Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the UN General Assembly, has pushed the delegitimization of Israel at the United Nations just that little bit further. One might also point out that, by claiming that Palestinians “are being crucified” by Israel, he’s pushed something else a little further too. (Or is one of our anti-Zionist detractors going to claim that calling such an invocation antisemitic is “shutting down debate?”)
For decades, the UN has enshrined the unique status of the Palestinians by providing them with an entire infrastructure of committees, conferences and endless resolutions which reinforce the “original sin” narrative of Israel’s creation. No other stateless or occupied people enjoys these privileges.
Speaking during the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People - which is how the UN marks its own 1947 resolution partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states - Brockmann said:
“More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a non-violent means of pressuring South Africa. Today, perhaps we in the United Nations should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel.”
As Eye on the UN points out, this statement marks a “gross abuse” of the office of the General Assembly President. Israel is a member state of the UN; no other member state is treated so grotesquely by an institution that is always quick to invoke the sovereignty rights of tyrannical regimes across the globe. “[W]ithin the UN,” I wrote in 2006, “implicit or even explicit questioning of Israel’s legitimacy as a state has become habitual.”
In that regard, Brockmann’s statement is consistent with the fact that, when it comes to Israel’s status at the UN, the Orwellian maxim that “some are more equal than others” prevails. Those who advocate quarantining the world’s only Jewish state will doubtless be enjoying the propaganda value - for that is all it is, given the functional irrelevance of the General Assembly - of his words.
In the meantime there is this report from The New Republic observes that:
“UN Bans “Defamation of Religion” in Islamic Bid to Curb Free Speech”
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2008/11/24/hooray-for-denmark.aspx#comments
“Geneva, November 24, 2008 — By a vote of 85 to 50, with 42 abstaining, the UN General Assembly today adopted a draft resolution calling on all countries to alter their legal and constitutional systems to prevent “defamation of religions,” asserting that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”
…
“This is just the latest shot in an intensifying campaign of UN resolutions that dangerously seek to import Islamic anti-blasphemy prohibitions into the discourse of international human rights law,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, an indpendent human rights monitoring group in Geneva.
“Human rights were designed to protect individuals — to guarantee every person free speech and free exercise of religion — but most certainly not to shield any set of beliefs, religion included.”
“These resolutions legitimize the criminalization of free speech in countries like Sudan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia,” said Neuer. “Muslim moderates, bloggers, women seeking basic freedoms — all of these will be the first to suffer from the worsening climate of state repression in the name of state-supported Islamic orthodoxy.”
“No less is today’s enactment aimed at the Western world, to intimidate anyone from criticizing radical Islam and those who commit violence in its name,” said Neuer.”
This Orwellian, on the one hand it’s ok for the UN general assembly to defame the Jewish State while on the other any criticism of Islam will be outlawed as ‘defamation.’
The aim of the UN to Islamicize itself has just been boosted, on the other hand the UN has just taken another step in the continuing process of delegitimizing itself as body which represents equally the rights of all of humanity religious or irreligious.
The UN at work!
“Banned UN Speech: “Human Rights Nightmare”"
Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 4:03:16 pm PST
Council president Luis Alfonso De Alba, denounces Neuer’s statement about the UN’s inability to deal with real human rights issues:
Courtesy of:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/24924_Banned_UN_Speech-_Human_Rights_Nightmare