Congress Laying Groundwork to Boycott U.N. Body After Rash of Anti-Israel Measures

Congress is laying the groundwork to remove America from a United Nations human rights body that lawmakers claim uses American taxpayer funds to unduly target Israel for criticism and promote anti-Semitism, according to officials familiar with the effort.

A new congressional resolution gathering support among lawmakers calls out the U.N. Human Rights Council, or UNHRC, for what many allege is its virulently anti-Israel bias and urges the body to enact massive reforms or face a cut off of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is spearheading the resolution, which puts the UNHRC on notice that its targeting of Israel could lead the United States to remove itself from the body and to consider cutting off some $23 million in funding.

The effort comes amid a push by not just the UNHRC but also a number of other U.N.-affiliated bodies to target Israel for criticism and promote boycotts of the Jewish state, an effort that many describe as anti-Semitic in nature.

The UNHRC was created in 2006, but the United States did not join the organization until 2009, when former President Barack Obama came into office.

The organization has long faced accusations of anti-Israel bias for having what many describe as an obsessive focus on the Jewish state. While the organization is tasked with promoting human rights across the globe, it has issued a record 78 condemnations of Israel in past years, while ignoring abuses by countries such as Iran, China, and Russia.

"The American people need to know this particular council has incredibly condemned Israel 78 times and North Korea nine times, and has never condemned the authoritarian conduct of China or Russia," Wilson told the Washington Free Beacon. "It has targeted Israel more than any other country."

By continuing to be a member of the UNHRC, the United States is "giving complicity to the outrageous conduct," Wilson said.

The UNHRC most currently took up an effort to target U.S. companies that do business with Israel and to push them into cutting ties, an effort that fits in with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), a global campaign to wage economic war on Israel.

Anne Bayefsky, a human rights scholar and head of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, said the U.N. efforts to blacklist American companies doing business with Israel is reason enough to withdraw from the organization.

"The fact that the U.S. taxpayer–with congressional backing–paid for the production of a U.N. report purporting to tell U.S. companies with whom they can do business, and more specifically to direct them to boycott Israel, is scandalous," Bayefsky told the Free Beacon. "Obviously, this report alone should have been reason enough to resign from the Council, and withdraw financial support from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that produced it, effective immediately."

"Putting it in context with the lack of attention to nations such as North Korea, where you have more starvation and torture and the ultimate totalitarian regime, where you have in Cuba a lack of freedoms and the abuses of human rights and dignity, and sadly this particular council has focused I believe in a very anti-Semitic and anti-Israel way of focusing condemnations on the democracy of Israel," Wilson said.

Current UNHRC members include countries such as Rwanda, Qatar, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among many others where human rights abuses take place daily.

The latest congressional measure "condemns the United Nations Human Rights Council's actions as wasteful and abusive," according to a copy of the resolution, which also backs U.S. efforts to expand laws preventing boycotts of Israel.

"My view is it is so off base that we should make every effort to reform it or withdraw" from the organization, Wilson told the Free Beacon.

The resolution demands the UNHRC stop singling out Israel and enact a series of reforms to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not being spent on an anti-Semitic agenda.

Asked if the Obama administration had any success in reforming the UNHRC by becoming a member, Wilson bristled, saying the organization has become even more focused on condemning Israel since the United States joined.

"It really is sad by the thought of joining it you'd be able to reform," he said. "It did not. And from my perspective it gave it undue credibility. The best way to address a rogue organization is not to be a member, but to withdraw. I would hope at some time we'd withdraw."

Mary Robinson headed the Jew Hate U.N. Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa.

She declared it a success after it was over.

One of Obama’s first acts as new US president was to give Mary Robinson the US medal of Freedom, giving his stamp of approval to her cultivation of international Jew Hate.

