Mark Regev: The UN - where anti-Israel prejudice remains supreme
There are clear signs that Arab hostility towards the Jewish state is on the wane. The Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, an Israeli Defense Minister can make a very public visit to Morocco and even Saudi Arabia allows flights to and from Israel to cross over its territory. But there remains at least one bastion of anti-Israel enmity, the United Nations, where systematic, organizational prejudice against the Jewish state reigns supreme.Melanie Phillips: New Year’s resolution? Abolish the UN Human Rights Council
The opening act: Though not representing a member state, in 1974 Yasser Arafat was issued an extraordinary invitation to address the UN General Assembly (UNGA). His speech included a call for an end to Israel. The Jews, he said, could become citizens in the PLO’s “democratic Palestine.” Extreme content notwithstanding, and the fact that he spoke soon after his PLO massacred 25 hostages in Ma’alot, mostly high school students, Arafat received a standing ovation.
Infamously, the following year, the UNGA adopted Resolution 3379 which declared Zionism a “form of racism and racial discrimination”. Although that travesty was officially repealed in 1991, its annulment did not mark the end of the UN’s anti-Israel obsession – far from it.
Every year the UNGA routinely passes, with massive majorities, a series of blatant anti-Israel resolutions; in 2021 17 were enacted. Earlier this month, for example, the UNGA called upon Israel to withdraw from the “occupied Syrian Golan,” with delegates voting to hand over the Golan to Bashar Assad’s murderous regime.
But the story doesn’t end with these multiple resolutions, as some of them establish UN organs whose sole mission is to further propagate an anti-Israel agenda. The Special Committee to Investigate Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People is one such body. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which every year organizes the UN’s annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, is another.
These visionaries failed to grasp that, since the world was dominated by states and regimes that were both repressive and deeply imbued with Jew-hatred and hostility to Israel, any world body or supra-national system of law would itself become an accomplice to tyranny and antisemitism.v Caroline Glick: The escalating international war against Israel
That’s why “lawfare,” or the weaponisation of international law to wage war with better PR, has become a prime weapon against Israel, singling out the Jewish people alone for such unhinged attack.
And it’s why the UN, the world body set up to ensure that never again would crimes against humanity be repeated — a global aim which it has conspicuously failed to achieve — has itself turned into a weapon with which to commit them against the Jewish people once again.
In other words, the UNHRC has become an engine of evil.
In January, the US returns to the Council as a member. The Biden administration claims it will thus be able to stop its abuses. This is unlikely.
The UN is supposedly the world’s police force. But if a police force is in the pocket of a murderous and tyrannical cult, it turns into a protection racket where the innocent get gunned down and the guilty remain free to inflict yet more carnage.
This is not just Israel’s problem. As long as the west ignores the profound corruption of the UNHRC, it corrupts itself.
How to make the world a better place in 2022? Shut down the UNHRC.
And this brings us to the Human Rights Council's permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Professor Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry's mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel's birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an "investigation" on the basis of "testimonies" which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent "war crimes" that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN's political "courts" in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.The Caroline Glick Show: Ep31 – Lawfare – Domestic and Foreign | Guest: Prof. Avi Bell
Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making "recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts."
A similar statement is made in the resolution's preamble regarding "business enterprises."
The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.
Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the antisemitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into "law" through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault.
In Episode 31 of the Caroline Glick Mideast News Hour, Caroline was joined by Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University and University of San Diego law schools. Caroline and Avi discussed first Israel’s legal fraternity’s transformation of Israel from a democracy to an authoritarian aristocracy of lawyers. Given Israel’s legal fraternity’s focus on seizing the power of Israel’s elected leaders, it is not surprising that if fails to understand the nature of the international lawfare being waged against Israel, first and foremost by the UN. The two discussed the nature of the UN-led political war against Israel and the central role of pseudo-legal claims play in the efforts. Caroline ended the show with a discussion of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s role in mainstreaming contemporary anti-Semitism.