2-Aug-14: Not satire: UN's chief human rights officer outraged that Israel and US fail to share Iron Dome technology with the Islamists

Pillay in 2011 [Image Source]

A reasonable observer could be forgiven for thinking that the people who manage some of the world's most influential and well-funded humanitarian organizations enter into moments of madness when Israel is on the agenda. Maybe not all of them, but certainly some.

Here's an example recorded on the Al Jazeera site ["UN says illegal Gaza blockade must be lifted | UN officials condemn Israeli attacks and warn of humanitarian crisis amid 440,000 displaced and lack of basic services"] from yesterday. It quotes Navanethem Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2008, speaking about the rights of the Gazans:

Pillay also criticised the US, Israel's main ally, for failing to use its influence to halt the violence. "They have not only provided the heavy weaponry which is now being used by Israel in Gaza, but they've also provided almost $1bn in providing the Iron Domes to protect Israelis from the rockets attacks," she said. "No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling."

Reuters ["World powers must hold Israel accountable: U.N. rights boss"] has it too.

It's hard to ignore her silence on the brazen (and suicidal) siting of jihadist rocket-fire emplacements inside residential buildings, schools, hospitals, mosques by the men of Hamas. And she says nothing about the absence of bomb shelters or other protective structures to serve Hamas' Gazans; the terrorist regime has been in power since 2006 and presided over its descent into ever deeper poverty and hopelessness, with tragically little attention to the infrastructure needs of those they rule. Does this not impact on Gazans' human rights? Of course it does, but it's an inconvenient truth.

But more than anything else, it's just breathtaking to see how, confronted with an entirely defensive system that can bring no harm to the fat-cat (and largely absent) insiders of Hamas or to the masses of Gazans suffering under their fanatical rule, Judge Pillay criticizes Israel for the Iron Dome system too.

It's too easy to characterize Pillay's (and OHCHR's) distorted reality as merely bizarre. It comes against a more serious, sadly rich background of distortion and agenda-driven partisanship, as Anne Bayefsky pointed out some days ago in "Depravity at the UN Human Rights Council":

• A native of Durban, South Africa, Pillay spent her time in office championing the racist anti-racism conference that took place in her hometown in 2001... She choreographed the second and third UN Durban conferences in 2009 and 2011 that “reaffirmed” the Israel-is-racist canard. 
• Pillay also initiated, and subsequently became the lead spokesperson for, the 2009 slanderous UN Goldstone Report. Though Goldstone himself later recanted the charge, the report accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians the last time Israel had the audacity to mount a sustained response to the Hamas killing machine in Gaza.
• Pillay opened the [UN Human Rights] Council session on July 23, 2014. For her, “suffering” was a description applicable only to Palestinians. She carefully presented the charge of “crimes against humanity” – knowing full well that the image projected was one of Israelis as the new Nazis. She simultaneously called for an investigation to discern the facts and recounted a list of supposed Israeli-driven horrors... [including] “unimaginable death, destruction, terror and life-long consequences.”
• In the end, the Human Rights Council’s resolution “deplores” and “condemns in the strongest terms” Israel’s “grave,” “widespread, systematic, and gross” “violations of human rights.” The word “Hamas” is never mentioned. And the UN launched a second Goldstone-like inquiry...
• There have been twice as many urgent debates and special sessions of the [Human Rights] Council on Israel in its entire eight-year lifespan than there have been on Syria with upwards of 200,000 dead... One-third of all the resolutions and decisions critical of a single state - for all 193 UN members - have been directed at Israel alone. 

Six years after Ms Pillay took office, presiding over 1,000 employees and a budget of $120 million, we're entitled to wonder how close she came to fulfilling the predictions made at the time, like those of UN Watch, whose head said in 2008 as the undoubtedly-talented woman was getting into the driver's seat:

"Pillay will need to use her unique [platform] to throw a spotlight on the world's worst violations, including Sudan's mass killing in Darfur, Burmese brutality, Chinese persecution, and Mugabe's destruction of Zimbabwe"...

His optimism is admirable. Pillay, too, sounded an optimistic note in the same report on her way into the job:

"This is the only office at the UN to be fiercely uncompromising and independent about human rights standards. The commissioner is the voice of the victim everywhere." [BBC, July 28, 2008]

We're still puzzling over how the rights of Israelis, pounded by more than 3,000 civilian-seeking rockets from Gaza between January 1, 2014 and the end of July [Wikipedia], have gained from that $120 million budget, those thousand OHCHR bureaucrats, and those uncompromising UN actions and standards.

Actually, we're not entirely puzzled. That's because of a rare and not-very-pleasant one-on-one meeting we had some time ago with one of the key UN officials whose travels and views play a key role in OHCHR reports and thus on Ms Pillay's policies.

In a post entitled "28-Feb-08: John Dugard", we wrote of how Mr Dugard, another South African lawyer , has the improbable job description - according to the business card he handed over when we met him - of Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967". In less bombastic terms, his actual role was to look exclusively at one side of a multi-sided conflict.

Come to think of it, meeting him was good preparation for trying to make sense of Navi Pillay's depressing pronouncements.

1-Dec-08: Terrorism versus Human Rights

Here's the text of a speech delivered to an international conference arranged by MPCT (Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme) in Paris, 23-Nov-08. The speaker is one of this blog's authors.

On Terrorism and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Arnold Roth – Chairman, The Malki Foundation

As our presence here in this place attests, today's subject, Terrorism Versus Human Rights, is surely important enough for us to leave our warm homes and come to this public place and engage in discussion.

The subject has the greatest significance for every person who cares about democracy, humanity and freedom.

For some of us, it is more than simply important. The tension between terrorism on one hand and human rights on the other speaks directly to our personal experience.

For me, the public discussion of this important theme has personal ramifications which compel me to raise my voice. I feel the need to do this even in places where there is little desire for a voice like mine to be heard.

In preparing myself for this conference, I reviewed legal documents, political essays, speeches, declarations, blogs and academic journal articles. From these, it can be seen that, sixty years after its creation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is under sustained attack and from several quarters.

1. The secular and universal nature of the Declaration is being undermined and delegitimized. For this we must lay the credit at the feet of the largest club of nations in the world, the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
2. The UN Human Rights Council, the very organization charged with carrying the Declaration's message into practical application is in fact smothering it. It does this by failing to adhere to the first, and arguably the paramount, principle embodied in the declaration. I shall return to this a little later.
3. The dark hand of global terrorism, along with the powerful political, ideological and religious forces that sustain it, are endeavoring to strangle it to death. And they are winning.

In my personal life, each of these two trends – (one) the principles of the UDHR and (two) the forces that may bring its life to an end, has played important roles.

I was born in Australia to Jewish parents who arrived as refugees from Germany after being caught up in the extermination which wiped out one-thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, the country of their birth. Surviving the Nazi death camps, my parents began rebuilding their lives in friendly, welcoming Australia at almost exactly the same time as the UDHR was adopted.

Australia was a place which, for all its blessings, had scarcely begun to comprehend the meaning of human rights. In the decade or two after UDHR, the land of my birth abandoned an immigration policy that, while unofficial, was universally known as the "White Australia Policy". I was a high school student when Australian law changed for the first time to include its native population, the Australian Aborigines, in the national census. Their right to vote in elections was granted only in 1948, the same year as the UDHR was born.

The evolution of sensitivity to human rights in Australia took place even while religion and politics remained, for the most part, subjects that were rarely discussed in public. Australian society then and now treats these as matters of personal choice and conscience. The notion that the state or a non-state entity might impose them on a reluctant population was foreign and unacceptable.

The adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the UDHR on December 10, 1948 occurred, as I have mentioned, in the shadow of events that dramatically marked world history and also the chronicle of my own family.

Though traditions and religious background are different, and cultural backgrounds and expressions are varied, human nature is universal and the same. The UDHR came to affirm this universal human identity.

I was raised in a system characterized by gentle tolerance, and a respect for the humanity and individuality of the other... though as I have said - not for every other. Fundamental human rights needed to be won. And they were. The laws and sensitivities engendered by UDHR undoubtedly played and play a role in that process.

Beginning in 1981, soon after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran which emerged from the rubble of the empire of the Shah, that country's representatives began a systematic and fundamental attack on UDHR. They did this, and continue to do it, in the United Nations and in many other international forums.

The Iranian ambassador to the UN put his country's agenda on the official record [2] in addressing the General Assembly in 1984.

"The concept of human rights is not limited to the UDHR. Man's divine origin and human dignity cannot be reduced to a series of secular norms. Certain concepts (therefore) contained in the UDHR need to be revised… Iran respects no power or authority but that of A-mighty G-d and no legal tradition other than Islamic law. UDHR represents a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This does not accord with the values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran… Iran therefore would not hesitate to violate its provisions since it has to choose between violating divine law (on one hand) and violating secular conventions (on the other).

This straight-forward analysis leaves little room for doubting where UDHR fits in the hierarchy of values of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and of those who hold to its views.

A little later, the OIC's Conference of Foreign Ministers then gave legal and practical effect to the Iranian rejection of UDHR adopting the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam [3] in August 1990. Two of its articles are of astonishing power and significance:

Article 24: All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to Islamic Shariah.
Article 25: Islamic Shariah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles in this Declaration.

The Cairo Declaration therefore claims supremacy over UDHR based on divine revelation.

Its sponsors, the OIC, succeeded in persuading the leadership of the Human Rights Council that "only religious scholars are allowed to discuss matters of faith." In effect the issue is, by consent, off limits to discussion. This is utterly extraordinary.

---

Shortly before he was murdered in Baghdad in 2003, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Iraq, put it this way,

"Human rights law has sought to strike a fair balance between legitimate national security concerns and the protection of fundamental freedom. It acknowledges that states must address serious and genuine security concerns such as terrorism."

The notion of human rights norms has been tested and tempered by the surge of terrorist violence in the past decade, and by the ongoing debate in civil societies throughout the world on how to deal with terrorism and with terrorists - with their human rights, and with the human rights of people suspected of taking part.

---

My wife and I brought our family to the historical Jewish homeland, Israel, in 1988. This was the fulfillment on not only our own dreams but those of our parents and grand-parents.

In Jerusalem, in 2001, our oldest daughter Malki, who was then only 15, was murdered along with many other Israelis in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem.

A few years later, also in Israel, I met John Dugard – a man whose job title at the time is a sad reflection of the fundamentally flawed way human rights are viewed in certain international circles. He was the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. Dugard confessed to me, at the end of an hour-long private meeting in my office in Jerusalem, that until that day he had never met a victim of Palestinian Arab terrorism. I have never managed to understand how such an individual can be so influential at the highest levels of international discourse and at the same time be so poorly informed. And so highly partisan.

Sometimes the unfairness and distortions that characterize the global community's work in human rights produces a change. Such a change happened when the UN's Commission on Human Rights was replaced in 2006 by the Human Rights Council. This came after years of complaints about some of the absurd aspects of the Council's work – too many to recount here. But since its replacement by the HRC, the bad old scenarios repeat themselves:

• By January 2008, barely two years into its life, HRC had already managed to condemn one country - Israel - eight separate times.
• About sixty percent of its decisions have been directed at criticizing one country - Israel.
• The monumental and highly publicized abuses of human rights in such places as Zimbabwe, China, Saudi Arabia have produced zero response.
• Cuba and Belarus were on a special HRC list of countries under close investigation for human rights infringements. But after a recent vote, their names were removed from that list.
• Both Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon felt it necessary to point out to the members and leadership of HRC that there are human rights problems in the world in which Israel is not the major player. But they have not succeeded.

---

The tension between human rights and security in a time of terror seems to be best appreciated in states where terrorism has already made an impact.

