"The U.N. on the Loose"

"It is a kind of moral idiocy: the greatest defender of freedom on the planet, enjoying the freest institutions, seeking its moral yardstick in the looking-glass values of a corrupt, perverse institutional relic." (Charles Krathammer)

News and commentary on the U.N. in general and its anti-Israeli bias in particular.

February 2003
"Let's quit the UN" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/02/08 issue)
"The UN is fast becoming a threat to world peace" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/02/04)

January 2003
"U.N., R.I.P." (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/01/31)
"Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference" (CNN.com, 2003/01/29)
"A Tyrants Club" (Claudia Rosett, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/22)
"Security Council Sells Out" (Thomas W. Murphy, USA in Review, 2003/01/21)
"Libya elected to head UN rights body" (Richard Beeston, The Times, 2003/01/21)

November 2002
"Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?" (James Traub, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/11/17)

October 2002
"Who Elected the U.N.?" (Robert L. Bartley, OpinionJornal, 2002/10/07)
"The Myth Of 'U.N. Support'" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2002/10/04)

September 2002
"Transnational Government" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/25)
"Bush issues ultimatum to Iraq" (BBC News, 2002/09/12)
"Since Durban: An entrenchment of hatred" (Anne Bayefsky, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/12)

August 2002
"Stand up for human rights" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/08/22)
"Gadaffi To Head Human Rights Body" (Sky News, 2002/08/19)
"Arabs Ignore Palestinians' Plight" (Marc Ginsberg, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/08/11)
"The UN on the Loose" (AEI/Commentary, Joshua Muravchik, 2002/08/08)

July 2002
"Human 'Wrongs'" (Gerald M. Steinberg, National Review, 2002/07/25)
"The Human Wrongs Commission" (Joshua Muravchik, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/25)

June 2002
"The UN Human Rights Agenda: A Strategy of Diversion" (Anne Bayefsky, Justice, from the June 2002 issue)

May 2002
"Ending Bias in the Human Rights System" (Anne Bayefsky, The New York Times, 2002/05/22)
"What about anti-Semitism?" (Anne Bayefsky, The Washington Times, 2002/05/10)
"United Nation's War Against Israel" (David Harsanyi, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/05/06)
"The Overseers of Jenin" (Dov B. Fischer, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/13 issue)
"U.N. lynching prelude" (Arnold Beichman, The Washington Times, 2002/05/02)

April 2002
"The U.N. won't investigate the real tragedy" (Yossi Klein Halevi, Los Angeles Times, 2002/04/28)
"The UN and terrorism" (Shlomo Avineri, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/28)
"The U.N.'s Israel Obsession" (David Tell, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/06 issue)
"Why we shouldn't trust the UN" (Anne Bayefsky, The Globe and Mail, 2002/04/26)
"Cornelio Sommaruga [Kofi Annan's "fact-finder"] compared Shield of David to swastika" (IMRA, 2002/04/23)
"At the UN It’s Ok to Be Anti-Semitic" (Ruth Wisse, History News Network, 2002/04/22)
"International hypocrisy" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/22)
"The UN is running out of blind eyes to turn" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/04/20)
"U.N. vote undermines 'human rights'" (Jonah Goldberg, The Washington Times, 2002/04/19)
"The U.N.'s Refugees - The international body gives aid and comfort to terrorists" (Michael Rubin, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/04/18)
"U.N. to Jews: Drop Dead" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/04/16)
"Abolish UNRWA" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/15)

October 2001
"On the road from Durban racism and terror converge" (Shimon Samuels, Haaretz, 2001/10/10)
"Anti-Semitism at the United Nations: The World Conference Against Racism Becomes a World Conference For Racism" (Anne Bayefsky, Justice, from the Autumn 2001 issue)

"Let's quit the UN" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/02/08 issue)
"But amazingly the Anglican position has now been embraced by huge majorities of the British, Australian and American peoples: only the UN can confer moral respectability on the war.
I can't see it myself. UN support for the war presently depends on Washington giving certain understandings to France. Nothing very moral about that. Some of us think the Iraqi people should be allowed to decide for themselves whether, post-Saddam, they want anything to do with the dictator's best pal, M. Chirac. But no, apparently the moral position is to hole up in the smoke-filled rooms until Jacques comes around.
So I find myself in a position the pollsters don’t seem to have provided for: I support a US-led war against Saddam, but not a UN war. ...
So I say: go ahead, Jacques, make my day. Wield your veto, and let the Texan cowboy and his ever-expanding posse go it 'alone'. I don't know whether a haughty Gallic 'Non!' would be enough to finish off the UN once and for all — these institutions are like those nuke-proof cockroaches — but I do know that another UN-sanctioned war would enshrine the principle that only the UN can sanction war."

"The UN is fast becoming a threat to world peace" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/02/04)
"The United Nations has been a thorn in the side of the free world since the mid-1970s, when Unesco was taken over by unfree countries of the Third World and the General Assembly passed the "Zionism is racism" resolution in 1975. Even so, some of us argued in print that, so long as the UN contributed a 0.1 per cent chance to helping maintain world peace, it was a worthwhile investment. That argument has worn thin.
By now the United Nations, with its Human Rights Commission chaired by Libya, is not only irrelevant; it is coming perilously close to endangering world peace and security. The majority of its members are in breach of most tenets of the UN Charter and yet these same members are rewarded with plum UN assignments.
In March, Iraq will assume the chairmanship of the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The UN is rapidly becoming more of a force for harm than good.
Countries that actually practise and value the UN constitution should probably withdraw from it. ... Still, if America pulled out, an unreformed UN steered by such luminaries as Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson would likely collapse under its own irrelevant ineptitude or be forced to reveal itself as a collection of quasi-Marxist and Islamist dictatorships with a few whey-faced Europeans strutting about."

