Predictably Neutral

"His opinions against Israel are known to all, and prove without a doubt that Israel cannot expect justice from this body ... The report has already been written and the only question is who signs it."
Foreign Ministry statement, Canada

"[Mr. Schabas' appointment to head up a UN commission into Israeli 'war crimes' in Gaza is [a sham] ... an utter shame [that] will do nothing to promote peace and dignity in Gaza for the Palestinian people."
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Ottawa

"I think that when we look at all the crimes committed in Gaza during the conflict at the end of 2008-2009 we find that they are probably not, on a Richter scale of atrocity, at the top [of the scale of human-rights abuses], and there are many places in the world where worse crimes have been committed."
"Sri Lanka, for example, in March or April of 2009 was much more serious in terms of the atrocities and loss of life that was committed ... I think the reason why many people in the world are so upset about the atrocities in Gaza is not because of the bombardment of facilities in Gaza in January and in December of the last year but because of our unhappiness about the general political situation there. It is because the people of Palestine are still being denied their right of self-determination. And so, we mix our dissatisfaction with the situation of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank where we have this terrible wall that has been built and the settlements which continue being built even if [Barack] Obama has told [Benjamin] Netanyahu to stop. And certainly all these are a violation of international law and absolutely unacceptable."
"I believe that pretending the prosecution of Sudan [at the International Criminal Court is not political is a mistake, too. Of course it is political. Why are we going after the president of Sudan for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza? Because of politics."
"My favourite would be Netanyahu in the dock."
William Schabas, Canadian 'international human-rights law expert'

AP Photo/Jiri Bulle

The agreement by the United Nations Security Council to the legal and lawful and historical Partition of Palestine never occurred, nor did the initial combined Arab world's militaries attack the nascent State of Israel, nor did they do so again and again and again until 1967 put an end to it. And it's just as well that the Palestinian Liberation Organization, dedicated to recapturing from Israel the land they claim as theirs never existed, nor did their countless atrocities in airplane hijacking, or ships at sea, or the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Relentless suicide bombing attacks against civilian Israelis never took place, not in restaurants, shopping malls, crowded buses, nowhere at all, but in the febrile imaginations of Israelis crying out for protection against the virulent hatred of Palestinians toward Jews whom their leadership emphasized time and again had taken the land from Arabs. Good thing too, that Arab states in the Middle East detest and maltreat Palestinian 'refugees' since it's all Israel's fault.

So obviously, negating this history and that Gaza was left in 2005 to the Palestinians living there to do with as they would, it might have become a living breathing bombshell, but instead became completely pacified, Arab Palestinians learning through that process to live in harmony with their neighbours, declining politely to view them as alien interlopers whose existence must be destroyed. Since none of this expresses reality, Mr. Schabas knows of what he speaks, quite clearly.

It's great that Mr. Schabas has such a robust sense of humour, lumping Sudan's president, Omar al-
Bashir together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he knows perfectly well that despite the ICC identifying al-Bashir as a war criminal he remains in good odour with the Arab League and highly respected within the corridors of the United Nations' Muslim World League. Causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands black Sudanese is not seen as a crime in the Arab world.

And Mr. al-Bashir is undoubtedly hugely admired by his firm hand in dispatching the janjaweed, Arab horsemen to instill terror in the Darfurians, admired for their capacity to repeatedly gang-rape defenceless women and girls, then set about the slaughter with renewed gusto. Sudan's government also dispatched attack helicopters to murder as many fleeing Darfurians as they could manage, just to teach them a lesson about who rules Sudan.

Mr. Schabas appears to be a trifle confused over cause-and-effect, and has little background knowledge about the conflict between Israel and Hamas in particular; that one is the aggressor provoking the other to retaliate. It is not Israel that blasts rockets off with no provocation into Gaza with the direct intention of terrorizing the civilian population and if possible killing them. And in the process deliberately placing their launch pads directly in crowded civilian areas to ensure that answering fire will strike Gazans, representing a powerful public relations tool the international community responds to with condemnation, not against the aggressor but the defender of its people.

So, it's little surprising that the United Nations Human Rights Council has chosen the entirely neutral, utterly unbiased internationally renowned human-rights law expert Canadian William Schabas to produce a fairly predictable denunciation of the State of Israel for defending itself against the violence perpetrated against its people and the state by the psychopathic denizens of the Gaza Strip more than willing to sacrifice their own people to the greater goal of eliminating Israel from the Middle East.