United Nations Human Rights Council

According to Human Rights Council resolution 5/1, Annex, the following general criteria will be of paramount importance while nominating, selecting and appointing mandate holders:
(a) expertise;
(b) experience in the field of the mandate;
(c) independence;
(d) impartiality;
(e) personal integrity;
and
(f) objectivity.
Due consideration should be given to gender balance and equitable geographic representation, as well as to an appropriate representation of different legal systems. Eligible candidates are highly qualified individuals who possess established competence, relevant expertise and extensive professional experience in the field of human rights.
Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon unveils the artistic new ceiling of a conference room of the United Nations Human Rights Council. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre.

In the current line-up of the UN Human Rights Council, among the 47 members appointed some stand out for their serious deficiencies in upholding human rights. There is Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, China, Congo, Cuba, Indonesia, Qatar, Russian Federation Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, a who's who of human rights-violating nations, all of whom sit in judgement on other countries' records of human rights violations.

Qatar financially supports the terrorist group Hamas. Russia has added to its own violations by co-opting a significant geographic area of a neighbouring country into its federation. Saudi Arabia's role in financing Wahhabist fundamentalist madrassas throughout the world is known to have led to an upsurge in Islamist terrorism. In Congo, government militias rape vulnerable women at their leisure. China's occupation of Tibet is a travesty.

The United Nations and its member commissions have distinguished themselves by their veneer of concern for human rights while systematically supporting countries that commit wholesale human rights violations, but who are recognized as stalwart human rights supporting nations nonetheless making them fit to sit on the Human Rights Council as sterling examples whose judgement on the recognition of human rights exercised by other countries is to be respected.

So these violators, in collusion with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation unfailingly and repeatedly single out the State of Israel for condemnation as an exemplar of Human Rights violations, while overlooking those countries of the world, the non-aligned and Islamic nations in particular whose practise of human rights violations is notorious, but officially unrecognized. From 1955 to 2013 no fewer than 77 UNHCR resolutions targeted Israel.

In that period, only one resolution passed naming the Palestinian Authority: Resolution 1435: "...‘calls on’ the Palestinian Authority to meet its expressed commitment to ensure that those responsible for terrorist acts are brought to justice by it." Somewhat lopsided to say the very least. Here' serious lopsidedness; the Syrian regime which has been found to have been responsible for 330,000 Syrian deaths, the homelessness of 7 million of its people, has had six resolutions passed against it for its prosecution of the Syrian Civil War.

Now, the United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed Michael Lynk "special rapporteur on  human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967". It has chosen well in line with its other choices. And while the UNHRC declares that "impartiality" and "objectivity" are of "paramount importance" in the selection of mandate holders, it has selected an anything-but-neutral political activist in violation of its own core requirement for the office holder.

Professor Lynk is well known to have served as an advisory board member to Palestinian advocacy organizations, groups which specialize in slandering Israel as an "apartheid state". He has himself personally spoken of Israel engaged in "ethnic cleansing", has addressed "one-state" conferences premised on the position that the Jewish state be abolished and absorbed into a greater Palestinian state. He has been actively involved in advocacy for Palestinians and has been clearly anti-Israel.

Yet, despite the fact that the Government of Canada has appealed to the UNHRC to reconsider its decision to appoint this Canadian, given his background and orientation and clear biases, the UN body chose to proceed. In its most recent session the UNHRC passed five resolutions against Israel, none against Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Burundi and China.

Anti-Israel bias of a shameless and ferocious iniquity is alive and well at the United Nations. The world body has chosen to betray its founding principles. It is a discredited, useless institution, a victim of its own complicity in taking political sides when it was established as an apolitical voice in the world for reasonableness, rationality, peace among nations and its fervent commitment to uphold human rights for all of humankind.