"U.N., R.I.P." (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/01/31)
Krauthammer on the fact that Iraq will chair the U.N. Disarmament Conference: "You can't parody the United Nations. It inhabits - no, it has constructed - a universe so Orwellian that, yes, Iraq is going to chair the May 12-June 27 session of the United Nations' single most important disarmament negotiating forum.
Iran will co-chair. ...
This is the United Nations. This is the institution whose support Democrats insist the United States must have to validate the legitimacy of its actions, such as the forcible disarming of Saddam Hussein. This is the institution to which they turn to test the worthiness of decisions taken by the president and Congress of the United States. It is a kind of moral idiocy: the greatest defender of freedom on the planet, enjoying the freest institutions, seeking its moral yardstick in the looking-glass values of a corrupt, perverse institutional relic." (See also: "Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference" (CNN.com, 2003/01/29))

"Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference" (CNN.com, 2003/01/29)
"Iraq will chair the United Nations' most important disarmament negotiating forum during the panel's May session. At the rules-minded United Nations, it's not a country's status with international weapons inspectors, but the letters in its name that determine which member state chairs the Conference on Disarmament. "The irony is overwhelming," a U.S. diplomat said."

"A Tyrants Club" (Claudia Rosett, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/22)
Rosett on a Human Rights Commission headed by Libya: "Putting Libya in a spot to set the U.N. agenda on human rights is not simply a defeat of justice and human dignity. It is a betrayal. It is a betrayal of all those brave souls, world-wide, who don't just talk about human rights but put their lives on the line to fight for them in countries where the price can be prison, exile or death. ... In the secret balloting among the 53 nations that currently sit on the Human Rights Commission, only three - the U.S., Canada and, reportedly, Guatemala - voted against Libya. Among the 33 governments that voted in favor of Libya were almost certainly the rulers of such civic sinkholes as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Cuba and Zimbabwe. Like the despots in Syria, Vietnam and China, these are folks who do not have the guts to face a genuine system of democracy back home, They wield their votes at the U.N. not as legitimate representatives of their own fellow citizens, but as two-faced members of the global club of tyrants, who hold sway through force and fear." (See also a list of all members: "Membership of the Commission on Human Rights" (Office for the Commission on Human Rights, 2003))

"Security Council Sells Out" (Thomas W. Murphy, USA in Review, 2003/01/21)
"Since 1996, Russia has ranked first among nations doing business with Iraq under the oil-for-food program with sales exceeding $4 billion, and Russia still hopes to collect the $12 billion in cold-war-era debt owed by Iraq. ... On December 8, 2002, Iraq sent both Russia and France a message when it cancelled the $4 billion contract with Russia's Lukoil to develop the West Qurna oil field. French oil firms, fearing they were next, began pressuring the French government to force the U.N. to resolve the Iraq crisis peacefully and Total Fina Elf demanded assurances its oil contacts in Iraq will be protected in the face of a possible U.S. attack. ...
On January 16, in direct contradiction of Blix's statements, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister met with the Iraqi government and praised "the positive spirit of cooperation from Iraq" on the weapons inspections. On January 17, the Russian oil company Lukoil "miraculously" announced that it had "persuaded" Baghdad to reverse the decision made on December 8th to cancel the contract with Lukoil to develop the giant West Qurna oil field. ...
What an amazing coincidence; Russia starts praising Iraqi compliance and criticizing any potential U.S. military action and the next day Iraq reverses its cancellation of the Lukoil contract and awards Russian firms additional contracts that could be worth up to $40 billion. Critics of possible U.S. military action against Iraq say its all about oil. They are partially right; they just got the "U.S. part" wrong. Its about Moscow and Paris wanting to protect their oil interests in Iraq."

"Libya elected to head UN rights body" (Richard Beeston, The Times, 2003/01/21)
"The credibility of the United Nations Human Rights Commission was thrown into question yesterday after Libya secured its chairmanship. Amid angry scenes at the commission’s headquarters in Geneva, Libya pulled off a diplomatic coup when Najat al-Hajjaji, its envoy, was voted the chairman by 33 out of the 53 states on the commission. The United States, Canada and Guatemala voted against Libya in the secret ballot. Seventeen countries, including Britain and most of the other Western nations, abstained. All the African, Asian and Arab states on the body are thought to have voted for Libya."

"Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?" (James Traub, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/11/17)
"The Security Council needs the United States in order for it to play a meaningful role in world affairs, but it appears as though the United States doesn't need the Security Council - or at least that many of the leading members of the Bush administration think that it doesn't. Secretary of State George Marshall had predicted in 1948 that should there be ''a complete lack of power equilibrium in the world, the United Nations cannot function successfully.'' And now, for the first time since the U.N.'s establishment, that state of affairs has come to pass. And so the resolution on Iraq has been the first test case of the new world of American supersupremacy. As Gelson Fonseca, the Brazilian ambassador to the U.N., put it archly, ''You have a situation of dual containment: you have to contain the United States; you have to contain Iraq.'' Containing the Bush administration has meant finding a middle ground between rubber-stamping American policy - and thus making the council superfluous - and blocking American policy, and thus provoking America to unilateral action, which of course would make the council irrelevant. Fonseca seemed to feel that containing the U.S. is a harder job than containing Iraq, and possibly a more important one."

