On March 26th, the UN’s notorious Human Rights Council appointed Richard Falk as its “Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories” and added insult to injury by appointing another rabidly anti-Israel zealot, Jean Ziegler, as one of the Council’s 18-member advisory committee members. Both Falk and Ziegler have compared Israelis to Nazis. These appointments take place amid UN preparations for the Durban II World Conference Against Racism, scheduled for early 2009.
Durban II’s Planning Committee chairperson is Libya’s Qaddafi and its vice chairperson is Iran’s Ahmadinejad. That’s right, the Conference Against Racism is being planned by a genocidal Muslim supremacist who called for the Jewish State to be “wiped off the map.” 2001’s Durban Conference was a hate-fest against Israel, and Durban II’s stated goal is to “further the Durban I Declaration,” which essentially charged only Israel with racism.
Also alarming, Muslim states have just pushed through a resolution in the Human Rights Council to monitor individuals and the media for negative comment about Islam. According to Warren W. Tichenor, the US Ambassador to the Council meeting in Geneva: “The resolution adopted attempts to legitimize the criminalization of expression.”
Despite these outrageous developments by the UN, there has been only sporadic coverage in major media informing the public about the UN’s assault on Western values, Israel and the UN’s own mandate to prevent genocide and uphold individual rights.
UN Human Rights Council Votes to Have Foxes Watch the Henhouse
Richard Falk, the newly appointed rapporteur, is to monitor and report on alleged violations of international law only by Israel. There is no such rapporteur appointed by the UN to report on the numerous war crimes and violations of international law by the Palestinians.
Unfortunately, Falk is far from being an objective professional:
• In a July 2007 essay, “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” Falk likened Israelis to Nazis.
• Falk signed the www.911Truth.org petition alleging that “people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” He also wrote the foreword to a 9/11 conspiracy-theory book.
For other irresponsible quotations of Falk’s, click here.
Jean Ziegler, the newly appointed advisory committee member to the UN Human Rights Council, has a long record of anti-Israel zealotry. For details from UN Watch, click here. There you will find an open letter signed by Professor Irwin Cotler and others, in which they note Zeigler’s:
• abuse of his former position as “UN special rapporteur on the right to food” to virtually ignore “the world’s most starving populations, instead focusing attention on his personal political agenda.”
• support for serial violators of human rights, such as Ethiopian dictator Colonel Mengistu, Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, as well as the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
• involvement with Libyan propaganda, including co-founding the “Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize”
• support for Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, calling him “one of the leading thinkers of our time.”
The letter also notes that “In 2005, both UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and High Commissioner Louise Arbour publicly denounced Mr. Ziegler for having compared Israeli soldiers to concentration camp guards. He is the only UN expert to have been so reprimanded. Seventy U.S. congressmen wrote to the UN, citing Mr. Ziegler for anti-Semitism, while the Canadian government filed an official protest.”
Racists, Anti-Semites and Israel-Haters Organize to Bash Israel at Durban II
Durban II promises to be just as devoid of any constructive work against racism as was Durban I. The primary agenda is to further the work of Durban I — the demonization and delegitimization of Israel. As Anne Bayefsky wrote about Durban I:
The World Conference Against Racism became a forum for racism. Human rights was used not as a facilitator for communication but as a weapon of political interests antithetical to human rights protection. A large group of states sought to minimize or exclude references to the Holocaust, redefine or ignore antisemitism, and isolate the state of Israel from the global community as a racist practitioner of apartheid and crimes against humanity. The vestiges of Jewish victimhood were to be systematically removed by deleting the references to antisemitism and the Holocaust, to be displaced by the Palestinian victim living under racist, Nazi-like, oppression.
The hate literature distributed during the NGO conference included caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, Palestinian blood on their hands, surrounded by money, and Israelis wearing Nazi emblems. At the Government Conference, there was daily distribution by NGO participants of literature reading “Nazi-Israeli apartheid,” while inside the drafting committees, states such as Syria and Iran objected to the inclusion of antisemitism or the Holocaust on the grounds that antisemitism was a “complicated,” “curious,” and “bizarre” concept, and reference to the Holocaust would be imbalanced or “favoritism.”
Meanwhile, outside the conference hall, as one delegate reported in the Los Angeles Times, he and other representatives of Jewish groups were subjected to taunts and physical intimidation. At one point, thousands of South African Muslim demonstrators marched bearing banners proclaiming “Hitler should have finished the job.”
Thus, success on the political battlefield was to be accomplished by utilizing the language of human rights to demonize, and then dismember, the opponent. In this way, the Durban Conference provided rampant antisemitism with a global platform under UN auspices, in a conference allegedly against racism and xenophobia. It also revealed the malevolent antisemitism underlying the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel.
For more information on Durban II, go to www.eyeontheun.org.
EYEontheUN has produced five very short videos from live coverage of the UN Human Rights Council (the committee organizing Durban II) on what the Council is planning to accomplish at the Durban II conference.
Click here to see YouTube videos on:
• an important conference — for Iran• the racist “anti-racism” message
• a conference to redefine antisemitism
• a conference to allege “Islamophobia”
• a conference to limit freedom of expression
Muslim Bloc Votes to Police (i.e. Limit) Free Speech
Finally, the recent passage of a resolution railroaded through by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) effectively inverts the free-speech tenets of the UN. Western members and their allies voted against the measure, and lost.
As Israel’s Ynetnews reports: “Pakistan’s ambassador, Masood Khan, speaking on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, denied the resolution would limit free speech. ‘It only tries to make freedom of expression responsible,’ he said.” EyeOntheUN has posted a chilling video of pro-Western nations stating their position, then being forced to retreat on this vital issue.