free facilities and daily advertisement of “side-events.” In theory “materials containing abusive or offensive language or images are not permitted on United Nations premises.”
In practice, in Geneva the UN permitted handouts that claimed Israel “saw ethnic cleansing as a necessary precondition for its existence.” A film accused Israel of sexual violence against children and “trying to exterminate an entire Palestinian generation.” Speeches focused on the 1948 “catastrophe” in which a “settler colonial state” was established on Palestinian land. The New York CSW-NGO scene included a film set in in the context of Israeli “oppression” and the “tear gas of my childhood,” and statements analogizing the experiences of Palestinians to today’s Syrian refugees.
Picture these real-life scenes: In Geneva’s grand U.N. “Human Rights” Council chamber, 750 people assembled, pounced on the Jewish state, broadcast the spectacle online, and produced hundreds of articles and interviews in dozens of languages championing the results. On the ground, Israelis are being hacked to death on the streets, stabbed in buses, slaughtered in synagogues, mowed down with automobiles, and shot in front of their children.
At the New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descend on only one country. On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called “adultery,” Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian.
Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the U.N. a harmless international salon or a bad joke? The poison isn’t simply rhetorical. One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel – as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield. The resolution casts a wide net encompassing all companies engaged in whatever the U.N. thinks are business “practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises.”… [To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.] |
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Anne Bayefsky is a CIJR Academic Fellow
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THE ALWAYS RELIABLE UNITED NATIONS
Elliott Abrams
National Review, Mar. 28, 2016
The United Nations, always fully reliable when it comes to hating Israel, has done it again. On March 14, I wrote at National Review Online about the coming selection at the U.N. Human Rights Council of a new “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” The selection has now been made, and the honor — as it were — goes to a Canadian named Michael Lynk.
Now, in the U.N., these hate-Israel jobs are important. You cannot take the risk that a selectee will be fair or balanced or unbiased. So you go for someone like Lynk. For example, Lynk is a member of the advisory board of the “Canadian–Palestinian Education Exchange” (CEPAL), which promotes the “Annual Israeli Apartheid Week.” Three days after 9/11, he blamed the attacks on “global inequalities” and “disregard by Western nations for the international rule of law.” He signed a 2009 statement condemning Israel for alleged “war crimes” in Gaza. At the Group of 78’s annual policy conference in 2009, he said, as summarized in the group’s report, that he “used to think the critical date in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict was 1967, the start of the occupation.” Now he thinks that “the solution to the problem must go back to 1948, the date of partition and the start of ethnic cleansing.” In other words, Israel should not exist and its mere existence is a harbinger of ethnic cleansing and other crimes.
U.N. Watch’s director correctly said last week that “the U.N.’s selection of a manifestly partisan candidate — someone who three days after 9/11 blamed the West for provoking the attacks on the World Trade Center — constitutes a travesty of justice and a breach of the world body’s own rules.” Well, a travesty of justice, a breach of the U.N.’s own rules — and absolutely par for the course when it comes to the U.N. and Israel. In his press conference on the Human Rights Council’s session, which thank God is now over, the U.S ambassador to the U.N., Keith Harper, did not even mention this despicable appointment. (He did however, denounce, the “especially disturbing” resolution to set up a database of businesses operating in settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights. The resolution “only serves to reinforce the council’s one-sided actions against Israel” and exceeded the council’s authority, he said. Better than nothing, I guess.)
Lynk will never set foot in Israel or the Palestinian territories, because the Israeli reaction to this nonsense is to deny these “special rapporteurs” a visa. He can write his report in Ontario, and there will be no surprises in it: another in the long line of U.N. assaults on the Jewish State.
CANADA POLISHES ITS GOOD-GUY BADGE
Konrad Yakabuski
Globe & Mail, Mar. 20, 2016
Canada is back at it. Justin Trudeau already has his eye on a seat on the United Nations Security Council, even though he may no longer be in office by the time Canada’s candidacy comes up for a vote in 2020. The Prime Minister is also promising to “revitalize Canada’s historic role” in UN peacekeeping, befitting our nature as a global good guy who prevents wars instead of starting them. That’s what the Liberals would like you to think, anyway. But Canada’s self-image as an “honest broker” in international affairs has always been the construct of a tiny elite of politicians, diplomats and academics eager to differentiate this country from that belligerent bully next door. It may be good for their egos and careers. But is it good for the country?
It depends on what Canada makes its limited influence as a middle power. Former prime minister Stephen Harper was needlessly antagonist toward the UN and Canada punched below its weight in global affairs during his time in office. But his refusal to “please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations” had its charms as a governing principle in foreign policy. The question facing the Trudeau government is whether its all-abiding desire to be seen as non-confrontational and easy to get along with translates into a mushy multilateralism that sells well at home but leaves our global allies in the lurch when they really need us. (See our modified mission against the Islamic State.) At its worst, mushiness makes for incoherent foreign policy.
Selling tanks to the Saudis posed no moral dilemma for Mr. Harper. Despite the kingdom’s egregious human-rights record, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country capable of counterbalancing Iran’s far more destructive influence in the Middle East. And defence contracts are a huge boon to Canada’s economy, allowing Canadian suppliers to participate in global innovation chains.
The Liberals have already flip-flopped and prevaricated so much on the $15-billion sale of light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, your head spins trying to keep up. They’ve managed to insult the Saudis and damage Canada’s chances of winning future contracts from any Arab ally, all while fuelling cynicism with their bromides about standing up for human rights – next time. What, then, would Mr. Trudeau do with a seat on the Security Council? The answer to that question is a long way off, if it ever comes. But it’s worth asking whether the Prime Minister is merely interested in the bragging rights that come with winning a Security Council seat or seeks to make Canada a voice for reform from within a body notorious for its dysfunction and impotence.