"Who Elected the U.N.?" (Robert L. Bartley, OpinionJornal, 2002/10/07)
"A moral exemplar it most emphatically is not, however. Its moral standing and moral record deserve to be rehearsed just now. Whatever its pretensions, and however much they're cheered by the limp-minded, in fact the U.N. is the epicenter of world cynicism. Here idealistic rhetoric is routinely invoked on behalf of power politics and often sheer tyranny. In extenuation, it could scarcely be otherwise. ... Under the principle of "state sovereignty," each of these 191 nations has the same vote as any other. ... Another 59, with 24% of the world's population, were "partly free," with significant but abridged rights - in particular one-party political systems. The remaining 48 countries, or 35% of the world's people, were "not free," with no consent of the governed or respect for the individual. The United Nations is what you get when you have this melange send representatives, confine them in a hothouse on the East River, stir briskly, and tell them to go forth to solve the great issues of the world. In the political pushing and shoving, too, some nations follow Marquess of Queensbury rules and others do not. Left to its own devices, the cacophony produces a contorted consensus."

"The Myth Of 'U.N. Support'" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2002/10/04)
"Much of the leadership of the Democratic Party is in the thrall of the United Nations. War and peace hang in the balance. The world waits to see what the American people, in Congress assembled, will say. These Democrats say: Wait, we must find out what the United Nations says first. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, would enshrine such lunacy in legislation, no less. He would not even authorize the use of force without prior U.N. approval. ...
Now, the Security Council has five permanent members and 10 rotating members. Among the rotating members is Syria. How can any senator stand up and tell the American people that before deciding whether America goes to war against a rogue state such as Iraq, it needs to hear the "final recommendation" of Syria, a regime on the State Department's official terrorist list? ...
Okay. So we are not talking about these dots on the map. We must be talking about the five permanent members. The United States is one. Another is Britain, which supports us. That leaves three. So when you hear senators grandly demand the support of the "international community," this is what they mean: France, Russia and China. As I recently asked in this space, by what logic does the blessing of these countries bestow moral legitimacy on American action? China's leaders are the butchers of Tiananmen Square. France and Russia will decide the Iraq question based on the coldest calculation of their own national interest, meaning money and oil."

"Transnational Government" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/25)
The third installment of a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest": "Pertinent in the present context is the U.N. Convention on Refugees and Asylum, ratified in 1951, at a time when migration was not common and asylum rarely offered or sought. This piece of legislation obliges our governments to offer asylum to all who need it, and to give hospitality meanwhile to those who claim it. As a result of global mobility, some two million people arrive every year in Europe, ostensibly seeking asylum but in fact wishing to profit from the black economy, and in any case enjoying the obligatory hospitality required by the U.N. Convention. As a result, European states have lost control of their borders, have unknown numbers of illegal residents, and have black economies that grow larger by the week. Moreover, anyone who suggests that the U.N. Convention is anachronistic, politically dangerous, and socially destructive is subjected to intimidating criticism and risks being denounced as a "racist" or worse.
The political and economic advantages that lead people to seek asylum in the West are the result of territorial jurisdiction. Yet territorial jurisdictions can survive only if borders are controlled. Transnational legislation, acting together with the culture of repudiation, is therefore rapidly undermining the conditions that make Western freedoms durable. The effect of this on the politics of France and Holland is now evident to everyone. And when we find among the "asylum seekers" the vast majority of those Islamist cells that have grown up in London, Paris, and Hamburg, we begin to recognize just how much the political culture of the West is bent on a path of self-destruction." (See also: "The Personal State" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/24) and "The West and the Rest" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/23))

"Bush issues ultimatum to Iraq" (BBC News, 2002/09/12)
"Iraq is a "grave and gathering danger", President Bush has told world leaders in a keynote speech at the United Nations. He issued one last chance to Iraq to comply with UN resolutions - or face America's military might. ... Mr Bush said Saddam Hussein had proved his contempt for the United Nations and listed all the UN resolutions he considered Iraq to have ignored or broken. "By his cruelties... Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself," he said. ... He accused Saddam Hussein of allowing members of Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network to be based in Iraq. "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material," he said." (See also: "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" (The White House, 2002/09/12), a document with examples of Saddam Hussein's defiance of the United Nations, and "President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly" (George W. Bush, The White House, 2002/09/12): "My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council on a new resolution to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately and decisively to hold Iraq to account. The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.")

