From Ian:
Hillel Neuer: UN rights chief compares ‘Palestinian suffering’ with Holocaust
Netanyahu urges UN refugee agency for Palestinians be shut down
Hillel Neuer: UN rights chief compares ‘Palestinian suffering’ with Holocaust
UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a former Jordanian ambassador and member of the royal family, should apologize for profoundly offensive remarks (see below) in which he compared “Palestinian suffering” with the Holocaust, and Palestinian refugee camps with Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The odious analogy was immediately endorsed by Qatar.
While he disingenuously insisted that the two cases were different, and though he made a point of predicting that he would be criticized by those acting ‘mechanically almost’, the fact remains that Mr. Hussein not only unfairly singled out Israel by dedicating the opening part of a major UN speech to the Palestinian situation but repeatedly juxtaposed the alleged suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis with Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis.
Hussein spoke on Tuesday to open the 35th session of the UN Human Rights Council. I took the floor to respond—see below.
While the high commissioner addressed the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2015, his odious analogy — unless he fully apologizes — renders him unfit to be invited back.
Netanyahu urges UN refugee agency for Palestinians be shut down
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called for the closing of UNRWA, the United Nations’ agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, saying he had already urged the US envoy to the world body to consider pushing for it to be shuttered.IsraellyCool: UNRWA’s Terror Tunnel Condemnation Rings Hollow
On Sunday, two days after the announcement of a tunnel that was discovered June 1 underneath a UNRWA-run school in Gaza, Netanyahu said he told US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley during her visit to Israel last week that it was time to reconsider the agency’s existence.
“Hamas uses schoolchildren as human shields. This is an enemy we have been fighting for many years and committing a double war crime: On the one hand, they deliberately attack innocent civilians, and on the other hand they also hide behind children,” Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu, who is also foreign minister, said he instructed the Foreign Ministry’s director-general, Yuval Rotem, to file an official complaint at the UN Security Council. On Saturday, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon wrote a letter of complaint to the president of the Security Council.
Leaving aside my incredulity that UNRWA did not suspect anything beforehand – terror tunnel construction tends to make a lot of noise and it is not like UNRWA is not aware of their existence in general – the condemnation, like the tunnels themselves, rings hollow.
Look at the wording again. UNRWA is condemning the violation of their supposed neutrality – the fact the tunnels ran under their premises – and not the general existence of these terror tunnels.
This reminds me of their flacid condemnation when rockets were found on their premises. Again, the condemnation was for the “violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law” and not the existence and use of these rockets against Israeli civilians.
Why won’t UNRWA condemn Hamas for siphoning of money earmarked as aid and using it to construct these tunnels and manufacture the rockets? Surely as a so-called relief agency, they should be outraged the money is being wasted in this way.
Unless….they are not.













