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Friday, August 21, 2015

Israel complains about biased UN official - for good reason

AP reports:

Israel's ambassador is urging the U.N.'s internal watchdog to investigate the head of a U.N. agency for misconduct, accusing her of "modern day anti-Semitism." Last year, he tried unsuccessfully to get Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to suspend Rima Khalaf.

Ambassador Ron Prosor met Carmen Lapointe, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, late last month and called for a disciplinary hearing against Khalaf, a Jordanian who heads the Beirut-based U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, which promotes economic and social development in 17 Arab countries.

A letter from the ambassador to Lapointe obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press said "Ms. Khalaf has abused her position in order to promote an anti-Israel agenda, in a flagrant violation of U.N. obligations and principles."

Prosor gave a series of examples including her support for the June 29 "illegal and provocative attempt" to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, a July 7 reference which he said equated "terrorism with a fight for 'justice'," and what he called "a hate fueled report" on Arab integration in March 2014 "that once again promotes anti-Israel incitement by blaming Israel for shortcomings in the Arab world."

"Ms. Khalaf's outrageous criticism against the state of Israel and the discrediting of its government undermine the integrity of the United Nations and amount to serious misconduct, by U.N. standards," Prosor said in the July 27 letter. "I call on you to initiate an urgent investigation into this matter."
Some more details from Arutz-7:
The issues with Khalaf are not new. Last year, Prosor asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to fire Khalaf, after she indirectly compared Israel with Nazi Germany, and blamed Israel for all of the Arab world's problems in the area of development.

Ban spoke with Khalaf about the matter but did not fire her.

Several weeks ago, Khalaf again made provocative statements against Israel.

She expressed support for the hostile “flotilla” that sought to breach Israel's maritime blockade on Gaza in June, and said the move was legitimate. She compared the Israeli response to an act of terror, saying: “The Israeli response to the flotilla is like the violent abductions carried out by pirates at sea, in the air and on land, which the world does not hesitate to call terror.”

At another event, which took place at the UN HQ in New York, she said that “terror activities” constitute “a war for justice.”

“In Palestine,” she said in the July speech, “international indifference not only allowed the Israeli occupation to keep on grinding for half a century, but spread instability in the region. This eroded the faith in global justice and pushed some people to take justice into their own hands.”
Last year, Khalaf's agency issued a series of 181 tweets/posts for the "International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People." Many of their "facts" were anything but.. For example, #2:



The linked article has a footnote that links to a UN report which in turn links to an Israeli NGO report  that further links to Israeli Freedom of Information disclosures that show that the people referred to here are mostly Arabs who left the region for seven years and didn't check back in with Israeli authorities (all of this was before the 1994 Oslo accords)  and therefore lost their residency status. They were not "expelled" in any sense of the word and the UN document linked does not use that word at all.

That's just one example of how anti-Israel UN-ESCWA is. There's lots more:


"In spite of the occupation"? Every university in the territories opened up after 1967!  (And one college that became a university in 2007 was founded in 1930 by a Jewish philanthropist.)

And here this UN agency twists Israeli humanitarianism into proof of Israeli evil:


How exactly 15,000 people were allowed to leave the "prison" of Gaza is not quite explained.

This is a UN agency that is going out of its way to propagate anti-Israel lies. No doubt Ms. Khalaf had a lot to do with this initiative.

And the UN can lie with impunity as long as the target is Israel.