"Since Durban: An entrenchment of hatred" (Anne Bayefsky, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/12)
"The final document of the Summit speaks of "massive institutionalized human rights violations through the acts of...apartheid in the occupied territories of the Palestinians" and calls "on business worldwide to divest from the Israeli economy..." After it became clear Israel was to be the only nation criticized in this global gathering, the United States and Israel left the government conference. The final Durban Declaration proclaims the Palestinian people to be victims of Israeli racism. FOR THE UN, post-Durban was a time of no regrets. ... The Commission resolution of April 2002, injects Durban into every pore of the UN system. In its words, it calls upon "all relevant organs, organizations and bodies of the United Nations system to become involved in the follow-up to the World Conference Against Racism...and invites specialized agencies and related organizations of the United Nations system to...adjust...their activities, programs and...strategies to implement and follow-up the Durban Declaration..." ... In fact, to be specific in the words of the NGO Declaration, [Amnesty International] and other NGOs pledged to "call for the reinstitution of UN resolution 3379 determining the practices of Zionism as racist practices," and to "call upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state." ... The Durban phenomenon is one of substituting the voices of alleged victims, and the false consensus of UN mob-rule, for universal standards. The disservice to the real cause of human rights could not be more fundamental." (See also: "Anti-Semitism at the United Nations: The World Conference Against Racism Becomes a World Conference For Racism" (Justice, from the Autumn 2001 issue))

"Stand up for human rights" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/08/22)
An editorial on the election of Libya as the next head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights: "Libya has one of the poorest human rights records in the world. Freedom House, the renowned organization that rates relative freedom around the world, gives Libya the lowest possible score on both political liberties and civil rights. ... According to the official US report, Libya's torture methods reportedly include "chaining to a wall for hours; clubbing; applying electric shock; applying corkscrews to the back; pouring lemon juice in open wounds; breaking fingers and allowing the joints to heal without medical care; suffocating with plastic bags; depriving of food and water; hanging by the wrists; suspending from a pole inserted between the knees and elbows; burning with cigarettes; attacking with dogs; and beating on the soles of the feet." ... As much as Libya's election is an embarrassment to the UN and a setback to the cause of human rights, the choice is most damning to Africa itself. ... In a sense, it is the democracies that should be most ashamed of themselves, because they do not stand up more forthrightly for their own values. By meekly going along as dictators tear down the very notion of human rights, the democracies do worse than betray themselves, they betray the billions who do not enjoy such freedoms and depend on the free and powerful to speak for them." (See also: "Gadaffi To Head Human Rights Body" (Sky News, 2002/08/19))

"Gadaffi To Head Human Rights Body" (Sky News, 2002/08/19)
Found via Right Wing News: "Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi is to head an international watchdog on human rights. Libya is to be elected chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights - despite its links with terrorism and torture. The move sparked a storm of controversy as it emerged British officials did nothing to block the appointment. Libyan terrorists were responsible for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people, and Gadaffi's regime has been criticised for violence against its own people. Human rights groups and Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith united to criticise the appointment. But a Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "Our policy is to engage constructively with Libya, rather than isolate them." Gadaffi's one-year term begins next March."

"Arabs Ignore Palestinians' Plight" (Marc Ginsberg, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/08/11)
"To those who genuinely care about the fate of the Palestinian people it is surely a disgrace that the U.N. has played into the hands of Arab governments and the Palestinian Authority. Insisting that the refugee camps remain temporary shelters ensures that Arafat's demands for the right of return are not undermined. It has been an exercise of the most cynical sort - using those whose cause is championed as political pawns. Any reasonable attempts to develop long-range rehabilitation programs or to improve the conditions of these camps have been consistently thwarted by the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority. It is not by accident that the infamous Jenin refugee camp - the site of so much recent controversy - gave birth to at least 28 suicide bombers. The inhumanness of these camps and the endless, hopeless exile create fertile recruiting grounds for extremist groups."

"The UN on the Loose" (AEI/Commentary, Joshua Muravchik, 2002/08/08)
Muravchik on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights 58th annual meeting, which was the first time the United States did not participate: "None of the resolution's supporters explained why the commission should deplore attacks on Muslims in particular at a time when, in Europe, synagogues were being burned, Jewish cemeteries vandalized, and Jews assaulted on a daily basis - almost always by Muslim immigrants. Nor did they say why it was erroneous to associate Islam with terrorism and human-rights violations when about two-thirds of the terrorist groups named in the State Department's annual report on the subject are Islamic and when the world's predominantly Muslim states duster together at the bottom of Freedom House's survey of civil and political liberty. But the hypocrisy in the commission's concerns about "defamation" of the Islamic world were as nothing compared to its treatment of Israel. ... The coup de grace of the anti-Israel resolutions "affirmed the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist the Israeli occupation," adding that "by so doing, the Palestinian people is fulfilling ... one of the goals and purposes of the United Nations." To dispel any doubt about the import of the term "resist," the resolution invoked the authority of General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of December 3, 1982. Opposed at the time by both the U.S. and the Europeans, this proclaims "the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples against foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle". As everyone understood then and now, the last six words mean terrorism. This blatant sanction of terrorism was approved by a vote of 40 to five, with seven abstentions. Two of the nine EU members of the commission, Britain and Germany, voted against the resolution, as did Canada, Guatemala, and the Czech Republic. One, Italy, was among the abstainers, as were Japan and Poland. The other six EU members - France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Austria - voted for it."

