Israel Matzav

As part of a much-touted undertaking to reform the UN, the defunct and unlamented commission was last March 15 replaced by the UN Human Rights Council. The accompanying fanfare promised sincere introspection, contrition and, most of all, a cleaning up of the commission's shameful act.

It sadly took no more than the new council's inaugural session in Geneva to dispel all illusions. The commission may be called a council, but it's just as malodorous. The preposterous patterns of old immediately reasserted themselves in full.

Only one country-specific censorious resolution was passed - against Israel. Moreover, the council discerned nothing more urgent with which to occupy itself than to establish a review of Israel's alleged human rights violations as a permanent agenda item at each and every session from hereon.

A report on Israeli "transgressions" has already been commissioned for the council's September session. A special deliberation of the current hostilities is to be held soon.

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The Geneva-based NGO, UN Watch, criticized the council for showing "that we are back in the dark days of selectivity and politicization that, as Kofi Annan said, led to the demise of the council's predecessor…In Geneva, tragically, it's business as usual." Indeed the mass murders in the Darfur region of Sudan were all but glossed over, with a meaningless nonspecific resolution which names no culprits. Genocide perpetrated by Arabs is immune to scrutiny, while exclusive focus is directed at anti-Israeli fabrications.

If Arab and Muslim states truly cared about human rights, they'd work to put their own houses in order rather than cynically hurl invective at the only democracy in their region. Instead, with Egypt and Jordan dismally on board [both of which have peace treaties with Israel and receive US foreign aid. CiJ] , the council is yet another forum in which the Arab world continues to make war against Israel. Those Arab countries which claim to have subscribed to the two-state solution, and in some cases are committed to it by treaty, hugely discredit the professions of peace that ostensibly constitute the crux of the Saudi initiative every time they engage in such Israel-vilification.