If it wasn’t for David Littman and UN Watch and perhaps one or two more people like that of whom I am unaware, not only would the UN be an anti-Israel Witch hunt, but most would never know it.
Category Archives: UN HRC
UN Watch busts Syria in modern blood libel
Transcript below the fold
Vlad Tepes interviews Bat Ye’or
Our humble blog had the great opportunity on Monday to interview Bat Ye’or, Sam Solomon, and David G. Littman when they were in Ottawa to speak at an IFPS-Can joint event with the Fred Litwin’s Free Thinking Film Society.
With great thanks to them, here is part one of two of the interview with Bat Ye’or
U.N. Watch speaks to condemnation of Israel
David G. Littman: 25 years at the UN Human Rights bodies. A retrospective:
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.
John Robson on ‘Human Rights Commissions’
UN Watch tells it like it is.
This is poetry. Thank you Hillel.
Goldstone Altered UN Letterhead to Hide Report’s Tainted Origins
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 →
David G. Littman at the UN HRC. Stunning expose of the UN
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:
David G. Littman UN-HRC on female genital mutilation
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
From the NY Daily News:
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.
David Littman reminds the UN-HRC what ‘refugee’ means.
UN rights body narrowly passes Islamophobia resolution
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 →
David Litman silenced by UN HRC for raising an actual Human Rights issue
Islamic group boasted: “We created the Goldstone Report”
From UN Watch:
In a few weeks, on January 12, 2010, we will mark the one-year anniversary of the UNHRC resolution that commissioned the Goldstone Report. Who was pulling all the strings? Who created Goldstone’s “fact-finding” mission?
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which controls the UNHRC, is not shy, and, in many ways, is far more honest about this than Goldstone. Here’s what OIC secretary-general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told Al Jazeera in October:
Let me first start by completing the story of the history of the Goldstone report. What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.
On January 3, during the attacks on Gaza, we convened the executive committee of the OIC on a ministerial level. It was decided that the OIC group in Geneva should ask the Human Rights Council to convene and consider the possibility of sending a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
The OIC was instrumental in getting through this resolution and thanks to the good offices of Ms Pilay, the UN high commissioner, that she formed this fact-finding mission headed by Judge Goldstone.
On October 8, I visited Geneva and had a meeting with OIC ambassadors and the high commissioner. We revived the process again and the Goldstone report has been approved by the rights council.