"Human 'Wrongs'" (Gerald M. Steinberg, National Review, 2002/07/25)
"The accidental deaths of a number of Palestinian children resulting from the Israeli strike against the building in which Hamas terror leader Salah Shehadeh took refuge in the middle of Gaza City was a tragic error. But from the chorus, composed of the self-styled "international community" - the U.N., the media, human-rights NGOs, and European desk-wise diplomats - Israel's efforts to defend itself constitute a moral crime of the gravest magnitude. If anyone needed further evidence of the ethical depravity of this chorus, these condemnations provide it. ... The inability to distinguish between aggressors, who show no concern for human life, and the defenders, whose goal is to preserve the sanctity of these lives, constitutes the fundamental moral failure of our time. The same chorus kicked in automatically when allied bombs went astray in the war against Saddam Hussein (i.e. when civilians housed below a military facility were killed); in Serbia in the effort to defend Kosovo against Milosevic; and again in Afghanistan following bin Laden's mega-terror attacks on September 11. ... In each of these cases, the moral burden of the loss of innocent lives falls directly on the terrorists and their supporters, including those who provide ideological support, funds, and cover."

"The Human Wrongs Commission" (Joshua Muravchik, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/25)
"When Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and China serve on the commission, they are supposed to assess human-rights issues honestly. This never happens, of course, but it is considered retrograde to say so. Perhaps that is because, with its noble intentions and its execrable record, the human-rights commission provides as vivid an illustration as one could want of the wishful thinking behind the very idea of the United Nations. ... The lesson in all of this is the wisdom of American unilateralism, and the folly of submitting to any new accretion of international treaties and organizations or any further role for the UN in Middle East peace efforts. Independent American action need not be a token of superpower arrogance or high-handedness. It is much more a matter of doing what we alone have both the power and the heart to do - namely, to inject a modicum of principle into the 'community of nations.'"

"The UN Human Rights Agenda: A Strategy of Diversion" (Anne Bayefsky, Justice, from the June 2002 issue)
"UN intergovernmental human rights machinery is not keen on specifics. Its members include some of the most notorious human rights violators in the world today: China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Those countries prefer devoting UN funds, (22% of which are from the United States), to criticizing Israel - lest attention wander too close to home. 11 The strategy of diversion has been wildly successful. Fifteen percent of Commission time and thirty percent of country-specific resolutions over thirty years are directed at this one state. ... The Asian group (including China and the bulk of Muslim states) has no regional human rights system. These states strenuously avoid international human rights scrutiny and are largely successful in their efforts. No resolution has ever been passed at the UN Human Rights Commission concerning China or Syria, for example." (Note: This article was orginally published in The New York Times ("Ending Bias in the Human Rights System" (Anne Bayefsky, The New York Times, 2002/05/22)), but "editorial demands resulted in the submission of six new drafts, four additional drafts with smaller changes and corrections, seven drafts from the editors and 6 hours of editing by telephone." Justice covers the changes made under the heading "All the news that's fit to print?")

"Ending Bias in the Human Rights System" (Anne Bayefsky, The New York Times, 2002/05/22)
"Each year more than 100,000 letters about human rights violations are addressed to the United Nations. ... In response, the annual Human Rights Commission session, which ended last month, was able to agree on resolutions concerning the conduct of just 11 of the 189 member states. This is not uncommon because in almost all cases commission members seek to avoid directly criticizing states with human rights problems, frequently by focusing on Israel, a state that, according to analysis of summary records, has for over 30 years occupied 15 percent of commission time and has been the subject of a third of country-specific resolutions. ... But there are fewer than 100 cases registered by this system annually. Not one has been registered from Chad or Somalia, for example, and just a couple from Algeria and Angola. The treaty body on women's rights, which has been empowered to receive complaints for the past year and a half, has still not registered a single case."

"What about anti-Semitism?" (Anne Bayefsky, The Washington Times, 2002/05/10)
"Yasser Arafat wasn't out on the streets courting the sympathy of the world's media for five minutes before he violated international law. "Israelis are Nazis and racists," he said. Incitement to racial hatred is a violation of the world's first major human rights treaty - the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the most basic standards of human dignity. For Mr. Arafat and his Middle East agenda, however, racism is a central weapon of war. ... Mr. Arafat, his agents and soul-mates, whether it be Fatah, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, operate a two-part strategy. First, demonize the enemy as a racist. Second, advocate and justify eliminating that enemy by armed struggle, including suicide bombing. The United Nations has proved to be the ideal breeding ground for this one-two punch. At the U.N. World Conference "Against" Racism in Durban last August, Palestinian and Arab participants succeeded in including in the final declaration the conclusion that Palestinians were victims of Israeli racism. Jewish delegates to the Durban non-governmental forum, of which I was one, saw our voices silenced and replaced by the condemnation of Israel as an apartheid state. ... The United Nations is a propaganda machine for the Palestinian cause, as any reading of the voluminous material produced by the U.N. Division for Palestinian Rights will reveal. The EU readily sacrificed Israel in Durban after the United States walked out."

"United Nation's War Against Israel" (David Harsanyi, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/05/06)
"Prior to the Madrid Conference in 1991, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir commissioned an analysis of U.N. voting towards Israel. The results are not surprising. From 1967 to 1988 the security passed 88 resolutions directly against Israel, zero resolutions criticized or opposed the actions or perceived interests of an Arab state or body, including the PLO. During that span, Israel was "condemned" 49 times, Arab countries not once. In the General Assembly, 429 anti-Israel resolutions were passed in that span. Israel was "condemned" 321 times. Arab nations? Not once. The U.N. Human Rights Commission (it really takes a lot of self-control not to put facetious quotation marks around all U.N. titles) now includes Zimbabwe, China, Ukraine, Algeria, Bahrain, Congo, Libya, Sudan, Russia, Syria, Uganda and Vietnam – all strongholds of civil liberty. This April, the commission passed a pro-terrorist resolution condoning "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. Six European Union members joined the 57 nations of the Islamic Conference in legitimizing suicide bombers. ... Of all condemnations by the commission, 26 percent single out Israel. Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia evidently possess spotless human rights records, as they have been immune to denunciation." (The original link is down, but the article can be found here: "United Nation's War Against Israel" (David Harsanyi, Capitalism Magazine, 2002/05/27))

