Making a mockery of human rights

 


Posted on December 29, 2011 

There is a straight line from the UN’s obsessive focus on condemning Israel to the cynical decision of the Arab League to appoint “the world’s worst human rights observer” as the head of its mission to monitor violence in Syria.

As UN Watch noted in a report on the first few years of UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) operation:

The 47-nation body has condemned Israel in 80% of its country censures, in 20 of 25 resolutions. The other 5 texts criticized North Korea once, and Myanmar four times.  The Council has ignored the UN’s other 189 countries, including the world’s worst abusers. While Darfur was addressed several times, these resolutions were non-condemnatory, often praising Sudan for “cooperation.”

This dismal record is hardly surprising in view of the fact that even the worst human rights violators are eligible to serve on the UNHRC – while the world’s only Jewish state is excluded, since the Arab and Muslim states will not admit Israel as member of the Asian regional group: I’ve called it Apartheid, UN-style.

Yet another illustration of the limitless hypocrisy that is so commonplace at the UN was the recent nomination of Syria to two committees dealing with human rights, and the approval of this nomination by the UNESCO Executive Board.

After making a mockery of human rights for so long, the Arab League probably couldn’t imagine that anyone would notice how cynical it is that its mission to Syria is headed by the Sudanese General Mohammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi:

Dabi may be the unlikeliest leader of a humanitarian mission the world has ever seen. He is a staunch loyalist of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity for his government’s policies in Darfur. And Dabi’s own record in the restive Sudanese region, where he stands accused of presiding over the creation of the feared Arab militias known as the “janjaweed,” is enough to make any human rights activist blanch.

If past experience is any guide, it is unfortunately not really true that human rights activists always “blanch” (or blush) when human rights abusers play human rights defenders — and given the composition of the UNHRC and some other UN human rights groups, Dabi is actually not such an unlikely leader for a “humanitarian” mission.

Unsurprisingly, the Arab League’s intrepid human rights monitor from Sudan told reporters after his mission’s first day in Syria “that the observers had seen ‘nothing frightening’.”

There were always victims of human rights abuses who had to pay a painful price for the mockery that was made of human rights – this time, it may be the turn of the Syrians.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Destroying Muslim heritage [updated]

Image
  Destroying Muslim heritage [updated] Posted on   March 24, 2013   | There is a veritable industry out there producing an endless stream of “reports” about imaginary Israeli efforts to destroy, damage or defile Muslim sites, in particular the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. I have repeatedly written about   this vicious campaign   that goes back to the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who later gained notoriety as a Nazi collaborator. Many recent examples of this ongoing incitement have been compiled by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), and for the very latest installment, you can always turn to the website of Quds Media Center . The manufactured outrage that usually accompanies the false reports on invented Israeli transgressions against Muslim holy places stands in stark contrast to the docile silence that has allowed Saudi authorities to transform Islam’s holiest places into glitzy luxury destinations. However, by now several reports highlighting the destruction of h
Read more

Dying for an imaginary right of return

Image
  Dying for an imaginary right of return Posted on   March 19, 2014   | Picking up on a report by the Palestinian news agency  Ma’an , blogger  Elder of Ziyon  recently found out that a Palestinian official used a meeting with diplomats to spread what can only be called a blood libel. According to the  Ma’an  report, Fatah central committee member Mohammad Ishtayyeh said in a meeting with diplomats organized by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation in Ramallah “that the Palestinian Authority had attempted to negotiate the return of Palestinian refugees from Syria, but Israel had refused […] to allow them to come to the Palestinian territories.” The report noted that some “1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Syria conflict, and around 250,000 Palestinian refugees have been forced to leave their homes in Syria due to violence in the country.” But as  Elder of Ziyon  shows by quoting an  AP  report from January 10, 2013, Israel had “agreed to the return of those refugees to G
Read more

Yafa Yarkoni and the songs of Israel

  Posted on   January 2, 2012   When Yafa Yarkoni passed away this Sunday, a eulogy posted at  Ha’aretz  noted that the legendary singer “was known as the singer of Israel’s wars, [who] entertained Israeli troops beginning in 1948 and was one of Israel’s most acclaimed artists.” The  Jerusalem Post’s  eulogy noted, however, that Yafa Yarkoni “detested” being described as “the singer of the wars.” Given the fact that Yarkoni’s career spanned well over half a century, it is easy to see that she had good reason for rejecting this description with its narrow focus on just a few of her songs. Moreover, it would be wrong to imagine that her “war songs” were the type of songs usually associated with martial music. Among Yarkoni’s famous songs is Bab el Wad, and when ( ex-blogger ) Yaacov Lozowick recommended it yesterday in a tweet as “perhaps her single most important song,” I thought this was finally my chance to mention Yaacov’s wonderful series on Hebrew songs. In the first post of this s
Read more