By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist ——Bio and Archives--October 31, 2013
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“Qatar, one of the richest countries on the planet, will be hosting the World Cup in 2022. But much of the Gulf state's expansion is being built by some of the poorest migrant workers in the world. In the worst cases, employees are not being paid and work in conditions of forced labour. Each month dozens of young Nepalese migrant workers are returning home in coffins.”Concurrent with the Human Rights Council’s review of Israel’s human rights record under the Universal Periodic Review process, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights Richard Falk submitted his latest report to the UN General Assembly. Falk’s mandate comes from the very same Human Rights Council now sitting in judgment of Israel. Falk’s latest submission was typical of his one-sided reports during his six year mandate, which lay all the blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel’s shoulders. In remarks to UN correspondents discussing his latest report, he said that from a political and moral perspective Israel has practiced “systematic discrimination” that would “qualify as an instance of apartheid.” When asked about Hamas’s building of tunnels from Gaza into Israel, which was done to enable the carrying out of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, Falk first claimed that he didn’t know much about the tunnels and then proceeded to defend the tunnels as “an obvious response” to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. After lumping the terror tunnels into the category of reasonable resistance, Falk defended Hamas as having made “a concerted effort to adopt a political course of action.” He claimed that Hamas has made “offer after offer of peaceful co-existence with Israel” to last for as long as 50 years. “Resistance” is the code word used by jihadist groups like Hamas and their supporters, meant to justify their violence and distinguish it from terrorism. Falk himself illustrated this perverse logic in an Al Jazeera article last December, when he compared the Palestinian terrorists to resistance fighters against the Nazis during World War II:
“It gives perspective to imagine the situation being reversed as it was during the Nazi occupation of France or the Netherlands during World War II. Resistance fighters were uniformly perceived in the liberal West as unconditional heroes, and no critical attention was given as to whether the tactics used unduly imperiled innocent civilian lives. Those who lost their lives in such a resistance were honoured as martyrs…Hamas leaders have made similar arguments on several occasions, in effect asking what are Palestinians supposed to do in the exercise of resistance given their circumstances, which have persisted for so long, given the failures of traditional diplomacy and the UN to secure their rights under international law.”Contrary to Falk’s characterization of Hamas’s aspirations for peaceful co-existence with Israel, Hamas’s own leaders have laid bare their true agenda. Peace for them means Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state. "Palestinians have the right to resist Israeli occupation and will one day return to property they lost in 1948," Hamas's leader in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, said at a rally in 2011 to commemorate what the Palestinians refer to as the day of nakba (catastrophe). "Palestinians mark the occasion this year with great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine," he proclaimed. Israel is expected by Falk and the Human Rights Council that he represents to take the persistent terrorist threats it faces lying down. In the world inhabited by the hypocrites who denounce Israel while abusing the human rights of their own residents, Israel is expected to look the other way while the “resistance fighters” build their tunnels of terror and launch their rockets against Israeli civilians. Fortunately, while Israel was willing to play along with the meaningless Universal Period Review, it shows no inclination to drop its guard or to back away from defending its citizens with whatever means it deems necessary. Hopefully, this will remain true no matter what the UN Human Rights Council may think.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.