"The Overseers of Jenin" (Dov B. Fischer, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/13 issue)
"For Americans, perhaps our attention should focus more on underlying questions: Why is the United Nations running refugee camps for people who claim to be living in their own land? How could a refugee camp under U.N. auspices become a world center for recruiting and training suicide bombers? And why is the United States essentially bankrolling these camps when wealthy Arab oil sheikhdoms barely contribute? ... It also is odd that a "refugee camp" under United Nations auspices has emerged as a terror center where Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorists ran wild, stocking arms, building bomb-making factories, and recruiting and training children educated at UNRWA schools to detonate themselves. Perhaps oddest of all is the American role as chief bankroller. With Washington now scouring its outlays in the face of projected budget deficits, it is remarkable that America continues to pump scores of millions into a U.N. program that has institutionalized dependency among four generations of Arabs - while the oil princes barely contribute. It is remarkable, too, that the refugees and their descendants are still living in squalor half a century after the helping hand first was extended."

"U.N. lynching prelude" (Arnold Beichman, The Washington Times, 2002/05/02)
"Of the 190 countries in the United Nations only one, Israel, has been singled out by a majority of the U.N. membership for extinction. I will document this statement with a catalogue of actions taken by the U.N. in the half-century of the its existence that will demonstrate: First, that no other U.N. member state has ever been so targeted; yes, not even apartheid South Africa. Second, no other U.N. member state has had its legitimacy so consistently questioned. Third, no other U.N. member state has been denied its right to self-defense against deadly attacks against its citizens."

"The U.N. won't investigate the real tragedy" (Yossi Klein Halevi, Los Angeles Times, 2002/04/28)
"The commission won't be investigating how the Palestinian Authority, established and lavishly funded by the international community, abused its sponsors' trust by turning Jenin and other West Bank towns into centers for suicide bomb factories. ... The commission won't be investigating how donor nations, especially those of the European Union, allowed the Palestinian Authority to sustain a terrorist war for the last 19 months, lavishing funds on a corrupt regime that devotes its budget to building bomb factories rather than hospitals and schools. ... The commission won't be investigating why much of the world's media rushed to proclaim a massacre in Jenin without evidence, and then appeared disappointed not to find mass graves beneath Jenin's rubble. Neither will the commission be investigating itself to expose how the U.N. has been hijacked by a coalition of international dictatorships that have singled out Israel, which struggles to maintain democratic norms under permanent siege, as the world body's symbol of evil. ... The commission won't be investigating the real tragedy: how the U.N. squandered the dream of a united humanity animated by justice - a dream first offered by the prophets of ancient Israel - and instead joined the unholy coalition of Islamic fundamentalists, far-left moralizers and far-right neofascists in again targeting the Jewish people."

"The UN and terrorism" (Shlomo Avineri, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/28)
"The United Nation group should investigate something else as well - the UN complicity in the way terrorism developed at the Jenin refugee camp and at other Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. Because, what has been forgotten in the barrage of accusations and counter-claims is that the Jenin refugee camp is run - as are all Palestinian refugee camps - by UNWRA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. It has been a long-standing scandal that this UN agency has toed the Arab line that the refugees camps should remain temporary shelters, so as not to undermine the claims of the 1948 refugees to refugee status and to their demand to return to Israel proper. ... But there is a deeper issue: all refugee camp officials - from directors of the camps, through the camp bureaucracy and down to teachers in the schools - are UN employees. Most of them are Palestinians. Is it possible for a camp like Jenin to become a center for terrorists and suicide bombers without the knowledge, connivance or even active participation of the UN-employed camp bureaucracy - Palestinians or expatriates? ... Unless the UN takes some robust action to distance itself, its agencies and its employees from involvement in terrorism, it is indeed in a morally ambiguous and unacceptable position. In Bosnia it was complicit in mass murder; in the Palestinian camps it has, for years, at least been passively acquiescing in its employees' involvement in terrorism."

"The U.N.'s Israel Obsession" (David Tell, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/06 issue)
"UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from fall through spring each year, children are taught that all of "Palestine," from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them. ... UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to do double duty as munitions dumps. UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and counterfeit currency factories are housed in the public shelters it has constructed in Jenin. UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own administrative offices in Jenin are festooned with graffiti celebrating some of the world's most notorious terrorist organizations. Or how some of the world's most notorious terrorists might have found their way onto the agency's payroll - to the point where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, extreme even in the context of Palestinian extremism, now openly controls the UNRWA workers' union. This same United Nations, the blood of Israeli civilians still wet on its hands, now dares to question the morality of a modest, defensive, and long-overdue Israeli reprisal? In curricular materials published by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education, "Objective Five" for high school history teachers reads as follows: "The student will understand why the people of the world hate the Jews." It is a question for the ages. Zionism may no longer be racism at the United Nations. But anti-Semitism is forever."

"Why we shouldn't trust the UN" (Anne Bayefsky, The Globe and Mail, 2002/04/26)
"Almost 30 per cent of UN Human Rights Commission resolutions on specific states over a 35-year period are on Israel alone. Of 10 emergency special sessions in the history of the General Assembly, six have concerned Israel. The UN currently operates three mechanisms focused only on Israel: a Special Rapporteur since 1993, a Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting Human Rights since 1968 that issues three reports a year, and a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, established in 1975 on the same day the General Assembly passed the Zionism-is-racism resolution and still producing annual reports. Each one of these UN bodies refuses to document the range of human-rights abuses by the Palestinian Authority. ... Israel is the only UN member not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies. So while membership of the UN Human Rights Commission now includes Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Syria - four of the seven states designated as state sponsors of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department - Israel cannot even be a candidate. ... At the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, "anti-Semitism" was omitted from the final declaration because the chair of the drafting committee said it was too controversial. ... The subsequent racism discussion at the General Assembly in February deleted reference to "anti-Semitism" as a specific concern of the UN Third Decade to Combat Racism."

"Cornelio Sommaruga [Kofi Annan's "fact-finder"] compared Shield of David to swastika" (IMRA, 2002/04/23)
The former head of the International Red Cross, Cornelio Sommaruga, is appointed to the UN inquiry team which will probe events at the refugee camp in Jenin. Here's an indication of how "objective" he will be, taken from a column by Charles Krauthammer: "[The International Red Cross] grants full and honored membership to everyone, including such benefactors of humanity as North Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq. But it deliberately excludes Israel's MDA which, for example, sent emergency workers to our bombed-out embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Why? ... The reasons are obvious, crass and political. The Arab states don't want it and the rest of the world is too craven to cross them. Excluding the MDA is part of their larger campaign to ostracize Israel worldwide. ... But [Healy] is trying to do something about the outrageous exclusion of Israel from the community of Red Cross federations. And she has met with the usual reaction: hostility and anger from a cozy club not accustomed to having its mendacity and cynicism challenged. Particularly upset was Cornelio Sommaruga, then president of the ICRC. In a private meeting after her speech, and in the presence of several witnesses, he said to Healy: 'If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?'" (See also: "Red Cross Snub" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2000/03/24))

"At the UN It’s Ok to Be Anti-Semitic" (Ruth Wisse, History News Network, 2002/04/22)
"What Annan should have been seeking to end is the pernicious role of the U.N. as instigator and abettor of a possible international conflagration. The U.N.'s assault on Israel, in direct violation of its Charter, now rivals even the Jew-hating indoctrination that preceded World War II. ... In allowing the Arab countries to internationalize their war against the Jewish State, the United Nations has endangered Jews in new ways. Whereas earlier anti-Semitism could be identified with its evil sponsors and morally, if not militarily, countered, the United Nations lends its presumed legitimacy and prestige to anti-Semitism. ... By allowing Arab countries to conscript the U.N. for their war against the Jewish state, the democracies advertised the weakness of their system. Every advantage that Arabs have gained over Israel at the U.N. proclaims the strength of autocracies and dictatorships over liberal democracy. This lesson is reinforced every time there is a condemnation of the Jewish state."

"International hypocrisy" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/22)
"In response, Israel has stated that it will cooperate with a UN team because it has nothing to hide, but that the team should not include Larsen, UN Human Rights Commission chief Mary Robinson, or UN Relief and Works Agency Commissioner-General Peter Hansen. It should surprise no one that Israel singled out these three officials, because each has long ago given up any pretense of objectivity between Israel and the Palestinians. ... Not to be out done by his colleagues, Hansen did not bother restraining himself, "It was hell in the camp, and we will not exaggerate if we say that a massacre was carried out there... Having seen the reality with my own eyes, I cannot call what happened there by any other name." ... The miasma of international hypocrisy is running so thick that Israel should consider wearing its pariah status as a badge of honor."

"The UN is running out of blind eyes to turn" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/04/20)
"So you can understand why the UN's head man, Mr Roed-Larsen, would rather talk about "unacceptable" Israeli conduct than why his "refugee" camp (funded by British taxpayers) is, in fact, a bomb factory with on-site demonstration facilities. Mr Roed-Larsen's operation is a large part of the problem in the region. ... But it beggars belief that officials on the ground in the UN-managed camp weren't aware of the scale of terrorist activities: there are only so many blind eyes you can turn. That's what's "horrific beyond belief": that the UN is complicit in terrorism. ... In Jenin, it's the UN that breeds "hopelessness" and "frustration", and enables and shelters terrorism. There was no massacre, just the natural consequence of the UN's foetid administration: if you let your charges build a bomb factory, don't be surprised if it blows up."

"U.N. vote undermines 'human rights'" (Jonah Goldberg, The Washington Times, 2002/04/19)
"On Monday, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights voted to condemn Israel. This is hardly news. The United Nations has been condemning Israel with the regularity of a metronome for decades. But even for the United Nations this was a particularly scandalous vote, since language in the resolution was widely perceived to be condoning terrorism. Even more outrageous, several European nations, including France and Belgium, supported the measure. ... There are close to 60 Muslim nations represented in the United Nations. With the exception of Turkey, there's not a real democracy in the bunch. And yet, they've all mastered the language of the West, calling for self-determination, human rights and describing Yasser Arafat as an elected leader while calling Israel a terrorist regime. And they all get votes in the United Nations. If Israel's defenders are right when they say it is on the frontlines in the war on terrorism – and I think they are – then Israel's experience with the U.N. should concern us all."

