The UN Human Rights Council is the best, the most promising, the most successful purchase the Arab regimes have made to date.
An investment worth its weight in oil.
The UN used its funds to commission a UNHRC report whose planning brief specified in advance that it was to find Israel guilty of war crimes after Israel suffered eight (8) years of missile bombardment. During these eight years, 12,000 missiles were fired from within civilian areas in the Gaza Strip onto exclusively civilian areas in Israel. Schools, power stations, shops, petrol stations, kindergartens, hospitals, car-parks, apartments.
The UNHRC accordingly put together a team called “The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”. Bearing in mind the UNHRC’s corporate backers – including such illustrious human rights champions as Saudi Arabia, China, Egypt and Pakistan – the results were a foregone conclusion.
In an almost 600 page report, Israel was found guilty of innumerable human rights violations in its pursuit of a way to prevent a ninth consecutive year of rocket bombardment of its civilian population. Iran’s Hamas were not investigated, Israeli testimony was disregarded, and unsubstantiated claims made by any Arab in the Gaza Strip were duly recorded and included in the findings of this august body.
Existentially frustrating for Israel, acutely embarrassing for other democracies the world over, but above all a paramount success for the Arab investors behind this corporate takeover of yet another UN body. An investment success-story that flies in the face of the current global economic gloom and doom.
The aim of the investment was not to bring relief to a situation in desperate need of a solution. The aim was to entrench the main proponents even further in their own corners, to prevent any change in the status quo. With everyone busy looking after their own interests this would leave the market free for the investors to continue their buying spree. There are, after all, still some UN organisations that have not yet been included in the Arab investment portfolio. UNESCO recently resisted a bullish takeover bid that prompted the would-be investor, Egypt’s Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, to reassert his old commitment to burning Hebrew-language books (in the Egyptian Parliament in May 2008, with the UNESCO stock ripe for the picking, he announced “I’d burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt”).
For an objective take on the Goldstone Report, read what retired Major-General Jim Molan has to say on the subject of the law of war and the judiciary’s role in dealing with how war is supposed to be prosecuted.
Read also what legal expert Ben-Dror Yemini has to say on the subject on human rights abuses within and by the UN.
Professor Barry Rubin of the Glora Center says the Goldstone Report is a disaster for human rights and peace.
Ilya Meyer on the UN, Ilya Meyer on the UN and Islamism, Ilya Meyer on the UNHCR