Israel Matzav

Israel's ambassador to London blasts Goldstone

With the outrageous Goldstone Commission Report being presented to the inaptly named 'United Nations Human Rights Council' on Tuesday, Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the Court of St. James, blasts the report in a powerful op-ed in the Times of London.

It is impossible to escape the obsession of the Human Rights Council (and I chuckle every time I write its name) with Israel. In three years, it has issued 25 resolutions against individual states: 20 of them targeted Israel. Basic maths suggests that Israel, a tiny democracy permanently threatened by dictatorships and terrorists, is guilty of 80 per cent of the world’s human rights offences. This is ridiculous, as is a human rights body with member states that still view public beheadings as a wholesome leisure activity.

The UNHRC’s glaring spotlight on Israel blinds it to its official purpose: it is oblivious to the one million displaced people in Somalia, one million displaced in Pakistan or the 300,000 Tamil civilians currently languishing in Sri Lanka. In Darfur Sudan is responsible for at least 400,000 deaths. Yet the council has never condemned the Sudanese Government, and in fact praised it for its “co-operation”.

The UNHRC also remains silent over the systematic rape and torture of pro-democracy activists protesting against the stolen election in Iran. That’s unsurprising. Last week, President Ahmadinejad once again spewed out an anti-Semitic rant at the UN General Assembly. But in April he was the keynote speaker of the UNHRC in Geneva. As the UN passes Mr Ahmadinejad the microphone, his regime recently silenced the leader of the Iranian bus workers’ union by quite literally slashing his tongue.

The Goldstone report’s lack of credibility has not gone unnoticed in all quarters. Canada, Japan and the EU all refused to support Justice Richard Goldstone’s mission from the start. Even Switzerland, which has often lavished red-carpet treatment on tyrants, acknowledged that the anti-Israel bigotry of Goldstone’s team made it unsupportable. Mary Robinson, the former Irish President and a fierce critic of Israel, described Goldstone’s mandate as “guided not by human rights but by politics”.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the report wilfully ignores the context of Operation Cast Lead.

Read the whole thing.

What's most curious is that at this writing, I count 10 of 17 comments as being pro-Israel, and three of those that are not all come from the same person. While the Times and the Telegraph are among the more reasonable London broadsheets (as opposed to the Guardian and the Independent, which are deeply biased against the Jewish state), I did not expect to see so many comments in Israel's favor. The comment ratio shows just how outrageous Goldstone's report is. You can't fool all of the people all of the time. Not even at the UN 'Human Rights Council.'

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:32 PM