In Defence of Reality

"At first [his thinking] was, 'I want to go back, I'm a cop, I want to still be a cop'." It took some time for him to realize that wasn't exactly going to be what happened."
Danielle Thompson, legal team representing P.O. Darren Wilson

"I think I expressed to him, 'Do you realize your first call [back on the job] will be to a blind alley where you're executed?' He took a pause for a minute, thought about it and said, 'Oh', that is the reality'."
"[Zimmerman] is an idiot, Darren was not. Any criminal defence lawyer that has half a brain says, 'Shut up, don't say a word'."
"Even if he gave the most heartfelt apology, they'd [Michael Brown's parents] still not like it."
James Towey, legal team representing P.O. Darren Wilson

"Taking a life is a horrible thing to have to do."
And yet, the key phrase is, 'to have to do', because that is what he thinks. Is that going to make the Browns feel any less grief?"
Neil Bruntrager, legal team representing P.O. Darren Wilson

Store closed circuit video recording of Michael Brown's encounter with shop owner from whom he stole cigarillos

In the company of a friend, Michael Brown entered a neighbourhood convenience store and decided to take what wasn't his. When the shop owner protested, Mr. Brown used his 300 pound, six-foot-five frame to intimidate and bully the obviously much smaller man confronting him, before he and his companion left the store. The shop owner alerted police to a theft and gave a description of the malefactors.

A short time later Police Officer Wilson in his squad car saw two young men walking down the yellow-striped middle of a road, with cars passing by them. He pulled over to the two and asked them to take to the sidewalk, and the larger of the two men became enraged, informing the officer impolitely to shove off. Officer Wilson again drove up beside the two and repeated his request, then made to exit his vehicle.

The burly Michael Brown slammed the driver's side door back closed when the officer attempted to open it, and the second time this happened, with Michael Brown pressing his body against the door, he reached inside the vehicle and began thumping Officer Wilson about the head. Officer Wilson managed to draw his gun and Michael Brown grasped it from him; when Officer Wilson regained control of it he shot Michael Brown in the hand, causing both Brown and his companion Johnston to run.

When Officer Wilson exited his squad car after radioing for assistance, he pursued the two. Michael Brown turned and began to advance toward the police officer menacingly, at which time Officer Wilson shot him repeatedly, killing him. Witnesses at the scene both corroborate and deny the accuracy of Officer Wilson's account of the incident. Forensic evidence appears to support Officer Wilson's account.

When the grand jury advised their finding that there was no reason to charge Officer Wilson, the tension and anger of the black community in Ferguson was palpable and not readily defused. Looting and arson followed with a number of local businesses set afire and destroyed, along with a local church. The anger is real and it is one representing the anguish of discrimination, a situation that prevails across the nation where blacks are treated differently than their white counterparts in the security and justice establishment.

Reasons are explicable, from a history of exclusion and oppression derived from slavery and inhumane social conditions, to violence and repression, begetting a universal black pathology of defiance and victimhood. Out of this witch's brew of social dysfunction was bred a black underclass of young black men disproportionately involved in crime from the petty to the serious, but mostly violence characterized by black-on-black crimes.

Demonstrators flooded on to the streets of Ferguson after the grand jury verdict, with several buildings set alight

The death of Michael Brown has become symbolic of all of this, a great moral injustice and injury to a large population of Americans that is pervasive and troubling in its extremes of dysfunction for the entire society. Yet while the symbolism is there -- alive and demonstrably with cause, that Michael Brown, a young man with a disturbingly bullying attitude and resentment against authority is the spark that lit the protests -- it has its own troubling aspects.

That, for example, every news report has the obligatory exculpation of 'unarmed teenager' attached to it, rather overlooks the circumstances of the event, the young man's physical bullying of a shop keeper, his resentment toward the fact that his behaviour has consequences, and his willingness to physically confront a police officer and assault him to demonstrate his right to express his dissatisfaction with the prevailing system through violence, speaks volumes about the delicacy of race relations issues.

"For obvious reasons, I wanted to wait until the grand jury made their decision before I officially made my decision to resign.
"It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of paramount importance to me. It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal."
"I'm resigning of my own free will. I'm not willing to let someone else get hurt because of me."
[former] Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, 28

What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel

The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.

Matti Friedman Nov 30 2014, The Atlantic

A Reuters truck drives through a bombed refugee camp in Gaza. (Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms. Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story—a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization.
But how precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict. In doing so, I will draw on my own experiences and those of colleagues. These are obviously limited and yet, I believe, representative.

