13-Jun-17: We think we now have a deeper understanding of the human rights industry

The UN official previously known as His Highness Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein

When it comes to politicians, being the parents of a child murdered in the name of a political ideology can make a person, trust us, something of a cynic.

We're more sensitive now to how public figures like to get up on their soap-boxes and preach to others about what they ought to be doing. When they do, our strong inclination is to take a look behind the scenes and see whether the values of the speaker match the high rhetoric of the speechifying.

Take the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein as an example.

Once Jordan's ambassador to the UN and to the United States, he was appointed by acclamation to the HCR role by all 193 members of the UN General Assembly in June 2014, amidst flattering compliments and expressions of unbridled optimism. We have seen it described as a unanimous appointment but even if some people had their doubts, no one spoke out against.

He happens also to be a member of Jordan's royal family - a prince, in fact - as well as the pretender (an actual title) to the throne of Iraq. (Arab kingdoms tend to be both more complex and less complex than most people realize.)

Mr Ra'ad al-Hussein is busy this month as the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council over which he presides meets for its latest three-week-long gathering in Geneva. The HRC is made up of "47 States responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe".

Sounds worthy, of course. But the reality tends towards the shabby. As one report noted in March 2017:

According to the U.N.'s top human rights body, Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world today. That’s the result of the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council which wrapped up in Geneva on Friday by adopting five times more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country on earth... The Bush administration refused to join the Council when it was created in 2006. On March 31, 2009, President Obama – fully aware of its entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias – made jumping on board one of his very first foreign policy moves. Moreover, in an unscrupulous attempt to control his successor, the former President obtained yet another three-year term for the United States on the Council that began on January 1, 2017... The Council plays a leading role in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state by the United Nations. In its history, the Council has condemned Israel more often than any other of the 192 UN states. Comparative totals after this session’s pogrom tell the story:  Israel – 78 resolutions and decisions, Syria – 29, North Korea – 9, and Iran – 6.  As for Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, there’s nothing at all.

Lately, some member states have noticed. The British, for instance:

The UK has put the United Nations Human Rights Council "on notice" over what it called its "disproportionate focus on Israel". On the final day of the council's 34th session the UK mission to the UN said it would vote against all resolutions about Israel's conduct in the occupied Syrian and Palestinian territories if things did not change... [Independent UK, March 25, 2017]

The Americans have too:

Washington has long argued that the Geneva forum unfairly focuses on Israel's alleged violations of human rights, including war crimes against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The United States "remains deeply troubled by the Council’s consistent unfair and unbalanced focus on one democratic country, Israel", Erin Barclay, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, told the U.N. Human Rights Council. Barclay said that no other nation had a whole agenda item devoted to it and that "this obsession with Israel" threatened the council's credibility... "In order for this Council to have any credibility, let alone success, it must move away from its unbalanced and unproductive positions," Barclay said. "As we consider our future engagements, my government will be considering the Council's actions with an eye toward reform to more fully achieve the Council's mission to protect and promote human rights." The United States is currently an elected member of the 47-state Geneva forum where its three-year term ends in 2019... ["U.S. seeks end to U.N. rights council's 'obsession' with Israel", Reuters, March 1, 2017]

That was in March. What's changed since then? Not that much. Here's a report from just 6 days ago:

…In a speech opening a three-week session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein observed the 50th anniversary of when he "first heard the sound of war" as a boy in Amman, Jordan. He said Palestinians were now marking "a half-century of deep suffering under an occupation imposed by military force" and marked by "systematic" violations of international law. Israelis also deserve freedom from violence, Zeid said, adding: "Maintain the occupation and for both peoples there will only be a prolongation of immense pain..." ["End of Israeli occupation would benefit both sides: UN right chief", Reuters, June 7, 2017]

And this from yesterday:

“The High Commissioner notes the repeated failure to comply with the calls for accountability made by the entire human rights system and urges Israel to conduct prompt, impartial and independent investigations of all alleged violations of international human rights law and all allegations of international crimes,” the report said. Zeid's report also noted “the State of Palestine's non-compliance with the calls for accountability and urges the State of Palestine to conduct prompt, impartial and independent investigations of all alleged violations of international human rights law and all allegations of international crimes.” The report looked set to ignite further debate at the U.N. Human Rights Council, where the United States said last week it was reviewing its membership due to what it calls a “chronic anti-Israel bias.” ["Israel, Palestinians have failed to prosecute war crimes: U.N.", Reuters, June 12, 2017]

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein first got our attention in April 2017. It was one of those cases we described above - a public figure lecturing others, in this case the authorities in Jordan where Prince Zeid (his other name) is (as we mentioned a few paragraphs up) a member of the royal Hashemite family.

We emailed a cluster of his senior staff people - this is the unedited full text:

April 4, 2017

Re: Extraditing Ahlam Tamimi 

We were pleased to see the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, speak forthrightly [link] four days ago about how states must (a) honor their treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.

Prince Zeid was addressing the failure of his own homeland, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in relation to a notorious fugitive from justice, the president of Sudan, who ought to have been arrested when he came to Jordan. 

We are the parents of Malki Roth who was murdered in 2001 in the horrific Hamas attack on women and children in a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. Malki was 15. Fourteen other people were killed and 130 terribly injured. 

The mastermind of the attack is a Jordanian woman. She was eventually arrested and confessed to all the charges. She was convicted on 15 counts of murder and was sentenced to multiple life terms. Her sentence was drastically commuted eight years later in the 2011 deal Israel made with the Hamas terrorist organization to secure the release of an Israeli captive. She has lived free in Jordan since then, proudly taking "credit" for the murders and basking in the status of celebrity. 

Our daughter was a US citizen. Under US law relating to acts of terror, her killer must face justice in the US. The US formally requested some time ago that she be extradited by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But Jordan has refused. The woman, Ahlam Tamimi, is subject to a US arrest warrant and appears on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. 

We are respectfully asking that the High Commissioner speak as clearly and forcefully to the King and government of his homeland, Jordan, about Tamimi as he did four days ago in that other matter. We ask him to tell Jordan that, in relation to Tamimi, it must (a) honor its treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.

We appreciate you conveying this to the High Commissioner.

Sincerely
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel

What happened next? Nothing. So we wrote to the same people a second time on April 6, 2017:

In case this slipped by. An acknowledgement of receipt would be appreciated. 

Then again:

Third try - sorry to note that we have no acknowledgement from any of you. In our view, the issue we have raised is a serious one, and the sort that ought to be addressed by the High Commissioner's office. With great respect to your roles and responsibilities, unless we have something from you today, we will assume no response is going to come and proceed accordingly.  

A few days later, this nice reply arrived:

Dear Ms and Mr Roth,
Thank you for your message and sorry for the delay in acknowledgement - I can assure you that all messages received by this office are taken seriously, with only one problem being that there are too many of them from across the world, with many serious crisis and violations still ongoing, and too few people and resources to handle all of them.
Your message is of course well received, including by the Executive Office of the High Commissioner (where I belong) and the MENA section of the Office. It will be given proper attention - I can assure in this - and you will receive a response upon due consideration.
With full understanding and sincere sympathy for your loss.
Kind regards,
Anton Nikiforov
Human Rights Officer
EDM
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

We waited until April 12, 2017 - a month and a half later - and sent this:

Dear Mr Nokiforev,
Consistent with your OHCHR's slogan, we sincerely support the idea of "Stand up for someone’s rights today" [that's the business slogan that appears on the OHCHR's website]. We hope today will be the day the High Commissioner conveys to Jordan the message we outlined in our letter to the Office of the High Commissioner of April 4. As you know, it has still gotten no response.
Sincerely,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel
(Grieving parents of Malki Roth) 

The kind Human Rights Officer didn't have an actual answer but replied nonetheless, and promptly - in fact the same day:

Dear Ms and Mr Roth,
Thank you for your support to our campaign worldwide. Your message is acknowledged and my response to you still stands. There is really no need to send reminders, all messages are taken seriously but they require proper consideration among many, many tasks and urgencies with inadequate resources to handle them all at the same time.
Sincerely,
Anton Nikiforov 

We felt sorry for the OHCHR whose annual budget for 2017 is US $253 million and which is beset with "many, many tasks and urgencies with inadequate resources to handle them". So we sat patiently and then sent this on May 28, a month and a half later, with copies to the same senior OHCHR people whom we had originally approached on April 4 and who were all otherwise engaged:

Dear Mr Nokiforev,
Six weeks after your last memo assuring us that we are not overlooked or forgotten, we think we are now privileged to have a fuller understanding of what OHCHR means by the word "someone" in your slogan "Stand up for someone’s rights today".
We again express the sincere hope that eventually, the High Commissioner will convey to Jordan the message we outlined in our letter to him of April 4 even though it has gotten no response.
But perhaps you or your colleagues copied on this email will acknowledge that OHCHR's silence until now speaks eloquently for itself.
We see ourselves free to now air this issue in public places.
Sincerely,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel
(Grieving parents of Malki Roth) 

No response so far from any of them. Those "urgencies" and the "many, many tasks" - which happily did not get in the way of the prince chastising his Jordanian friends over the matter of the Sudanese butcher all the way back on March 31, 2017 - seem to still be keeping the OHCHR team pre-occupied.

The bright side is we think we have a better gasp now of how the human rights industry sorts out its priorities. Bringing the murderers of Israeli children to justice does not rank all that high up, it turns out. We're very surprised by that.

If we're wrong, we hope Prince Zeid (in case he's reading this) or one of his staff people will still get back to us. But to be really frank, we're not holding our breaths.

10-Jun-13: Will appeasing Hezbollah work better now than it did with Nazi Germany?

Britain's pre-war prime minister Neville Chamberlin, engaging
in a catastrophic policy that made sense at the time
to many observers [Image Source: NY Times]

Death tolls don't attract readers. Unless you have a strategic stake in an ongoing war, you will likely avert your eyes (especially if you're mainly on the dying side, as opposed to the killing side) when the tally of dead in this conflict or that appears in the news.

Syria has been the site of an appalling state-sanctioned bloodbath for more than two years. When the UN stopped conducting its own death count there in January 2012, the senior UN human rights official Navi Pillay said the toll was more than 5,000. We went to the website of the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights earlier today. There [this page] they offer these heart-stopping updated numbers:

• People killed since the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad: 83,598
• Of whom the number of civilians killed is 74,993.
• Of that number of civilians, 8,393 are children and 7,686 are women. 
• The number tortured to death: 2,441.

Smaller, more human-scale numbers, are easier for some to visualize. So the same organization's home page gives these numbers for the deaths of just the past few days: Thursday June 6: 84. Wednesday June 5: 69. Tuesday June 4: 91.

Just numbers, true. But signifying dead humans and lost lives.

It's horrifying. But now please note that the leaders of Hezbollah, the Shi'ite Islamist terrorists based in Lebanon, want those numbers to become bigger and better. A Lebanese news source says its leaders vowed today

to continue to help Syrian President Bashar Assad in his two-year-old civil war against rebels, while insisting the party be involved in national government decisions... "We will not change our position on protecting our people and the backbone of the resistance [Syria] regardless of intensified pressure locally, regionally and internationally,” Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nabil Qaouk said... "The more the threats and the more the pressures are exerted on us, the more the spirit of the resistance and enthusiasm has flared..."

The bogus claim to be at the heart of something called 'resistance' has served Hezbollah well. It gets very substantial military training, weapons, explosives and money, as well as political, diplomatic and organizational aid, from Iran (Wikipedia). In fact, for all practical purposes it serves as an arm of the Iranian leadership. It gets additional cash, and support, from Shi'ites living in West Africa, the United States and the tri-border South American area where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet.