Thus in 2005, the British Home Secretary announced tough new measures after the underground trains were blown up by British-born terrorists, acting in the name of their pathological definition of Islam, and said this [5]:

"The human rights of the people who were blown up on the tube on 7th July (2005) are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights of the people who committed those acts."

His statement brings me to certain insights about this issue which stem from my being the father of a child who was murdered by religious terrorists.

I mentioned earlier the first of the rights honoured and protected by the UDHR - the first, and arguably the paramount, principle embodied in the Declaration: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person" (Article 3).

This is the right to live, the right to stay alive. No right is more important than this one. It is the right that was stolen from my fifteen year-old daughter, and from the many people who loved her.

Prof. Harry Reicher, professor of international law at University of Pennsylvania and Scholar-in-Residence at Touro Law Center in New York is a man personally engaged in human rights-based litigation and other legal actions that respect and defend human rights. He has written this:

"If, in the context of measures aimed at preventing repetitions, strains are placed on individual rights, the unique character of the right to live suggests an a priori rationale for erring on the side of caution. To do so is not, in any sense, to trivialize other human rights. It is rather to underscore the ultimate nature of the right to live… Although it does not formally enunciate a hierarchy of rights, or spell out any mechanism for resolving potential tensions between different rights, the fact that the right to live is the first of the specific rights listed in the document suggests a certain primacy… It is a right that is qualitatively different from all other rights…[6]"

The abuse of this right is a deep wrong, the deepest of all wrongs. Here is why:

• When a person is imprisoned unjustly, there is a remedy: Release him or her. Restore the right that has been taken away. When a person is deprived of the right to live, then neither this right nor any other can ever be restored.
• A victim deprived of the right to live can not be compensated. No compensation exists. None can be imagined. But compensation for forms of abuse can be created, and are meaningful.
• Losing the right to live means the loss of every other right.

---

Though it is not so fashionable to say so, I believe there is such a thing as the war against terrorism – and it is not going well. Its victims are not only the children blown up in restaurants, and their parents, but also civil society in every country. For this reason, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to Huguette Chomski Magnis and her MPCT colleagues for pushing this on to the agenda of thoughtful people in a constructive and effective way.

Notes

[2] Extracted from "Universal Human Rights and Human Rights in Islam" - David Littman – Originally published in Midstream (New York), February/March 1999

[3] Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, Aug. 5, 1990, U.N. GAOR, World Conf. on Hum. Rts., 4th Sess., Agenda Item 5, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.157/PC/62/Add.18 (1993) [English translation]

[5] The Guardian: "Expulsions illegal, UN tells Clarke", 25-Aug-05

[6] "Right to live trumps", Prof. Harry Reicher, The National Law Journal (September 26, 2005)

28-Feb-08: John Dugard

Arnold Roth writes:

I spent nearly an hour in a private meeting in my office with Prof. John Dugard and his associate, another UN human rights specialist, on their visit to Jerusalem in February 2005. 

It was an unofficial visit. I have absolutely no official positions, and it's my understanding that the government of Israel decided some years ago to decline to participate in official meetings with a man whose job title is itself an exemplification of prejudiced one-sidedness, partiality and agenda-driven advocacy.

It was hard for me to know what to expect from a man whose business card gives this as his job title: Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967.

Dugard's role, in simple terms, involves looking exclusively at one side of a multi-sided conflict.

That's why I felt the most useful thing I could do in our get-together was to speak with him about how life looks from the viewpoint of the thousands of Israeli families like mine who have suffered the death of a loved one by a hate-driven act of Palestinian Arab terror. If you're not already aware, my daughter Malki was murdered in a Hamas action in the center of Jerusalem in 2001. (See this background piece, The Sbarro Restaurant Massacre, on the website of the Malki Foundation.)

Dugard's reports are the basis for innumerable official statements of the General Assembly and of many of the countries who sit there. So I expected to hear the views of an expert - a man who really knows his subject.