A rally in support of Islamic Jihad at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, in November 2013 (Courtesy of Matti Friedman)

I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy, and the demonstration was only mentioned by the AP weeks later when the organization’s Boston bureau reported that Brandeis University had cut ties with Al-Quds over the incident. On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a report about a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.

The pipeline of information from Israel is not just rusty and leaking, but intentionally plugged.

I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.

There are banal explanations for problems with coverage—reporters are in a hurry, editors are overloaded and distracted. These are realities, and can explain small errors and mishaps like ill-conceived headlines, which is why such details don’t typically strike me as important or worth much analysis. Some say inflations and omissions are the inevitable results of an honest attempt to cover events in a challenging and occasionally dangerous reporting environment, which is what I initially believed myself. A few years on the job changed my mind. Such excuses can’t explain why the same inflations and omissions recur again and again, why they are common to so many news outlets, and why the simple “Israel story” of the international media is so foreign to people aware of the historical and regional context of events in this place. The explanation lies elsewhere.

* * *

To make sense of most international journalism from Israel, it is important first to understand that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news. Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.

The best insight into one of the key phenomena at play here comes not from a local reporter but from the journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. In Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, Gourevitch wrote in 2010, he was struck by the ethical gray zone of ties between reporters and NGOs. “Too often the press represents humanitarians with unquestioning admiration,” he observed in The New Yorker. “Why not seek to keep them honest? Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies?”

This confusion is very much present in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where foreign activists are a notable feature of the landscape, and where international NGOs and numerous arms of the United Nations are among the most powerful players, wielding billions of dollars and employing many thousands of foreign and local employees. Their SUVs dominate sections of East Jerusalem and their expense accounts keep Ramallah afloat. They provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

The news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news.

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication. 

* * *

Anyone who has traveled abroad understands that arriving in a new country is daunting, and it is far more so when you are expected to show immediate expertise. I experienced this myself in 2008, when the AP sent me to cover the Russian invasion of Georgia and I found myself 24 hours later riding in a convoy of Russian military vehicles. I had to admit that not only did I not know Georgian, Russian, or any of the relevant history, but I did not know which way was north, and generally had no business being there. For a reporter in a situation like the one I just described, the solution is to stay close to more knowledgeable colleagues and hew to the common wisdom.

Many freshly arrived reporters in Israel, similarly adrift in a new country, undergo a rapid socialization in the circles I mentioned. This provides them not only with sources and friendships but with a ready-made framework for their reporting—the tools to distill and warp complex events into a simple narrative in which there is a bad guy who doesn’t want peace and a good guy who does. This is the “Israel story,” and it has the advantage of being an easy story to report. Everyone here answers their cell phone, and everyone knows what to say. You can put your kids in good schools and dine at good restaurants. It’s fine if you’re gay. Your chances of being beheaded on YouTube are slim. Nearly all of the information you need—that is, in most cases, information critical of Israel—is not only easily accessible but has already been reported for you by Israeli journalists or compiled by NGOs. You can claim to be speaking truth to power, having selected the only “power” in the area that poses no threat to your safety.

Many foreign journalists have come to see themselves as part of this world of international organizations, and specifically as the media arm of this world. They have decided not just to describe and explain, which is hard enough, and important enough, but to “help.” And that’s where reporters get into trouble, because “helping” is always a murky, subjective, and political enterprise, made more difficult if you are unfamiliar with the relevant languages and history.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

A Palestinian protester escapes tear gas fired by Israeli security forces during a demonstration in a West Bank near Ramallah. (Darren Whiteside/Reuters)

International organizations in the Palestinian territories have largely assumed a role of advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians and against Israel, and much of the press has allowed this political role to supplant its journalistic function. This dynamic explains the thinking behind editorial choices that are otherwise difficult to grasp, like the example I gave in my first essay about the suppression by the AP’s Jerusalem bureau of a report about an Israeli peace offer to the Palestinians in 2008, or the decision to ignore the rally at Al-Quds University, or the idea that Hamas’s development of extensive armament works in Gaza in recent years was not worth serious coverage despite objectively being one of the most important storylines demanding reporters’ attention.

