Thursday, December 09, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
Hamas said that Bachelet's remarks were "important and pivotal", as they "shed light on the continued Israeli occupation's violations against the Palestinian people and holy places."
When a terror group praises the UN's top human rights official, that indicates that something is wrong. And indeed, something is very wrong with Michelle Bachelet.
Her statement can be seen on video here. She speaks for about ten minutes, of which about nine and a half are about how terrible Israel is - starting with the May war in Gaza, which she claims was "directly linked to protests and violent responses by Israeli security forces — first in East Jerusalem, then spreading to the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory and to Israel."
She doesn't mention that Hamas and other groups shot 150 rockets into Israel on May 10, including Jerusalem, and Israeli airstrikes were responses to those attacks. Instead, Bachelet fully adopts the Hamas narrative that somehow Israeli actions in Sheikh Jarrah and Jerusalem were what caused the war to start - implying that Hamas rockets were meant to defend Palestinians, not attack Israeli civilians.
Bachelet has nothing bad to say about Hamas at all. She doesn't even mention the terror group's name.
The other thirty seconds that don't obsess over Israel (starting at 10:50) are almost all directed at Hamas' rival Palestinian Authority, where she quickly lists "assaults of journalists and human rights defenders, as well as intimidation; gender-based violence and harassment; excessive use of force; arbitrary arrests and censorship." She then briefly mentions that "the de facto authorities have also restricted Palestinians’ rights."
Unlike her allegations against Israel, she goes into no detail on these human rights abuses against Palestinians. Palestinian women are victims of gender-based violence? Who cares? Certainly not the UN's chief human rights defender.
The video is even more striking. When Bachelet accuses Israel of abuses, she speaks deliberately and looks up from her prepared notes and tries to make eye contact with the viewer. But when she talks about Palestinian abuses, she turns into a robot - she speeds up her delivery and barely looks up from her text. It is a checkbox for her - she doesn't want to be accused of bias so she throws in a little about Palestinian human rights abuses, burying it in her litany of impassioned criticism of Israel.
There is essentially no daylight between the positions of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and those of the Hamas terror group. No wonder Hamas praised her.
Like Hamas, the UN's own human rights chief proves that she doesn't care at all about the human rights of Jews. Like Hamas, Michelle Bachelet proves that the only time she pretends to care about the human rights of Palestinians is when she can blame the Jews.