He's erudite and talks well and smoothly, no doubt about it. In the course of about an hour of conversation, I learned some interesting things about how he does his job. Then we came to the end of our meeting, and he thanked me for making the time to meet. He very politely expressed appreciation that I had decided to share some views with him. And then, with no evident sign of realizing the impact on me, he said he had never met an Israeli victim of terror before.

And our meeting was over.

I recall that his words and expression were strikingly cold. But in the six years since Malki was murdered, I've come to understand the faces that public figures sometimes feel they have to show when doing their official duties.

Those final words of Dugard, apart from their impact on me, were helpful in letting me put some perspective around the agenda-driven statements we all hear from people in high places. They sound like they know their subject but they are frequently as ill-informed as the most prejudiced partisan.

Since his visit here and our meeting, I have closely read some of Dugard's many reports and speeches as well as compilations (by invaluable watchdogs like Eye on the UN) of some of the outrageous and partisan pronouncements he's made about Israel's position and policies in this ongoing war. And I have come to the conclusion he meant what he said. The Israeli side, for him, truly is terra incognita. Completely unknown and mostly not understood.

I wish the people who get his reports realized this.

UN rules prevent Dugard from having another term in that job with the surreal title. We understand his final report is going to be delivered verbally to the UN Human Rights Council some time in the next few weeks. 

But some of its content is already known via an advance publication on a UN website.

"Common sense [writes Dugard] dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against military occupation. Such acts must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of occupation... Israel exploits the present international fear of terrorism to the full. But this will not solve the Palestinian problem. Israel must address the occupation and the violation of human rights and international humanitarian law it engenders, and not invoke the justification of terrorism as a distraction, as a pretext for failure to confront the root cause of Palestinian violence - the occupation."

Perhaps it follows that when you give a man half a job-title, you end up with a half-baked analysis. As a white South African, Dugard might be excused for framing conflicts in terms of the one of which he was part, the one he knows best. But with his one-eye-open, one-eye-closed view of the war of the Jihadists against the Jews, it's inexcusable that he seems to know nothing (to cite just one instance) about the role of Arafat, Fatah and the so-called fedayeen at a time (1966 for example) when the total size of the territory he calls "Israeli-occupied" was zero.

If we're wrong, and if Dugard really does know about those matters, about the role they played and play today, about the deep roots of hatred and of jihadism and of terrorism by Arabs in this ongoing war against Israelis and Jews, then his fatuous, simplistic wrap-up and resort to a discredited "root cause" is a disgrace to him and to those who gave him the job.

2-Jun-07: Victimhood of Pal-Arab children... on film

From today's New York Sun:

In 2004, 24-year-old Brooke Goldstein spent her summer in the West Bank filming more than five hours of in-person interviews with terrorists — all of which she conducted without a bodyguard and without a weapon... She interviewed suicide bombers' families and children, who aspire to "martyrdom." The resulting film, "The Making of a Martyr," will screen as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival on Saturday and Tuesday. In the interviews, parents of suicide bombers sit in living rooms adorned with posters of their dead, and teenage terrorists sit with their hands tensely gripping machine guns that rest against their knees as they answer Ms. Goldstein's questions... The fanaticism was worse than she ever imagined. "The most shocking thing was reconciling the normal appearance of these kids and what was coming out of their mouths," she said. "I was holding these beautiful children in my lap, and my translator was translating words of hate."

Read it all.

In the recent past here in Jerusalem, we've had the opportunity to personally raise the appalling subject of what Palestinian Arab society is doing to its own children. The context was face-to-face private conversations with officials of the UN. (We have never written about these meetings before, but it's time we did.)

The most recent was with Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, in April.

A second was with Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last November.

The third, and by far the most disturbing, was with John Dugard, Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, two years ago (UPDATE February 2, 2008: I wrote about how that went).

All three individuals are intelligent, over-achieving professionals with impressive careers behind them. And all three produced not the smallest indication that anyone at the UN or anywhere else plans to do anything about catastrophic Arab abuse of its own youth.

Seems there are far more important issues on the agenda of these officials and their employer.