As usual, Orwell got there first. Here is his description from 1946 of writers of communist and “fellow-traveler” journalism: “The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect that the lies which they condone will get out of the newspapers and into the history books.” The stories I mentioned would be “inopportune” for the Palestinians, and would “play into the hands” of the Israelis. And so, in the judgment of the press corps, they generally aren’t news.
In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein. (The Middle East, he wrote, “is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.”) My article was gentle, all things considered, beginning like this:

JERUSALEM (AP) _ The prickly relationship between Israel and its critics in human rights organizations has escalated into an unprecedented war of words as the fallout from Israel’s Gaza offensive persists ten months after the fighting ended.

Editors killed the story.
Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-born professor named Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

When the UN released its controversial Goldstone report on the Gaza fighting, we at the bureau trumpeted its findings in dozens of articles, though there was discussion even at the time of the report’s failure to prove its central charge: that Israel had killed civilians on purpose. (The director of Israel’s premier human-rights group, B’Tselem, who was critical of the Israeli operation, told me at the time that this claim was “a reach given the facts,” an evaluation that was eventually seconded by the report’s author. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” Richard Goldstone wrote in The Washington Post in April 2011.) We understood that our job was not to look critically at the UN report, or any such document, but to publicize it.
Decisions like these are hard to fathom if you believe the foreign press corps’ role is to explain a complicated story to people far away. But they make sense if you understand that journalists covering Israel and the Palestinian territories often don’t see their role that way. The radio and print journalist Mark Lavie, who has reported from the region since 1972, was a colleague of mine at the AP, where he was an editor in the Jerusalem bureau and then in Cairo until his retirement last year. (It was Lavie who first learned of the Israeli peace offer of late 2008, and was ordered by his superiors to ignore the story.) An Indiana-born Israeli of moderate politics, he had a long run in journalism that included several wars and the first Palestinian intifada, and found little reason to complain about the functioning of the media.

But things changed in earnest in 2000, with the collapse of peace efforts and the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Israel accepted President Bill Clinton’s peace framework that fall and the Palestinians rejected it, as Clinton made clear. Nevertheless, Lavie recently told me, the bureau’s editorial line was still that the conflict was Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world were blameless. By the end of Lavie’s career, he was editing Israel copy on the AP’s Middle East regional desk in Cairo, trying to restore balance and context to stories he thought had little connection to reality. In his words, he had gone from seeing himself as a proud member of the international press corps to “the Jew-boy with his finger in the dike.” He wrote a book, Broken Spring, about his front-row view of the Middle East’s descent into chaos, and retired disillusioned and angry.

Reporters have decided not just to describe and explain, but to “help.” And that’s where they get into trouble.

 

I have tended to see the specific failings that we both encountered at the AP as symptoms of a general thought pattern in the press, but Lavie takes a more forceful position, viewing the influential American news organization as one of the primary authors of this thought pattern. (In a statement, AP spokesman Paul Colford dismissed my criticism as “distortions, half-truths and inaccuracies,” and denied that AP coverage is biased against Israel.) This is not just because many thousands of media outlets use AP material directly, but also because when journalists arrive in their offices in the morning, the first thing many of them do is check the AP wire (or, these days, scroll through it in their Twitter feed). The AP is like Ringo Starr, thumping away at the back of the stage: there might be flashier performers in front, and you might not always notice him, but when Ringo’s off, everyone’s off.

Lavie believes that in the last years of his career, the AP’s Israel operation drifted from its traditional role of careful explanation toward a kind of political activism that both contributed to and fed off growing hostility to Israel worldwide. “The AP is extremely important, and when the AP turned, it turned a lot of the world with it,” Lavie said. “That’s when it became harder for any professional journalist to work here, Jewish or not. I reject the idea that my dissatisfaction had to do with being Jewish or Israeli. It had to do with being a journalist.”

* * *

In describing the realities of combat in the Second World War, the American critic Paul Fussell wrote, the press was censored and censored itself to such an extent that “for almost six years a large slice of actuality—perhaps one-quarter to one-half of it—was declared off-limits, and the sanitized and euphemized remainder was presented as the whole.” During the same war, American journalists (chiefly from Henry Luce’s magazines) were engaged in what Fussell called the “Great China Hoax”—years of skewed reporting designed to portray the venal regime of Chiang Kai-shek as an admirable Western ally against Japan. Chiang was featured six times on the cover of Time, and his government’s corruption and dysfunction were carefully ignored. One Marine stationed in China was so disillusioned by the chasm between what he saw and what he read that upon his discharge, he said, “I switched to Newsweek.”

Journalistic hallucinations, in other words, have a precedent. They tend to occur, as in the case of the Great China Hoax, when reporters are not granted the freedom to write what they see but are rather expected to maintain a “story” that follows predictable lines. For the international press, the uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouchable because they would disrupt the Israel story, which is a story of Jewish moral failure.

Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information. Recognizing this, certain Hamas spokesmen have taken to confiding to Western journalists, including some I know personally, that the group is in fact a secretly pragmatic outfit with bellicose rhetoric, and journalists—eager to believe the confession, and sometimes unwilling to credit locals with the smarts necessary to deceive them—have taken it as a scoop instead of as spin.

During my time at the AP, we helped Hamas get this point across with a school of reporting that might be classified as “Surprising Signs of Moderation” (a direct precursor to the “Muslim Brotherhood Is Actually Liberal” school that enjoyed a brief vogue in Egypt). In one of my favorite stories, “More Tolerant Hamas” (December 11, 2011), reporters quoted a Hamas spokesman informing readers that the movement’s policy was that “we are not going to dictate anything to anyone,” and another Hamas leader saying the movement had “learned it needs to be more tolerant of others.” Around the same time, I was informed by the bureau’s senior editors that our Palestinian reporter in Gaza couldn’t possibly provide critical coverage of Hamas because doing so would put him in danger.

Hamas is aided in its manipulation of the media by the old reportorial belief, a kind of reflex, according to which reporters shouldn’t mention the existence of reporters. In a conflict like ours, this ends up requiring considerable exertions: So many photographers cover protests in Israel and the Palestinian territories, for example, that one of the challenges for anyone taking pictures is keeping colleagues out of the frame. That the other photographers are as important to the story as Palestinian protesters or Israeli soldiers—this does not seem to be considered.

A Hamas fighter inside an underground tunnel in Gaza in August 2014, during a tour for Reuters journalists (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

In Gaza, this goes from being a curious detail of press psychology to a major deficiency. Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. It is predicated on the cooperation of journalists. One of the reasons it works is because of the reflex I mentioned. If you report that Hamas has a strategy based on co-opting the media, this raises several difficult questions, like, What exactly is the relationship between the media and Hamas? And has this relationship corrupted the media? It is easier just to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

In previous rounds of Gaza fighting, Hamas learned that international coverage from the territory could be molded to its needs, a lesson it would implement in this summer’s war. Most of the press work in Gaza is done by local fixers, translators, and reporters, people who would understandably not dare cross Hamas, making it only rarely necessary for the group to threaten a Westerner. The organization’s armed forces could be made to disappear. The press could be trusted to play its role in the Hamas script, instead of reporting that there was such a script. Hamas strategy did not exist, according to Hamas—or, as reporters would say, was “not the story.” There was no Hamas charter blaming Jews for centuries of perfidy, or calling for their murder; this was not the story. The rockets falling on Israeli cities were quite harmless; they were not the story either.

It's easier to leave the other photographers out of the frame and let the picture tell the story: Here are dead people, and Israel killed them.

 

Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas-reported civilian death toll—relayed through the UN or through something called the “Gaza Health Ministry,” an office controlled by Hamas—but would make those numbers the center of coverage. Hamas understood that reporters could be intimidated when necessary and that they would not report the intimidation; Western news organizations tend to see no ethical imperative to inform readers of the restrictions shaping their coverage in repressive states or other dangerous areas. In the war’s aftermath, the NGO-UN-media alliance could be depended upon to unleash the organs of the international community on Israel, and to leave the jihadist group alone.

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group.” The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This summer, with Yazidis, Christians, and Kurds falling back before the forces of radical Islam not far away from here, this ideology’s local franchise launched its latest war against the last thriving minority in the Middle East. The Western press corps showed up en masse to cover it. This conflict included rocket barrages across Israel and was deliberately fought from behind Palestinian civilians, many of whom died as a result. Dulled by years of the “Israel story” and inured to its routine omissions, confused about the role they are meant to play, and co-opted by Hamas, reporters described this war as an Israeli onslaught against innocent people. By doing so, this group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth.

