The Obama administration’s political and financial backing of the UN Human
Rights Council resulted in another win for Hamas on Friday, June 22 in Geneva. A
Hamas-affiliated organization and its supporters held an “informal parallel
meeting” promoting the destruction of the Jewish state at the UN’s Palais des
Nations.
The event was advertised on the UN website and listed on an
official UN document headlined “Human Rights Council, twentieth session, 18 June
– 06 July 2012.”
Opening week of the Council’s latest session, therefore,
featured both friends of Hamas sporting UN passes and championing an end to a
Jewish state, and Obama’s Ambassador (and former California fundraiser) Eileen
Donahoe painting the Council as the place to be to promote and protect human
rights.
In recent months, top Israeli officials have pleaded with their
US counterparts to end American legitimization of the Council in light of its
virulently anti-Israel record. In fact, this is the first Council session in
which Israel’s observer seat is empty. Instead, the Obama administration has
doubled-down on its support for the UN body and continues to trumpet its
decision to seek a second term on the Council at elections this
fall.
Hamas and company have now calibrated team Obama’s evident
priorities to their advantage.
One of Friday’s three speakers was Sameh
Habeeb, head of the media department of the “Palestinian Return Centre.” The
event flyer, which clearly identified the Center as a “coorganizer” and named
its representative as a speaker, was authorized to be posted at the UN
conference room and distributed on UN NGO-reserved tables. And yet, as the Meir
Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has documented, the
Palestinian Return Centre is one of the central institutions through which Hamas
operates in Britain.
Here is some of what Habeeb had to say while
speaking in a UN room, at a UN-provided microphone, at a UN-advertised event
associated with the UN’s top human rights body: “In 1947, 1948 and 1949 the
Palestinian refugees were ethnically cleansed by the Israeli gangs.... Some Arab
armies came to Palestine to fight the Zionist project, which came from all over
Europe to take over Palestine and to make it as a national home for the Jews,
although it was always the national home for the Palestinians for thousands and
thousands of years.”
Habeeb, a well-known radical and “one state
solution” campaigner, didn’t come alone. Various publications of his Palestinian
Return Center were made readily available on UN premises.
There was the
pamphlet with this bigoted diatribe: “a racist ideology is inherent in political
Zionism and... is being implemented as a political project by the state of
Israel.
Political Zionism idealizes and advances a racist and
chauvinistic... religion and nationalism.”
And there was the map with the
word “Palestine” splashed across the entirety of what is now Israel. Advocating
the elimination of a UN member state, the most elementary violation of the UN
Charter, is evidently acceptable literature in the belly of the UN human rights
beast.
A third handout, entitled “Apartheid against Palestinians,”
analogized Israelis to Nazis: “The Israeli regime is based on... race and
religious supremacy... Modern nation states formed through these corrosive
ideals scarred the 20th century, including in Germany and the South African
apartheid regime.”
This is the second time in two consecutive sessions of
the Human Rights Council that Hamas and its messengers have been allowed into
the UN fold. At the last session of the Council in March, a Hamas member of the
Palestinian Legislative Council, Ismail al- Ashqar, was given a UN pass, seated
in a UN room at the invitation of a UN-accredited NGO, and permitted to speak at
another Council “side-event.” Though UN organizers issued the standard
disclaimer about what is said during such events, applications to hold any such
meeting are first vetted and approved by UN staff.
The raft of
anti-Israel informal meetings during Human Rights Council sessions which have
been approved, and the nonstop Israel-bashing emanating from the Council itself,
are not mere ships passing in the night. Forty-one percent of all the
resolutions and decisions of the Council condemning a specific state have been
directed at just one country among all 193 UN members, namely,
Israel.
Nevertheless, today the UN Human Rights Council’s lead promoter
is President Obama.
As November’s election fast approaches, UN Ambassador
Susan Rice has been commissioned to explain the troubling disconnect with
American values to disaffected voters.
At a synagogue in Boca Raton,
Florida last month, Rice lectured: the administration had made “meaningful
progress... at the Human Rights Council.” That is, some are more equal than
others. She also tried this contortion: “there’s an important distinction to
understand. Israel gets singled out at the UN, not by the UN. When Israel gets
marginalized and maligned, it’s not usually because of the UN Secretariat....
It’s usually because of decisions by individual member states.”
Actually,
the decisions to facilitate public speeches and the distribution of documents by
Hamas and its cohorts alongside the Human Rights Council were made by the UN
Secretariat. And the point is, UN bodies empower and magnify the pernicious
decisions of their members.
In what is bound to become standard Democrat
fare in the coming months, Rice summed up her UN pep talk this way: “Efforts to
chip away at Israel’s legitimacy have been met with the unflinching opposition
of the United States.”
Except with Obama’s representative settled
comfortably into her Council digs while the Israeli chair lies vacant, it is
obvious to all that this White House has blinked.
The writer is the
director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
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