"The U.N.'s Refugees - The international body gives aid and comfort to terrorists" (Michael Rubin, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/04/18)
"On Monday, France, Belgium and four other European Union members endorsed a U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution condoning "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. Hence, six EU members and the commission now join the 57 nations of the Islamic Conference in legitimizing suicide bombers. ... UNRWA operates 27 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and another 32 camps in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. ... Confronted with evidence of illegal Palestinian mines, mortars and missiles, no U.N. official questioned how it was that bomb factories could exist in U.N.-managed refugee camps. Either the U.N. officials were unaware of the bomb factories - which would suggest utter incompetence - or, more likely, the U.N. employees simply turned a blind eye. ... Perhaps Mr. Annan can be forgiven for not being aware that U.N.-funded refugee camps housed arms factories, or for allowing U.N. complicity in terror cover-ups in Lebanon and Iraq. But in a Middle East where perception is more important than reality, Mr. Annan's silence is deafening and his moral equivalency is interpreted as a green light for terror. The main casualty is U.N. credibility."

"U.N. to Jews: Drop Dead" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/04/16)
"The United Nations Human Rights Commission has endorsed Palestinian terrorism and denounced Israel for defending itself, Canada's National Post reports. By a 40-5 vote, the commission approved a resolution approving of "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. The resolution makes no exception for terrorism. Only Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany and Guatemala voted against the resolution. Six European countries - Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden - endorsed the murder of Jews. Italy abstained. .... The Toronto Globe and Mail notes that the resolution condemned "mass killing" by Israel during Operation Defensive Shield - and never mind the lack of evidence that any such killing took place. ... It's possible that recovery efforts will uncover evidence of a massacre, but the U.N. commission vote makes clear the Austrians, Belgians, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedes regard Jews as guilty until proven innocent - if then." (See also: "UN backs Palestinian violence" (Steven Edwards, National Post, 2002/04/16): "Alfred Moses, a former United States ambassador to the commission and now chairman of UN Watch, a monitoring group, was more blunt. "A vote in favour of this resolution is a vote for Palestinian terrorism," he said. "An abstention suggests ambivalence toward terror. Any country that condones - or is indifferent to - the murder of Israeli civilians in markets, on buses and in cafés has lost any moral standing to criticize Israel's human rights record." And "Canada votes against UN resolution condemning 'mass killings' by Israel" (The Globe and Mail, 2002/04/16): "The resolution "strongly condemns the war launched by the Israeli army against Palestinian towns and (refugee) camps, which has resulted so far in the death of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children.")

"Abolish UNRWA" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/15)
"As if this weren't bad enough, UNRWA has now become a de facto accomplice in terrorism. Food storage areas have been allowed to become munitions' depots and weapons' factories, as the incursion last month into the Balata refugee camp showed. And UN administrators have ceded effective control of the camps to Palestinian gunmen - a fact not lost on the IDF as it attempts to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Operation Defensive Shield."

"On the road from Durban racism and terror converge" (Shimon Samuels, Haaretz, 2001/10/10)
"The vacuum of post-Communism was filled by a coalition of so-called "anti-globalization" human rights and Islamic groups that hold fundamentalist world views and a pathological contempt for America and those who share its values. ... ...the moral justifiers [of hate] exposed themselves in the Durban process, for it was here that "anti-racism" and terrorism converged, endorsed by positions of the principal human rights organizations. ... So-called distinctions drawn between "anti-Zionism" and "anti-Semitism" were forever effaced when "Third World" demonstrators on Friday afternoon forced the closure of the Jewish Center, while distributing "The Protocols of Zion" chanting "Hitler didn't finish the job." ... The United States and Israel drew a red line, by their departure, for Europeans, Canadians and Australians to belatedly enter the breach and fend off Islamo-Arab extremism in the final documents. But the atmosphere had been poisoned and deep, almost geological, hate-lines exposed." (See also: "Anti-Semitism at the United Nations: The World Conference Against Racism Becomes a World Conference For Racism" (Anne Bayefsky, Justice, from the Autumn 2001 issue))

"Anti-Semitism at the United Nations: The World Conference Against Racism Becomes a World Conference For Racism" (Anne Bayefsky, Justice, from the Autumn 2001 issue)
With three articles on The Durban Conference, including Bayefsky's address at the Commission on Anti-Semitism in Durban: "This Conference is supposed to be about combating racism. Instead it has been seized by those who foment it. It has become a global forum for racism. A racist anti-racism conference. ... Anti-Semitism is not merely an historical phenomenon. One need only come to the World Conference on Racism to watch it metastasize. In the draft documents of both the NGO and Government Conference:
...
• Language likening the Jewish State to an apartheid regime thereby criminalizing its purpose and its very essence.
• Language containing wild accusations - such as genocide or ethnic cleansing - directed only to Israel, virtually ignoring the other 190 States of the UN.
... Unfortunately, the UN has laid the groundwork for such an assault for decades. ... And where are the world's leaders of civil society? Where are the NGOs who claim anti-racism is their cri de couer? Silencing speakers who remind them of the victims of anti-Semitism in all its forms as in meetings yesterday? Donning free T-shirts ridiculing Jewish self-determination? Harassing Jewish registrants to this Conference?"

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Articles of the week

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Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

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"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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