Israel Matzav

Mary Robinson whines to the media

Mary Robinson has gone whining to the media in her home country, Ireland, over the criticism that has been leveled at the Obama administration by 'certain elements of the Jewish community' for awarding her the Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.

Ms Robinson hit back yesterday at what she described as allegations "totally without foundation" of her condoning anti-Semitic behaviour at the Durban World Conference Against Racism in 2001.

"It's totally without foundation but when stuff is out on the internet, I'm not quite sure what you can do," Ms Robinson told RTE Radio One yesterday.

Ms Robinson insisted that she never supported any anti-Semitism and cited her decision at the conference to reject a civil society document which she deemed racist.

"There's a lot of bullying by certain elements of the Jewish community. They bully people who try to address the severe situation in Gaza and the West Bank. Archbishop Desmond Tutu gets the same criticism."

At The American Thinker, Ed Lasky says that Robinson's criticism of the Jewish community is part of a pattern.

Notice a pattern here. Samantha Power complained criticism of Obama was all about "what was good for the Jews"; Chas Freeman blamed the pro-Israel lobby for forcing him to withdraw his nomination; Jeremiah Wright blames the Jews around Obama for preventing his access to him. Now we have a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner complaining about being bullied by pro-Israel lobbyists.

Obama and his team have a knack for picking thin-skinned bullies who do not like Israel and have paranoid delusions about Jews in America.

Yes, we have noticed.

Just to rebut the substantive point in Robinson's complaint, this 2002 column by Michael Rubin sets out the case against Robinson, both before and after Durban.

In Tuesday's New York Post, Gil and Tevi Troy sum up the case against Robinson:

Despite her noble commitment to human rights, Robinson has become a symbol of all that's wrong in the human-rights community and the United Nations -- of the tendency to appease dictatorships, rationalize terrorism and bash the West.

She is perhaps best known for presiding over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa -- which targeted the West, especially Israel, while overlooking racism in Arab countries. The conference was so biased the United States and Israel boycotted it.

In the tense months before convening in Durban, Robinson failed to listen to pleas from Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), among others, to stop Arab dictators from hijacking an anti-racism conference to advance their anti-Zionist agenda. Afterward, she declared the disaster a success, even after she herself belatedly condemned the vicious anti-Semitism coursing through the streets of Durban at a parallel forum of nongovernmental agencies.

Robinson has criticized US foreign policy throughout her career. Since 9/11, she has blasted the United States for losing the "moral high ground" -- as if she's more focussed on trying to win the "minds and hearts" of unrepentant terrorists than on the dilemmas that democracies face in fighting terror.

She also blasted the United States for objecting to the new UN Human Rights Council in 2006 -- even though America was rightly protesting the power the forum granted to human-rights-abusing dictatorships such as Libya and Sudan.

Mary Robinson is a bad choice for this award. No amount of blaming the Jews or looking for conspiracy theories against her can change that fact.

Congress ought to pass a resolution urging President Obama to give the award to someone else before it breaks for recess.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:56 PM