Category Archives: United Nations

David G. Littman: 25 years at the UN Human Rights bodies. A retrospective:

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This is some compelling watching. David G. Littman himself speaks on some of his impressions in new interviews on his eperiences in the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies, and the extraordinary degree of obfuscation and other tactics used by the various members of the UN to avoid any discussion of actual human rights.

This is some compelling watching. There is more interviews on this with Mr. Littman to come, but this is the second in his retrospective on the UN.

Enjoy

Untitled from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

Goldstone Altered UN Letterhead to Hide Report’s Tainted Origins

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Analysis and Commentary from UN Watch in Geneva
May 10, 2010 — Issue 230

The UN Human Rights Council, dominated by dictatorships like China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, concluded its last session by once again turning a blind eye to millions of victims of human rights violations in 187 countries, including of the well-documented repression and killings this year in Iran, China, and Nigeria.

The 47-nation council instead devoted an inordinate amount of its limited time and diplomatic resources to resolutions targeting Israel, texts that effectively legitimized Hamas terrorism. In particular, the council adopted a new resolution to perpetuate the Goldstone Report — a deeply flawed and one-sided text that rejected any Israeli self-defence as an act of “futility” — by creating a new UN committee of so-called legal experts that will keep the Hamas-supported accusations alive in future reports; requiring the UN rights chief to raise the report in future sessions; and establishing a new escrow fund for Palestinian victims of last year’s Israel-Hamas war, but not for any Israeli victims — not the dead and wounded from more than 10,000 rocket attacks, and not for the hundreds of thousands of traumatized citizens.

Following is the UN Watch speech during the Goldstone Report debate, as delivered by Cindy Tan, 2009-2010 Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fellow at UN Watch. Ms. Tan’s earlier testimony on her family’s suffering in the Cambodian genocide can be viewed here

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UN Human Rights Council, 13th Regular Session
Agenda Item 7: “Follow-up to Special Sessions (S-12/1 and S-9/1)”
UN Watch Testimony delivered by Cindy Tan

Thank you, Mr. President.

Resolution S-9/1, under which we meet today to once again discuss the Goldstone Report, was adopted on 12 January 2009. This was the text that established the fact finding mission, focused only on alleged Israeli crimes, and declared Israel guilty from the start—of “massive violations.”

At the same time, the Goldstone Mission, all must admit, adopted a curious attitude toward its founding resolution.

In Annex II of the Goldstone Report we see the following. On 3 April 2009, the day he was named to head it, Judge Goldstone’s first act was to write to Israel under the following letterhead: “Human Rights Council International Independent Fact Finding Mission Established by Resolution S-9/1.” Continue Reading →

Canada deplores Iran’s election to the UN Commission on the Status of Women

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From PressTV

Iran seat on UN panel irks Canada
Sun, 02 May 2010 02:39:11 GMT
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon
Iran’s election to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), an influential panel that promotes women’s rights, has irked Canada.

In a Saturday statement, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said there were “serious concerns” with Iran’s election to the UNCSWat the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

On Thursday, the UN announced that Iran, along with 10 other countries, had been elected to the high-profile UNCSW for the term beginning in 2011.

The UNCSW seeks to ensure women’s rights by investigating nations that violate women’s rights, monitoring their efforts in improving women’s equality and detailing their shortcomings.

“It is the Government of Canada’s understanding that Iran was acclaimed as a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women as part of an uncontested slate endorsed by the Asian regional group, of which Canada is not a member,” he said.

“We deplore this development but will use Iran’s membership on this body to take the Iranian authorities to task for their systemic human rights violations,” he added.

Rejecting allegations of human rights violations, Iran blames Western countries for most of the abuses and rights violations that happen around the world.

“Those who claim to be the top advocates of human rights start wars and kill millions of people,” President Ahmadinejad has said.

Canada’s government is currently struggling with the parliament over documents that could implicate Canada in torture of Afghan detainees while in American custody.

Ahmadinejad has also said that freedom of expression and freedom of religion were integral parts of Iranian culture.

Iran’s civilization and culture dates back to 2500 years ago, when “Cyrus the Great put an end to slavery,” he has said, drawing a comparison with the US, where slavery has only been abolished for 180 years.

