PM slams Rights Council over 'fact finding' mission

Netanyahu calls UN Council "hypocritical" for voting 36 to 1 to create fact-finding mission over settlements.

By HERB KEINON
United Nations HQ in New York (photo credit: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
United Nations HQ in New York
(photo credit: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
Israeli reacted furiously Thursday to a UN Human rights Council decision to send a fact finding mission to the West Bank and east Jerusalem settlements, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu saying that council is "hypocritical" and should be "ashamed of itself."
By a vote of 36 – 1, with 10 abstentions, the council decided to establish an international fact finding mission to the settlements. Only the US voted against.
"This is a council that should be ashamed of itself," Netanyahu said. "The UN Human Rights Council has nothing to do with human rights." He said the body has an automatic anti-Israel majority.
Netanyahu said that the council has up until today passed 91 resolutions, 39 of them dealing with Israel, three with Syria, and one with Iran.
One only had to listen to the way the Syrian representative on the council talked about human rights Thursday to realize how cut off from reality the Council is, Netanyahu said. He said that another indication of how distant the council is from human rights is that this week it hosted an activist from Hamas, an organization whose ideology is based on "the murder of civilians."