Hezbollah has not always been as open about the murderous role it is playing in the Syrian killing fields. Its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted to that role in a May 25, 2013 address that MEMRI also translated to English. Hezbollah "cannot stand idly by" he said, while the Syrian regime is embroiled in civil war. It was an admission that caused outrage in the non-Shi'ite parts of the Arab world, particularly in the Arab/Persian Gulf (we don't take sides in that naming battle), with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), convening in Saudi Arabia last Sunday, deciding (see Al-Watan newspaper) "to examine taking measures against Hizbullah's interests". As with most of Nasrallah's pronouncements, it was deliberate and calculated.

Hezbollah has become a so-called 'state within a state' in its native Lebanon, but has grown lethally active in other places too, particularly in Europe. Reuters pointed out a few days ago that while there are increasingly focused efforts to outlaw Hezbollah in Europe, this

would mark a major policy shift for the European Union, which has resisted pressure from Israel and Washington to do so for years. [Reuters]

One of the factors behind the push to blacklist the Shi'ites is a terror attack carried out this past summer in a Black Sea vacation resort called Burgas. A Bulgarian bus driver was killed, along with 5 Israeli tourists. 32 more were injured. A bomb exploded on their bus at Burgas airport, minutes after they flew in on an Israeli charter flight. Two Hezbollah "activists" were fingered along with an unfortunate third man who died while putting the bomb inside the bus. The intelligence forces of Bulgaria, Israeli and the US, as well as Europol, have said Hezbollah carried out the cold-blooded atrocity. They also believe Hezbollah's Iran-driven terrorism is on the move, spreading out to other parts of the world.

Though sober voices in Europe choose to deny this enlargement of the Hezbollah terror footprint, people closer to the action know better. As we noted here, the parliament of Bahrain, for instance, decided two months ago

to label the Lebanese militia a terrorist organization, the Lebanon-based news outlet Now Lebanon reported. Tensions have been high since Bahrain accused Hezbollah of seeking to overthrow its government in 2011 ["26-Mar-13: Hezbollah is declared "terrorist group" by Bahrain's parliament"]

Also in March, a criminal court in Cyprus convicted a Hezbollah man on terrorism charges ["21-Mar-13: First conviction of Hezbollah terrorist in a European court"].

And last week, the editorial writers at (wait for this) the Saudi Gazette, said

Hezbollah needs to be seen for the ruthless terrorist organization that it really is

which we think wraps things up quite accurately.

But, sadly, not for the Europeans. A few days ago

A British request to blacklist the armed wing of Hezbollah ran into opposition in the European Union on Tuesday, with several governments expressing concern that such a move would increase instability in the Middle East [Reuters].

It goes on to say that "several EU governments questioned whether there was sufficient evidence to link Hezbollah to the attack in Bulgaria" and that there were 

"concerns that such a move would complicate the EU's contacts with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is part of the coalition government, and could increase turmoil in a country already suffering a spillover of civil war from Syria... More discussions on the issue will be held in Brussels in the next two weeks, with a decision possibly taken by the end of the month, diplomats said.

Italy's Foreign Minister Emma Bonino says her government needs more evidence from Bulgaria. Also, that it is concerned for "the fragility of Lebanon", which may surprise some Italians. According to Herb Keinon at the Jerusalem Post, Israeli officials said last week that the Irish are playing a dominant role in the effort to protect Hezbollah. Ireland currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. In last Tuesday's working group discussion, the Irish pro-Hezbollah position was backed by Sweden and Finland.

Note that France, which has for years been one of the group covering Hezbollah's back in these efforts to outlaw the terrorists, has lately stopped objecting to blacklisting them. The French have said (presumably because they see the reports that many others do, including the Lebanese report we quoted above) that thousands of Hezbollah men are fighting alongside the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They are up to their arm-pits in gore and murder.