Mary Robinson gave hate a megaphone

BY RABBI ABRAHAM COOPER Tuesday, August 11, 2009
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mary-robinson-gave-hate-megaphone-article-1.400661

Today, as President Obama bestows the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, I will be thinking of my father, the late Isaac Cooper. He, unlike his son, was a saintly man who always strove to find the good in each person. As a youngster, I came to understand, however, that when my father couldn’t find something good to say, he would murmur: “He means well.”

Well, Mary Robinson is no anti-Semite. And as president of Ireland she achieved many important things. But her signature moment in history came when, as chairwoman of the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, she allowed the conference to be hijacked by extremist groups. The meeting devolved into an ugly anti-American and anti-Semitic debacle and gravely wounded the cause of human rights.

Durban was no big tent of tolerance. Rather, it was a launching pad for demonizing the United States, Israel and any Jews with the audacity to openly identify themselves as Zionists.

A few ugly incidents still cling to my psyche:

* Each nongovernmental organization, or NGO, was invited to set up a booth. In a presentation that would have brought tears of joy to the eyes of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a Cairo-based lawyers group proudly displayed scores of political cartoons depicting Israelis as Nazis or subhumans.

* As a CNN reporter posed a question at our caucus’ news conference, 40 Muslim women from Iran burst in and physically tried to stop our event.

* On Friday, Durban’s chief of police gently but firmly urged us not to attempt to walk the 21/2 blocks from the conference to the Jewish Community Center. “I cannot guarantee your safety,” he told me. Outside, there were 17,000 anti-Zionist protesters, some of whom held up the banner: “Hitler Was Right!”

* The ill-fated “final NGO document” that Robinson was supposed to hand to then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, replete with anti-Israel invective, did have one reference condemning firebombing attacks against synagogues in France. But the reference was deleted when a delegate from the World Council of Churches rose at the closing plenary to ask, “What does an attack on a synagogue have to do with racism?”

We Jews left the big tent that night to the whistles and catcalls of some and the utter silence of too many of the human rights elites. Hate, not hope, had carried the day.

Sadly, the seeds of this debacle were planted by Robinson herself, when she approved a key conference preparatory meeting for Tehran. She assured the Jewish leaders and others attending the conference that we would be welcomed to participate. But visas for the Baha’i or members of the Wiesenthal Center did not arrive in time. While she protested the regime’s double cross, she welcomed the “consensus” of a productive meeting between civilizations at the Tehran meeting. She urged delegates to continue their fight against racism. As for the abuse against Israel, all Robinson would say was that “the situation in the Palestinian-occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final declaration.”

The internationally sanctioned Israel/apartheid ambush was ready to roll.

Robinson just doesn’t get it. Global human rights dialogue has been debased on her watch. The late Holocaust survivor and human rights crusader Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) told me as much just before he announced that he and U.S. diplomats, who shlepped to Durban to try to forge a compromise, were leaving in protest.

Jewish groups decry Obama’s choice of Ireland’s Mary Robinson for award

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/07/nation/na-obama-jews7

Spotty Coverage of Mary Robinson’s Role in Durban Hate Fest

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=2&x_article=1706

Media coverage of Pres. Barack Obama’s decision to give a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Aug. 12, 2009 to Mary Robinson, who organized the UN conference on racism that took place in Durban, South Africa in 2001, has often been superficial or even non-existent.

Responsible journalists need to take an unflinching look at her part in organizing the infamous Durban conference and its impact on the prospects for peace in the Middle East. The conference proved to be a watershed event in the ongoing campaign to demonize the Jewish state in the Middle East.

When President Barack Obama issued a list of 16 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 30, 2009, it included Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland. In addition to serving as the first female president of Ireland, she served as former United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, holding this post from 1997 to 2002.

During her stint at the UN, Robinson laid the groundwork for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance which became the scene of one of the most notorious explosions of anti-Semitism in decades.

ZOA Urges UC Berkeley To Cancel Honoring Israel-Basher Mary Robinson

https://zoa.org/2011/09/103081-zoa-urges-uc-berkeley-to-cancel-honoring-israel-basher-mary-robinson/

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