MJ/MMN

Islamic roots of the African slave trade. Fighting fiction with facts

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Here is a video of Farrakhan spouting unfounded unsubstantiated historical revisionism about Jewish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. This is pretty clear as to what it is. Again, it is just a guy holding a book and ranting. The facts of course are that Jewish people marched with Martin Luther King and where first and foremost in the civil rights movement in the US. Then below, please watch the expertly researched documentary on the Arab-Islamic roots of the African slave trade. The facts are clear and in good evidence.

H/T to Bad Faun for the Farrakhan vid

replacing another video that was taken down

David G. Littman at the UN HRC. Stunning expose of the UN

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Here is a rather amazing bit of video showing the depth of corruption of the UN-HRC, and the extent to which the OIC (organization of the Islamic Conference) basically runs an extortion racket at the UN with threats, and of course, subversion of the democratic process through voting blocks of totalitarian and Muslim states.

This is about 22 minutes, but worth watching more than once. As the guy who edited this video, I have now seen it probably a dozen times or more and each time I find something else in it which is quite startling. Littman is a brave and tenacious man for being able to deal with these people on an ongoing basis.

There is of course, a great deal of information about these exchanges which I could not possibly put in the video or it would be more of a book than a movie. So David G. Littman has written up some of the additional information in essay form.

The section where you do not hear Egypt, was redacted. We managed to get the transcription and put what he said back in. But what he did say, that he didn’t care about the results of any vote but that a discussion of sharia law was not going to happen, was such a flagrant sign of Islamic supremacy, that even he realized he should remove it from the official record.

All in all, the UN-HRC is so broken, that it should be closed down as clearly is it beyond repair. John McCain was right when he suggested abandoning the UN and creating a new thing with the G8 + India and Brazil.

The essay is below the fold:

Continue Reading →

David G. Littman UN-HRC on female genital mutilation

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FGM: ‘traditional practice’ in 32 countries, of which 29 are OIC States — 3 million girls mutilated worldwide each year, 95% of Egyptians

Comments by David G. Littman, NGO Representative at the UN in Geneva:
Association for World Education and World Union for Progressive Judaism
Oral statement (from UN webcast below the fold) reproduced verbatim below Continue Reading →

Propagating hate: Despicable UN rights council breathes life into blood libel

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From the NY Daily News:

Editorials

Propagating hate: Despicable UN rights council breathes life into blood libel

Monday, March 29th 2010, 4:00 AM

The grotesquely misnamed United Nations Human Rights Council has topped its own high standard of absurd lies about Israel – this time resurrecting the medieval blood libel against Jews with a medical twist.

The council has posted on its Web site a venomous letter from an anti-Israel organization called EAFORD, the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which is just as grotesquely misnamed as the council itself.

EAFORD, a nonprofit founded in Libya and granted UN accreditation in 1981, has one consuming obsession: to brand Israel a criminal state.

EAFORD’s statement, with the council’s imprimatur, accuses Israel of plucking organs of “dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians” in a conspiracy involving “Israeli physicians, medical centers, rabbis and the Israeli Army.”

Such is the nature of the Human Rights Council. It legitimizes outrageous, inflammatory lies about Israel while ordering Hillel Neuer of UN Watch to refrain from using the word “regime” when talking about Iran. It ceaseslessly attacks the only democracy in the Middle East while turning a blind eye to genocide, female genital mutilation and human trafficking elsewhere.

Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom, begins at sundown tonight. This would be the perfect time for the Obama administration, which has suffered from the delusion that the council can be reformed, to call it out for the hatemongering farce that it is.

UN rights body narrowly passes Islamophobia resolution

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GLOBALNEWS… GENEVA – The UN Human Rights Council on Thursday narrowly passed a resolution condemning Islamophobic behaviour, including Switzerland’s minaret building ban, despite some states’ major reservations.

The resolution, which was criticized by the United States as “an instrument of division”, “strongly condemns . . . the ban on the construction of minarets of mosques and other recent discriminatory measures.”

In a November referendum Swiss citizens voted to ban the construction of new minarets, a move that drew criticisms worldwide.

Such measures “are manifestations of Islamophobia that stand in sharp contradiction to international human rights obligations concerning freedoms of religions,” said the resolution.