As for the Bulgarians, Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary Magazine a few days ago ["Hezbollah’s European Appeasers"], says

The new Bulgarian government, which is led by the country’s former Communist party, is now claiming they are no longer certain that Hezbollah was responsible for the Burgas attack. It should be noted that the Bulgarian switch is not the result of the emergence of new evidence about the attack or even a change of heart by Hezbollah, whose terrorist cadres are now fighting in Syria to try and save the faltering Bashar Assad regime, another Iranian ally. There is no more doubt today that Burgas was the work of Hezbollah than there was in the days after the attack when the identities of the terrorists were revealed. It is simply the result of a political party coming to power that is hostile to the United States and friendlier to Russia and therefore determined to undermine any effort to forge a united European response to Middle East-based Islamist terror.

Tobin makes articulately a point that we wish we had written:

International unity on terrorism is illusory. The willingness of some Europeans, whether acting out of sympathy for the Islamists or antipathy for Israel and the Untied States, to treat Hezbollah terrorists as somehow belonging to a different, less awful category of criminal than those who might primarily target other Westerners is a victory for the Islamists... The effort to appease Hezbollah is not only a sign of Russian influence but also a signal to Iran that many in Europe are untroubled by its terrorist campaign against Israel. That alone is worrisome. But, as history teaches us, the costs of appeasement are far-reaching. Those who are untroubled by Hezbollah’s murders of Jews in Bulgaria or Cyprus may soon find that the vipers they seek to ignore will one day bite them too.

Or to paraphrase Chamberlain's successor as prime minister, Winston Churchill: Europe has a choice between terrorism and shame. Choosing shame, it is likely to get terrorism too.

6-Oct-11: Can you understand how these diplomats live with themselves?

On Tuesday, the UN Security Council considered a resolution to condemn the brutal bloodbath being carried out for the past several months by the dictatorial Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad.

The targets of the despot are his fellow Syrian citizens. The Assad family have led their country to several military disasters but this one they're determined to win. The score until now: 2,900 dead Syrian civilians [source]. The BBC says 16 died in today's clashes alone, at the hands of the well-armed Syrian military forces.

Because this is how things work at the UN, the text of the UNSC resolution was already severely diluted ahead of the vote. It condemned “the grave and systematic human rights violations and the use of force against civilians by the Syrian authorities” but stopped short of imposing an arms embargo on the house of Assad. It called (such optimism!) for an immediate end to violence, support for fundamental freedoms, a lifting of media restrictions and unhindered access for human rights investigators. Powerful stuff, no doubt of it.

And predictably it was defeated in a UN vote.

Reason, once again, for Syrian
dictator and sociopath Bashir al-Assad
to rejoice

The ambassadors of China and Russia exercised their right to veto, bringing the initiative to a screeching halt. Given their history in the Security Council, this was appalling but not surprising. What was a bit less expected, and simply sickening, were the abstentions from India, Brazil and South Africa. The non-permanent members, and the years in which they have to exit, are Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011), Germany (2012), Portugal (2012), Brazil (2011), India (2012), South Africa (2012), Colombia (2012), Lebanon (2011), Gabon (2011), Nigeria (2011). Little was expected from Lebanon which everyone knows is essentially a Syrian puppet. (The five permanent UNSC members are China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each of them has a right of veto in the Security Council.)

So what can be learnt from this?

One commentator called the debacle "a sad example of the failure of the world’s large emerging democracies to live up to their domestic values and assume the responsibilities of power". Sounds a touch ambitious to us. The US State Dept's spokesperson said yesterday the US leadership "obviously consider that the Security Council failed yesterday to address the urgent moral challenge... History will bear out which nations were right and which were on the wrong side in this vote yesterday.” Fighting words. It's a huge comfort for Israel's citizens to know that the absurd decisions made by the world's parliament year after year are going to eventually be judged by "history".

The Syrians are not only known for being great fighters. They also possess a keen sense of humour. Otherwise how to explain their decision this past May to compete for a seat on the UN's Human Rights Council as one of four Asian delegates? Better than most, they knew the UN General Assembly - which does the voting - has a proclivity for granting membership to dictatorships with a history of violence against their people.

Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review for more than 30 years, once said: "If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it."

He must be turning in his grave.