The Always Reliable United Nations By Elliott Abrams —
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/433293/print
The United Nations, always fully reliable when it comes to hating Israel, has done it again. On March 14, I wrote at National Review Online about the coming selection at the U.N. Human Rights Council of a new “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” The selection has now been made, and the honor — as it were — goes to a Canadian named Michael Lynk.
Now, in the U.N., these hate-Israel jobs are important. You cannot take the risk that a selectee will be fair or balanced or unbiased. So you go for someone like Lynk.
For example, Lynk is a member of the advisory board of the “Canadian–Palestinian Education Exchange” (CEPAL), which promotes the “Annual Israeli Apartheid Week.” Three days after 9/11, he blamed the attacks on “global inequalities” and “disregard by Western nations for the international rule of law.” He signed a 2009 statement condemning Israel for alleged “war crimes” in Gaza. At the Group of 78’s annual policy conference in 2009, he said, as summarized in the group’s report, that he “used to think the critical date in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict was 1967, the start of the occupation.” Now he thinks that “the solution to the problem must go back to 1948, the date of partition and the start of ethnic cleansing.” In other words, Israel should not exist and its mere existence is a harbinger of ethnic cleansing and other crimes.
RELATED: The U.N. Sinks Further into the Anti-Israel Muck
U.N. Watch’s director correctly said last week that “the U.N.’s selection of a manifestly partisan candidate — someone who three days after 9/11 blamed the West for provoking the attacks on the World Trade Center — constitutes a travesty of justice and a breach of the world body’s own rules.”
Well, a travesty of justice, a breach of the U.N.’s own rules — and absolutely par for the course when it comes to the U.N. and Israel. In his press conference on the Human Rights Council’s session, which thank God is now over, the U.S ambassador to the U.N., Keith Harper, did not even mention this despicable appointment. (He did however, denounce, the “especially disturbing” resolution to set up a database of businesses operating in settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights. The resolution “only serves to reinforce the council’s one-sided actions against Israel” and exceeded the council’s authority, he said. Better than nothing, I guess.)
Lynk will never set foot in Israel or the Palestinian territories, because the Israeli reaction to this nonsense is to deny these “special rapporteurs” a visa. He can write his report in Ontario, and there will be no surprises in it: another in the long line of U.N. assaults on the Jewish State.
— Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.
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