Such acts would “fuel discrimination, extremism and misperception leading to polarization and fragmentation with dangerous unintended and unforeseen consequences,” it charged.

Some 20 countries voted in favour of the resolution entitled “combating defamation of religions”, 17 voted against and eight abstained.

The resolution also “expresses deep concern . . . that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” Continue Reading →

« UN Human Rights Council slams Israel in 4 resolutions NGO Urges UN to Stop Circulating ‘Israeli Organ Blood Libel’

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UN Watch

– at March 25, 2010 in EAFORD, Goldstone “Fact Finding” Mission for UNHRC, GONGOs and Libya.

UN Watch Calls on UN Rights Chief to Stop Distributing Anti-Semitic Statement During Debate on Goldstone Report

Geneva, March 24, 2010 – UN Watch, the Geneva-based watchdog organization, today called on the president of the UN Human Rights Council and the High Commissioner for Human Rights to stop circulating an “anti-Semitic” text that accuses Israeli doctors of scheming to steal Palestinian organs. The statement by the Libyan-linked group EAFORD was posted by the UNHRC on its Agenda for debate on the Goldstone Report. The UN Watch protest letter follows below.

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Amb. Alex Van Meeuwen, President of the Human Rights Council
Ms. Navanethem Pillay, High Commissioner for Human Rights
United Nations European Headquarters
Geneva, Switzerland

March 24, 2010

Dear Mr. President,
Dear Madam High Commissioner,

As a human rights NGO dedicated to combating racism, UN Watch is alarmed to discover that the UN Human Rights Council, together with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has, however unwittingly, helped to propagate an anti-Semitic blood libel by publishing it as an official United Nations document (A/HRC/13/NGO/23), which is now being distributed to country delegates — under the same Agenda Item in which they will soon vote on the Goldstone Report.

We call upon you to immediately cease circulating this racist, hateful and inflammatory text to the ambassadors and other delegates of the Human Rights Council; to gather up and destroy all existing copies; and to remove it from the Human Rights Council website.

The document in question is A/HRC/13/NGO/23, entitled “Israeli Illegal Trafficking in Organs of Dead and Kidnapped Palestinian Victims.” It was submitted by the “International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination,” also known as EAFORD. As shown on its website (http://www.eaford.org/), the raison d’etre of this UN-accredited organization is to accuse Israel of being a racist state. (The website also links to a video on U.S. action in Iraq, which it describes as a “Holocaust.”)

The statement begins by accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing and massacres,” creating the “largest open-air prison in the world,” perpetrating “economic genocide,” and having “let loose hordes of marauding gangs of Israeli illegal settlers” in order to “launch pogroms against Palestinians.”

It then proceeds to the principal charge: “Now it is the turn of the dead, kidnapped and killed Palestinians. Their human organs, as reported in the press, can be a source of immense wealth through illegal trafficking in the world market. Israeli physicians, medical centers, rabbis and the Israeli army may be involved, according to reports published in the Swedish press and criminal investigations in the United States.”

It goes on: “After Israeli physicians remove organs they think marketable, the soldiers bury the bodies in graves that carry only numbers and no names, or place them in sealed caskets and deliver them under curfew conditions to the families and supervise the digging of the graves and burial.”

Finally, the statement concludes by calling on “physicians, medical centers and associations everywhere to condemn and boycott Israeli physicians and medical centers.”

Your Excellencies, the accusation that the Jewish state and its doctors are engaged in a racist campaign to steal Palestinian organs has no basis in fact or reality, and is nothing less than the repackaging of the medieval blood libel that was used over centuries to incite anti-Semitic hatred, violence and pogroms against Jews.

The United Nations cannot allow itself to aid or abet such blatant incitement to racism. Given that the Office of the High Commissioner carefully screens all submissions before deciding to publish them-indeed, our own submissions to this session were edited to remove certain words referring to regimes such as Iran and Libya-we are deeply disappointed that this hateful text was accepted for publication as an official UN document, and that it is now being distributed as such within the Human Rights Council chamber.

We urge you to take immediate action in accordance with the principles of human rights, equality and anti-racism upon which the United Nations was founded.

Respectfully,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland