A Tyrants' Club Obsessed With Israel

"Israel is the only UN member not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies. So while membership of the UN Human Rights Commission now includes Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Syria -- four of the seven states designated as state sponsors of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department -- Israel cannot even be a candidate." (Anne Bayefsky, The Globe and Mail, Apr 26, 2002)

UN refuses to condemn anti-Semitism

One interpretations of human rights is found in the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 'International Bill of Human Rights'; the other is the 1990 'Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam', approved by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which conforms to Islam and the Shariah. This ambiguity derails the UN's so-called "international legality" since 56 Muslim member states abide to Muslim, and therefore to religious-political principles-- in contradiction to Western secular laws.

Unequal UN mandates for refugees in the world: Palestinians vs. all others
20th century: 135 million refugees, less than 0.5% were Arab Palestinians
UNHCR mandated for 20 million refugees worldwide - except "UNRWA's"
UNRWA aids only Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria & Lebanon
UNRWA upgraded Palestinians internally displaced in 1948 to "refugees"
UNRWA upgraded also the descendants of these IDPs to "refugees"
UNRWA's Palestinian "refugees" multiplied due to natural population growth from 914,000 in 1950 to over four million in 2002.
In another 52 years (that is 104 years after their ancestors fled Israel), about 17.5 million descendants of Palestinians will qualify for UNRWA "refugee" status (given the same UNRWA definitions and the same natural increase).

Unequal UN staff members per refugee: Palestinians vs. all others
UNHCR (non-Palestinians): 1:3,582,
UNRWA (Palestinians): 1:165 (+2,000%)

"Constitution" of Arafat's Fatah (Fatah official website, Sep 20, 2003):
Article (6): UN projects, accords and resolutions, or those of any individual country which undermine the Palestinian people's right in their homeland are illegal and rejected.
Article (22): Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine, as well as any project intended to liquidate the Palestinian case or impose any international mandate on its people.

Hamas Charter, article 13 (Palestine Center website, Aug 9. 2003): “[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith … There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility. The Palestinian people are too noble to have their future, their right and their destiny submitted to a vain game.”

Map printed by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities with a special grant provided by the United Nations through their "UNDP" office in Jerusalem, as stated. Israel does not exist on this map. A UN Agency has obliterated a UN member.

Israel's second-class status at the UN (Anne Bayefsky, National Pos, Feb 18, 2003):
"In fact, the only remaining elected Israeli on a UN body anywhere is Mayer Gabay, vice-chair of the UN Administrative Tribunal -- whose term ends in December of this year and who is not permitted by general rules concerning time limits to stand for re-election.

By contrast, Egypt has members on all six of the UN human rights treaty bodies. In fact, the Egyptian candidate for the Committee on the Rights of the Child was elected with the highest number of votes by the 191 parties to the Child Convention. This is despite the fact that the leading child rights international NGO (based in Geneva) put out an advisory to countries before the vote. It said: "NGOs feel that she is not very knowledgeable nor reliable on the issues ... due to her strong affiliation and history with the Egyptian government." Translation: When countries of interest to Egypt are considered by the committee, an Egyptian government official sits close to the "independent" Egyptian member just to make sure they get it right.

Israel is also the only UN member state denied membership in any of the UN's five regional groups, which elect UN bodies in Geneva. Elections in the UN are normally based on regional representation or slates prearranged by regional groups. Israel qualifies for membership in the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), composed of geographically diverse states including Canada and Australia. But WEOG, driven by states such as France, refuses to admit Israel to its Geneva operations. This has the consequence that Israel cannot be elected to a whole range of UN bodies. For instance, Israel cannot stand for election to WIPO -- the World Intellectual Property Organization. Similarly, Israel is prevented from running for the International Labour Organization's Governing Body.

Lacking UN regional group membership in Geneva means that Israel is the only UN member forced to sit out consultations on draft resolutions and UN Geneva-based business of all kinds. Israel is refused any possibility of participating in the consultations of regional bodies in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development the World Health Organization. The meetings behind closed doors of regional groups at the Commission on Human Rights negotiate the language of resolutions on all subjects without any Israeli participation. In recent years, Sweden and Co. in the European Union have enjoyed negotiating an agreed-upon level of hostility on the myriad anti-Israel resolutions with Arab states on the commission, before Israeli diplomats got a copy of a first draft."

The U.N.'s Dirty Little Secret. The international body refuses to condemn anti-Semitism (Anne Bayefsky, Wall Street Journal, Dec 8, 2003): "A draft resolution on anti-Semitism--which would have been a first in the U.N.'s 58-year history--was withdrawn in the face of Arab and Muslim opposition."

AIPAC: "Israel is the only country in the world that is not eligible to sit on the Security Council, the principal policymaking body of the U.N. This situation violates the principle of the “sovereign equality of all member states” of the U.N. under Article 2 of the U.N. Charter."

Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) official website, Sep 6, 2003: "... is an inter-governmental organization grouping fifty-six States. These States decided to pool their resources together, combine their efforts ... in absolute priority, with liberating Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa from Zionist occupation."

The U.N.'s Israel Obsession (Davis Tell, The Weekly Standard)

A Tyrants Club. The U.N. Human Rights Commission is worse than a joke (Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal)

U.N., R.I.P. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Jan 31, 2003)

The UN gives hypocrisy a bad name (Shlomo Avineri, Jerusalem Post, Jan 28, 2003): Libya, a totalitarian, fundamentalist tyranny, has been elected to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Iraq, Israel and the United Nations. Double standards (Economist, Oct 10, 2002): " ... a quite distinct sort of claim is also made in the “double standards” debate. This holds that Israel stands in breach of Security Council resolutions in just the way Iraq does, and therefore deserves to be treated by the UN with equal severity. Not so."

Israel and Iraq: United Nations Double Standards – UN Charter Article 25 and Chapters VI and VII (Gerald M. Adler, LLM, JSD, Yale, Aug 20, 2003) (PDF, 320 KB)

Israelis are sitting ducks in war against terrorism (Anne Bayefsky, Chicago-Sun Times, Sep 19, 2003): "Arafat wrote in his letter of Sept. 9, 1993: 'The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators.' Why keep promises when you have the U.N.?"

Terror Stings Its Pal, the U.N. (Alan M. Dershowitz, Los Angeles Times, Aug 28, 2003): "There are numerous occupied peoples around the world seeking statehood or national liberation, including the Tibetans, Kurds, Turkish Armenians and Palestinians. Only one of these groups has received official recognition by the U.N., including observer status and invitations to speak and participate in committee work. That group is the one that invented and perfected modern international terrorism — namely, the Palestinians. These rewards were first bestowed in the 1970s when the Palestine Liberation Organization was unabashedly committed to terrorism. In fact, Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited to speak to the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 at a time when his organization was seeking to destroy a member-state of the U.N. by terrorism. By rewarding Arafat and the PLO for such behavior, the U.N. made it clear that the best way to ensure that your cause is leapfrogged ahead of others is to adopt terrorism as your primary means of protest. The Tibetans, whose land has been occupied more brutally and for a longer period than the Palestinians, but who have never practiced terrorism, cannot even receive a hearing from the U.N."

The U.N. can't define terrorism, let alone confront it (Anne Bayefsky, WSJ, Apr 28, 2003)

Genocide (Louis Rene Beres, FrontPageMagazine, Sep 4, 2003): "Readers of daily newspapers are now well acquainted with unending Palestinian calls for the annihilation of Israel. What might not be apparent, however, is that such calls - sometimes in the carefully whispered voice of the Palestine Authority, more often in the strident voice of PA accomplices in Hamas and other related terror groups - constitute an especially serious crime under international law. ... For example, the Fatah organization website still calls openly for the "eradication" of Israel. This call echoes earlier genocidal codifications in the still unchanged Palestinian National Charter, in Fatah's ongoing calls for Inqirad mujtama (the extinction of Israeli society), and in the Charter of Hamas ("There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad....I swear by that who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad! I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.")"

On Hating Israel. What we know but can't say out loud. (Victor Davis Hanson, NRO)

Ten Tips on How to Be an Arafat Apologist (Jamie Glazov, Frontpage Magazin, Apr 11, 2002)

 UN Arab Human Development Report 2002. Read/download the complete 178 pages report in one big file (5,209 KB) which the UN has commissioned from a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals: The GDP of all 280 million Arabs combined is less than what the 40 million inhabitants of Spain produce. Only about 300 books are translated annually for the 280 million people of the Arabic speaking world - this is 20% the number that are translated for the 10 million people of Greece!!! Freedom scores of ALL Arab states: Please don't ask ... Interestingly, while the category "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is included in practically ALL comparison tables of the report, most of the PALESTINIAN DATA IS MISSING. Why? One must conclude that the comparison of the Palestinian with the other Arabs' data would rather indicate that the Palestinians live in a paradise, compared with most other Arabs, and that the allegedly poor and desperate Israel-repressed Arabs in the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" are simply the richest, most educated, healthiest and freest Arabs in the neighborhood. However, the report reveals SOME of the Palestinian data: See for yourself that the allegedly poor and desperate Israel-repressed Arabs in the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" have the highest annual growth rate (4.78% p.a.) of ALL Arab states, and twice as high as the average of ALL neighboring states (Jordan: 2.90, Egypt: 1.82, Lebanon: 1.97, Syria 2.59). One must conclude that Israeli health care is good for Arab growth ... Number of frequently cited scientific papers per million people: Egypt: 0.02, Israel: 169 - this is 8,500 - eight thousand five hundred - times more than in Egypt, and 17,000 times more than Algeria. The rest is history ... So why does Palestinian society appear to be suicidal? That's a long story, but recall how highly advanced and sophisticated Germany and Japan tried very hard to destroy their neighborhoods and ended up disgracing themselves. The USA/GB liberated these people from their own dictators and their "occupation" resulted in democratic education, free press, free market etc. Within a decade, the German and Japanese people became higly respected partners and even allies of their former enemies.Complete 178 pages UN Arab Human Development Report 2002 (PDF, 4511 KB)
Tables of UN Arab Human Development Report 2002 (PDF, 128KB)
UN Arab Human Development Report 2003
Arab development. Self-doomed to failure (The Economist, July 4, 2002): "WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. It shook off its colonial or neo-colonial legacies long ago, and the countries that had revolutions should have had time to recover from them. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can. Across dinner tables from Morocco to the Gulf, but above all in Egypt, the Arab world's natural leader, Arab intellectuals endlessly ask one another how and why things came to turn out in this unnecessarily bad way. A team of such scholars (it is indicative of the barriers to freely expressed thought that there are almost no worthwhile think-tanks in the Arab world) have now spent a year putting their experience to diagnostic use in the “Arab Human Development Report 2002”, published this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)."
Human Development in the Arab World: A Study by the United Nations (Dr. Raphaeli)

United Nations Human Development Report 2003

The Refugee Curse (Daniel Pipes, The New York Post, August 19, 2003: "Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees?
Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.
Not so the Palestinians. For them, the refugee status continues from one generation to the next, creating an ever-larger pool of anguish and discontent.
Several factors explain this anomaly but one key component - of all things - is the United Nations' bureaucratic structure. It contains two organizations focused on refugee affairs, each with its own definition of "refugee":
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees applies this term worldwide to someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted . . . is outside the country of his nationality." Being outside the country of his nationality implies that descendants of refugees are not refugees. Cubans who flee the Castro regime are refugees, but not so their Florida-born children who lack Cuban nationality. Afghans who flee their homeland are refugees, but not their Iranian-born children. And so on.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization set up uniquely for Palestinian refugees in 1949, defines Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees. They are persons who lived in Palestine "between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." Especially important is that UNRWA extends the refugee status to "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." It even considers the children of just one Palestinian refugee parent to be refugees.
The High Commission's definition causes refugee populations to vanish over time; UNRWA's causes them to expand without limit. Let's apply each definition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who by the U.N.'s (inflated) statistics numbered 726,000. (Scholarly estimates of the number range between 420,000 to 539,000.)
The High Commission definition would restrict the refugee status to those of the 726,000 yet alive. According to a demographer, about 200,000 of those 1948 refugees remain living today.
UNRWA includes the refugees' children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as Palestinians who left their homes in 1967, all of whom add up to 4.25 million refugees.
The 200,000 refugees by the global definition make up less than 5 percent of the 4.25 million by the UNRWA definition. By international standards, those other 95 percent are not refugees at all. By falsely attaching a refugee status to these Palestinians who never fled anywhere, UNRWA condemns a creative and entrepreneurial people to lives of exclusion, self-pity and nihilism.
The policies of Arab governments then make things worse by keeping Palestinians locked in an amber-like refugee status. In Lebanon, for instance, the 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property or even improve their housing stock.
It's high time to help these generations of non-refugees escape the refugee status so they can become citizens, assume self-responsibility and build for the future. Best for them would be for UNRWA to close its doors and the U.N. High Commission to absorb the dwindling number of true Palestinian refugees."

UNRWA: "UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than four million in 2002, and continues to rise due to natural population growth."

Citizens for a Constructive UN
United Nothing
UNWatch

Index pages