Melanie Phillips: The anti-Israel travesty of Pillay’s kangaroo court
If this is to have any meaning at all, the United States must ensure Pillay’s removal. After all, her appointment contradicted the U.N.’s own guidelines which, as UN Watch said in its request for Pillay to recuse herself, make clear that members of commissions of inquiry must have “a proven record of independence and impartiality.”Ruthie Blum: Navi Pillay’s revitalized anti-Israel career
Even Pillay’s removal, however, wouldn’t address the core problem—the institutionalized bias of the United Nations itself. For it acts as the crucible of the campaign to delegitimize and destroy Israel.
Since 2015, the U.N. General Assembly has passed 125 resolutions condemning Israel, compared with six against Iran; seven against North Korea; nine against Syria; 18 against Russia; eight against the United States; and none against China, Cuba, Libya, Turkey, Pakistan or Venezuela.
Last September, the U.N. Economic and Social Council condemned Israel alone for allegedly violating women’s rights, even though Israel is the only upholder of women’s rights in the Middle East.
All this reflects the fundamental flaw at the heart of the United Nations itself. Committed to promoting freedom, justice and human rights for everyone, it is dominated by countries that stand for the negation of those things. So it betrays its core commitment virtually every day.
The fact that it singles out Israel for condemnation as a human-rights abuser when it is in fact the sole democracy in the Middle East and deeply committed to human rights is a travesty. The fact that it has now put in charge of this onslaught a woman who has endorsed the anti-Jewish lynch mob at the United Nations’ own disgusting Durban conference is obscene.
Yet America and the rest of the free world continue to treat it as the legitimate arbiter of global peace and justice.
The United Nations is the most conspicuous example of the fundamental mistake the free world makes over and over again. This is that, by refusing to acknowledge the true and unique characteristics of anti-Semitism, it fails to understand that the world’s oldest and most enduring hatred doesn’t just affect the Jewish people. It also signals the corrosion and eventual destruction of the culture that spawns it.
The continuing support by the free world of the fundamentally corrupted United Nations is a major factor behind the destruction of the west’s moral compass and its current spiral of decline.
A month before the end of her dubious tenure as human-rights high commissioner, for instance, she issued a particularly egregious parting hurrah. The timing was perfect for a tirade from the retiring radical, as Israel was in the throes of the 2014 Gaza war.
Referring to what she called the “same pattern of [Israeli] attacks on homes, schools, hospitals [and] UN premises” as in past military campaigns,” she said that “none of it appears to me to be accidental.”
She failed to mention the extensive Hamas tunnel network that Israel was in Gaza to destroy. That the underground passageways were equipped with weapons, handcuffs, IDF uniforms and anesthetic-filled syringes for the express purpose of kidnapping and killing Jews didn’t make it into her condemnation.
She ignored, as well, Hamas’s use of its population as human shields, and didn’t give the slightest nod to Israeli Air Force pilots, who not only dropped leaflets to warn Gazans of imminent shelling in specific areas, but aborted missions when they spotted women and children in their crosshairs. What she stressed, instead, was that the United States “provided almost $1 billion in providing the Iron Domes [sic] to protect the Israelis from rocket attacks; [yet] no such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling.”
This egregious inversion of defense and offense is quintessential Pillay, so the remark wasn’t surprising. Greater astonishment was due the self-proclaimed feminist a few months earlier, during an address to the UNHRC.
Dusting off an old libel lodged in 2005 by then-UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women Yakin Erturk, she blamed Israel for Palestinian men’s abuse of Palestinian women. The “occupation,” she suggested, robs Palestinians of their manhood. Feeling castrated by big bad Israel, these emasculated males take out their frustration on their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.
George Orwell is chuckling in his grave. Still, the rest of us shouldn’t be laughing.
As Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust director Anne Bayefsky cautioned this week in JNS: “Although this charade [of a commission] is obviously tainted and flawed, indifference to it would be a grave mistake. The ‘inquiry’ has no end date and is being financed in perpetuity. Now on the UN schedule are two reports every year, a perpetual drumbeat of modern antisemitism — the delegitimization of the Jewish state. Report No. 1 is all the evidence that decent people and democratic states need to tear down this wall of hate and intolerance.”
UN Watch: The Pillay Report Under Scrutiny — UN Watch Side Event, June 13, 2022
On June 13, 2022, as the United Nations in Geneva debates the Pillay Report, the controversial new document will come under scrutiny by a panel of renowned experts at a UN Watch event to be held on the sidelines of the Human Rights Council, to be streamed live here on this page.
The Pillay Report, released this week, offers a blueprint of what is to come from the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, which was granted a perpetual mandate to report annually in Geneva and New York on alleged war crimes and discrimination in wake of last year’s Hamas-Israel war.
The report turns a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism and embraces the Hamas narrative that Israel is the root cause of all conflict.
Many expected a biased report given that commission chair Navi Pillay has a record of lobbying governments to ‘sanction apartheid Israel’. In addition, she declared Israel guilty in the very conflict of last year that she is meant to investigate. To read UN Watch’s request for Navi Pillay to recuse herself, click here (pdf).