Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Apartheid Palestine

Jihad Watch

Israel is not an apartheid state. Muslim Arabs are in the Knesset, and enjoy more rights there than they do in an Islamic state. The real apartheid is in Sharia states, where the oppression of women and non-Muslims is institutionalized.
"Apartheid Palestine?," by Ann Bayefsky in the Jerusalem Post, March 17 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
It is impossible to read this latest UN report, or to listen to its authors and its state sponsors, without knowing that the campaign to rid the world of Israeli settlements is a campaign to rid the world of Israel. On Monday, March 17 in Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council will hold a first-ever three-hour session devoted to the alleged human rights abomination known as the “Israeli settlement.” In the moral wasteland of the United Nations, a Jew living on Arab-claimed land is a violation of Arab human rights.
There were once an estimated 900,000 Jews across the Arab world, but today there are less than a few thousand. They were given a choice: die, convert or flee.
This was an Islamic phenomenon, not an Arab one. But otherwise Bayefsky's analysis is spot-on.

Now the 22nd Judenrein Arab state is in-the-making: Apartheid Palestine. Meanwhile, 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab, and free Arab citizens sit on the highest courts of the land, represent Israel abroad, and hold political office. An Arab living (and thriving) in the Jewish state is fulfilling a human right.
How does this obvious contradiction make it past the human rights geniuses at the UN?
The answer is almost as old as humankind: intolerance, xenophobia, bigotry and lawyers.
On the table in Geneva will be a report, produced by three lawyers carefully selected by the UN brass.
The first item of business brushed aside by these legal beagles was that the conclusion of their so-called “fact-finding mission” was decided before they ever got started. Their job description, laid out by the Human Rights Council, was “to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the... rights of the Palestinian people.” But the same resolution already says: “Affirming that the Israeli settlement activities... constitute very serious violations... of the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Then there was the irrelevant issue of the bias of the fact-finders.
Pakistani “expert” Asma Jahangir has already had numerous UN jobs (as has her sister Hina Jilani, one of four authors of the UN’s infamous Goldstone Report). In 2004, as UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Jahangir took the extraordinary step of issuing a special statement exclaiming she was “aghast at the planned and deliberate extrajudicial execution of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.”
When Israel killed Yassin’s successor, Abdul Aziz Rantissi – with zero civilian casualties – Jahangir “sent a communication to the Government of Israel” worried that Israeli helicopters had fired “into the civilian car of Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior Hamas political leader.” No matter that their terrible acts had led US authorities to name both men as “specially designated global terrorists,” or that as combatants in a war they were not entitled to judicial process.
French “expert” Christine Chanet is on record as having told a UN treaty body meeting in July 2010 that settlements impose “severe” impediments to Palestinian rights.
Her decisions as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee are also revealing. In 2001 she dissented when the Committee decided that a Jewish citizen of the Czech Republic had been denied equal protection of the law after Czech authorities failed to provide restitution for property plundered by the Nazis. Chanet reasoned that by deciding in favor of the Jewish victim, the Committee was wrongly “involving itself in the assessment of evidence by the domestic courts.”
But in 2004, Chanet dissented when the Committee decided not to pursue the complaint of a professor who alleged he was denied an academic promotion because of his perceived anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. In the case of the alleged anti-Jewish victim, Chanet reasoned in the opposite direction. She said the Committee erred in refusing to reassess the professor’s record of performance because the right answer was to “be determined not in the light of the complaint as made before a domestic court.”
The third judge, Unity Dow from Botswana, has been on the Executive Committee of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) since 2006, and was chairperson of the Executive Committee from June 2011 to June 2012. During that time, the ICJ played a leading role in pressing for and supporting the Goldstone report and its libelous accusation that Israeli defense forces deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these legal minds produced a report on settlements that looks like law but smells like rubbish....

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