Merriam-Webster defines the term “kangaroo court” as “a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted.” There is no more apt term for the United Nations’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) against Israel, which has long dispensed with any pretense of being fair, impartial, or objective. So why did CNN’s Niamh Kennedy and Muhammad Darwish treat the COI as if its conclusions carried any respectability?
In their October 11 article, “UN inquiry accuses Israel of ‘crime of extermination’ through deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health care system,” Kennedy and Darwish uncritically amplify the COI’s latest report. As the headline indicates, the commissioners leveled serious allegations toward Israel. Yet nowhere in the article are readers warned about the many reasons to treat the COI’s claims with great skepticism.
One major reason: all three commissioners have histories of antisemitism. Most infamously, while serving as commissioner, Miloon Kothari complained about “social media that is controlled largely by…the Jewish lobby.” COI Chairwoman Navi Pillay, who has a long history of running cover for antisemitism, refused to denounce Kothari’s remark. Condemnations of the incident subsequently poured in from member states and even UN officials.
Allowing antisemites to sit in judgment of the world’s only Jewish state is contempt for truth and justice.
True to form, the commissioners have acted with disdain for fairness and accuracy. Prof. Anne Bayefsky detailed much of this at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs: the COI has staged hearings, arbitrarily dismissed submissions of evidence, omitted testimony, and “ravag[ed] the basics of due process.” CAMERA, too, has addressed this, exposing the COI’s low standard of proof, lack of transparency, and reliance on activist sources.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics instructs journalists to “[i]dentify sources clearly,” reasoning that “[t]he public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.” So why is this information completely absent in Kennedy and Darwish’s article?