|
 The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva voted 25 to six on October 16 in favor of a resolution to endorse a report that accuses both Israel and the Palestinians of committing "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity" during the December 2008-January 2009 war.
Voting in favor of the resolution were Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia.
Voting against the resolution were were the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Ukraine. Eleven countries abstained from the vote. The report, which was written by a group of investigators led by South African judge Richard Goldstone (hence, “The Goldstone Report”), calls on both sides to conduct investigations into the war crimes accusations within six months. If Israel and the Palestinians refuse to comply, the matter would be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The resolution was submitted to the council by Palestinians working indirectly through representatives from Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tunisia.
The Jerusalem Post reported that just prior to the council’s vote, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, addressed the UN session, and said that based on his knowledge and experience, during Operation Cast Lead (the Israeli military operation in Gaza) the The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare."
Kemp (who was Speaking on behalf of UN Watch, an independent Geneva human rights group ) added that "Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population." He said that Hamas, like Hezbollah, was expert at exploiting the media’s agenda.
"Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes," he said. "They are adept at staging and distorting incidents."
"It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights," continued Kemp. "The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties."
Addressing charges made in the Goldstone Report that Israel (as well as Palestinians) took"actions amounting to war crimes, Kemp said:
"War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American, and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes."
The Post reported that the Palestinian representative at the council said that Israel must take responsibility for its actions:
"Justice that isn't done on time, is as if it has not been done at all," she said. "Israel is denying the Palestinians basic human rights and there should be no compromise on this issue."
And an AP report quoted Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, who said he was delighted that the resolution had been passed: “The Palestinian Authority welcomes the decision of the UN Human Rights Council and we hope this will be followed up in the UN Security Council to ensure such Israeli crimes are not repeated.”
In an interview published in the Washington Post on September 22, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave her assessment of the Goldstone Report:
As I said the other day the mandate was unbalanced, one-sided and unacceptable. Goldstone did seek to expand his purview to look at Hamas and others and while we note that, the weight of the report is something like 85 percent oriented towards very specific and harsh condemnation and conclusions related to Israel and very sort of lightly treats without great specificity Hamas' terrorism and its own atrocities....
It comes from a body whose track record and history is one of focusing unduly and excessively on one country, Israel, to the exclusion of credible sustained treatment of the world's most egregious instances of human rights abuses in places like Sudan or Zimbabwe or Burma and so we are committed to bringing greater balance, bringing greater focus to the most egregious instances of abuse and we think that despite its flaws the place for this report to be discussed remains in the [Human Rights] Council.
In making the above statements, Ambassador Rice correctly identified an overwhelming bias that exists within many UN agencies — a bias that too freely levels condemnation at Western-oriented nations which giving a free pass to brutal regimes such as those governing Sudan or Zimbabwe or Burma. (Rice could also have mentioned communist China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.)
However, while recognizing this inherent flaw in the Human Rights Council, Rice seemed unaware that such anti-Western bias is so systemic throughout the UN bureaucracy that criticizing the failings of a single UN agency is nonproductive, at best.
The effusive praise that Rice heaped upon the United Nations earlier in the interview was completely consistent with the ambassador’s membership in the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whose members played a major role in the world body’s founding. (The American delegation to the San Francisco meeting that drafted the charter of the United Nations in 1945 included CFR members Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, John McCloy, Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, and the Secretary-General of the conference, Alger Hiss.)
Rice said, for example:
- "We are interested in an effective and productive United Nations because we believe fundamentally that given the nature of the 21st century security challenges we face we need to maximize the effective cooperation of as many states and peoples as can be mustered to deal with these challenges, because they are by definition transnational, the sort that can arise in any part of the planet, spread to any part of the planet, whether I'm talking about terrorism, proliferation or pandemic disease, the effects of climate change, criminal networks."
- "The United Nations is the venue in which every country has a voice, which has a unique international legitimacy and an un-paralleled capacity to perform against these critically important challenges."
- "The fact that there are a handful of countries with which we have profound differences that populate the United Nations doesn't in any way change the calculus that I just outlined....”
The problem is, it is not a mere “handful of countries” at the UN that are responsible for the world body’s historic malevolent actions against free, Westernized states such as Katanga, South Africa, Taiwan, and Israel, among others. Rather, the elite internationalists — most of them American or British — who created the UN in the first place continue to utilize the world body to further their objective of bringing the recalcitrant nations of the world under their control. Consider a few quotes from a few powerful individuals who shared Ambassador Rice’s membership in the CFR.
Early in the 1970's, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was later President Jimmy Carter's [himself a CFR member] national security adviser, wrote:
"A global consciousness is for the first time beginning to manifest itself... we are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites... composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries; their perspectives are not confined by national traditions... and their interests are more functional than national."
Richard Gardner, Carter's ambassador to Italy wrote in 1974:
"The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than an old fashioned frontal attack."
Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s [also CFR] room-mate from his Oxford days, once wrote:
"All countries are basically social arrangements. Within the next hundred years, nationhood, as we know it, will be obsolete. All states will recognize a single global authority. A phase briefly fashionable in the mid 20th century, citizen of the world, will have assumed real meaning at the end of the 21st."
And, when accepting the highest award of the World Federalist Association, the late, reknowned news anchorman Walter Cronkite said:
"...If we are to avoid the eventual catastrophe of world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations, as the first step towards world government... we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order." [Emphasis added]
The reason the UN has thus far not been able to broker peace is the Middle East has little to do with the trouble caused by a “handful of countries” among its membership. It is because many of the parties to the conflict in Palestine have not yet learned their parts in the UN’s “world government” script. Until then, they will continue their squabbles and UN agencies such as the Human Rights Council will continue to rap their knuckles when they step out of line. Photo of Richard Goldstone: AP Images
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