It’s an open secret that the real work of the Security Council goes on among the five permanent members – the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. Each of the so-called P5 has a veto over resolutions, which explains why the council has been largely powerless to solve most of the global crises it was designed to defuse. Syria is the current Exhibit A. We shouldn’t need to wait until 2021, when Canada would take its seat on the council, for the Trudeau government to push for a more effective, transparent and democratic council. Such a campaign might damage Canada’s chances of winning a seat in 2020, but it would be the true measure of whether Mr. Trudeau is willing to back up his rhetoric with “real change.”
As for peacekeeping, the nostalgic notion of minimally armed blue berets in postwar zones is drastically out of sync with modern reality.
What the UN euphemistically calls peacekeeping today is expensive, trauma-inducing and often more deadly than direct combat. If you doubt that, check out the peacekeeping efforts in Mali or Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today’s peacekeepers face constant terrorist threats and bear witness to genocides they may be powerless to stop, especially if they are hamstrung by UN mandates limiting their role. Judging by Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion’s comments last week, that is not what the government is talking about. Since African countries now provide the bulk of soldiers, he suggested Canada’s participation could be limited to training and equipping peacekeepers. If that’s the case, Mr. Trudeau’s promise to “revitalize” Canadian peacekeeping is just more hype from a government already well on its way to setting records for it.
VENICE JEWS MARK 500TH ANNIVERSARY
Hana Levi Julian
Jewish Press, Mar. 28, 2016
The Jews of Venice are appealing on behalf of the Muslim immigrants who are reaching the shores of Italy as they prepare to mark the half-millennial anniversary of the first ghetto. The event commemorates the opening of the Jewish ghetto of Venice, created on March 29, 1516 to separate the Jews from the primarily Christian population of the time. A series of cultural events are slated to take place this Tuesday to mark that date. The Jews of Venice say they believe their history can teach Europe that minorities can integrate while preserving their identities.
University Professor Shaul Bassi told The National in an interview on Monday, “Those of us who have worked on this anniversary believe the ghetto has precious ethical and cultural lessons to educate the public about Jews as well as the broader question of cross-cultural dialogue, co-operation and co-existence. Today, Italian Jews are proof that a minority can keep its identity and still integrate in a process of reciprocal influence,” he said. “Elsewhere in Europe Jews were treated worse, and Venice to some extent was a safe harbor,” said Paolo Gnignati, leader of Venice’s Jewish community. “The city wanted them to come because they needed access to Jewish trading networks; it was good business on the part of the doges.
“We were deprived of our rights here, but contributed to Europe’s identity and we are still here,” Gnignati said. “We can serve as an example to newcomers who want to participate in Europe while preserving their original identity.” The word “ghetto” in Italian is “geto” from “gettare,” the verb “to cast.” The Jews were forced into a cramped, polluted area surrounded by canals for the next 300 years. They were locked in at night and forced to pay the wages of their Christian guards.
During the day they were required to wear yellow caps to identify them as Jews (does any of this sound familiar?) as they entered the rest of the city. They were also ordered to use Christian architects to build the five synagogues in the ghetto itself, which remain today. Because the ghetto was so small, the Jews ended up creating the first skyscrapers, building apartments one on top of the other in order to accommodate the growing population. Some of the buildings, eight or nine stories high, are still the tallest in the city. Napoleon knocked down the gates of the ghetto when he occupied Venice in 1879, allowing Jews to live where they chose.
By the time of World War II, the city’s Jewish population had dropped from 5,000 to just over 1,000. During the war, 246 of the city’s Jews were sent to die in the concentration camps. Only eight returned.
Today in Venice only 450 Jews remain, with just a handful in the ‘ghetto.’ The five synagogues there are still open, and Venetian Jews say they’re urging incoming Muslims to learn from their history in order to survive.
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, Pakistan Fail to Silence Hillel Neuer; Defended by USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada (Video): UNWatch, Mar. 11, 2016—Hillel Neuer, UN Watch: Thank you, Mr. President. In four days, this Human Rights Council marks its 10th anniversary, founded to protect universal human rights and to “address gross and systematic violations.” Ten years later, we ask: Is the Council living up to its founding promise? Let us listen to the voices of the victims. We heard them two weeks ago at the 8th Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, organized by UN Watch and more than 20 other NGOs.
In Historic First, UN's Ban Ki-moon Apologizes to Israel for Labeling Jerusalem "Occupied": Breaking Israel News, Mar. 30, 2016—UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he regrets a “misunderstanding” over his use of the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem. The unfortunate comment has led to Israel expelling dozens of United Nations staff, Reuters reported.
March Madness, the Anti-Semite Bracket: Ruth R. Wisse, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 23, 2016—March madness is no longer limited to the basketball court. This month, American campuses are being invaded by the latest form of college hazing: Israeli Apartheid Week.
Roseanne Barr Denounces BDS Movement's 'Fascist Narrative' in Jerusalem: Truth Revolt, Mar. 30, 2016—I've always been an outspoken person because I’m a comedian and the subjects of racism, classism, and sexism were important subjects for me to lampoon and stand against, as a proper Socialist, like my father and his father before him — a Russian Jewish immigrant in Salt Lake City Utah.
A Dozen Diverse Visions of Israel: Alexandra Wolfe, Wall Street Journal, Mar, 4 2016—Photographer Frédéric Brenner made his name taking pictures of Jews all around the world, but his latest project focuses on just one country: Israel. His new exhibition, “This Place” at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, showcases photos by 11 artists and Mr. Brenner himself.