And that, as they say, is the story.

Looking For Outrage

"We have reduced the travel costs of all ministers using commercial and government aircraft by over 23 percent since forming government."
"And we have reduced the cost of ministerial travel on government aircraft by nearly 75 percent, compared to when the Liberals held office."
Jason MacDonald, director of communications, PMO

DVD2007 / 5 GBMC OAP   Harper took a Challenger jet on 113 trips between April 2011 and February 2014, at a cost of approximately $1.8 million, according to the flight manifests.

 

Another hoped-for spending scandal to embarrass the federal government with the hopes of further tarnishing its reputation through questionable imputation. Canadian media, in particular some outlets, feverishly deploy investigative journalists to try to bring to the public attention various types of what they infer to be questionable expenses by Ministers of the Crown, with the obvious intention of doing harm to the reputation of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as not being sufficiently sensitive to the prudent use of tax dollars.

All the more so, that the Conservative Government of Canada has embarked on an austerity campaign to reduce government spending. Those measures have resulted in a campaign to reduce the size of the public service, to lower departmental costs, to abolish unneeded and redundant services, to re-think the manner in which the federal government serves the public. The result has been  a success where the government is set to post a surplus rather than a deficit in its fiscal year 2015.

But the story is emblazoned with a headline that shouts: Harper, cabinet spend millions on Challengers ... citing 113 trips by the Prime Minister using a Challenger jet between April 2011 and February 2014, at a cost of around $1.9-million, according to flight manifests. And revealing as well that Governor General David Johnston, in the discharge of his duties as the Queen's representative, spending close to $2-million on the 109 trips he took between April 2011 and February 2014 on Challenger jets.

The federal government has a fleet of six Challenger jets. Again, in a bid to save money, the Conservative government has considered divesting itself of up to four of the jets. Simply put, the jets fly empty more often than not for the purpose of ensuring that pilots maintain flying skills. And those practise flights themselves are prohibitively costly, since the nine-seat jets cost over $3,300 hourly for operational costs.

The political opposition, casting about for items through which they can cast aspersions on this government, claim abuse of taxpayer dollars through the use of the jets. Despite that it is clear from examining the manifests that over the past few years cabinet ministers have diminished their use of the jets. Only ten ministerial flights were registered between April 2011 and February 2014, but that little bit of data doesn't put a stop to the hysterical accusations.

Former finance minister Jim Flaherty used a Challenger jet in 2011 with six Finance officials in attendance to fly to Mexico City to meet with the Mexican president and other government officials in discussion of G20 items. That one-day-and-return event came in at $33,179. An expense that was repeated in February 2012 with the minister and six officials again visiting Mexico City for two nights and three days, meeting with G20 finance ministers.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird along with two government officials flew commercial to Africa to attend a Friends of the Syrian People Meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco. A Challenger jet then took them to a G8 Broader Middle East and North Africa meeting later that day in Tunis, Tunisia, since there was no alternate way to attend both meetings. In returning to Canada out of Africa the contingent again flew on commercial aircraft. The Challenger had been in the region, which made it a useful alternative given the circumstances.

When Joe Oliver, now Finance Minister, took a Challenger jet to Paris he had an important cabinet meeting in Ottawa immediately beforehand, and a commitment to speak at the International Energy Agency as well as to attend bilateral meetings. No commercial flights were available to permit him to fulfill both commitments, making the use of the Challenger jet a necessity. "This trip followed all guidelines on the use of Challengers for government business", explained his director of communications in Finance.

Cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister are Canada's primary political, administrative legislators. There are times and events which call upon them to be somewhere on short notice and it is reasonable to expect that they will fulfill their obligations, but they do require the means within reason to do so. That these incidents come at great cost is no great surprise. That the niggling details and the standards to which they are held are manipulated to exploit the possibility of censure taking place is also no great surprise.

But it is rather unbecoming of a Canadian news empire that should be focused on matters that are legitimately newsworthy.

Telling All Of What?

The headline on the newspaper serving Canada's capital read: PM's ex-aide tells all. There's a gloating, misleading headline if ever there was one. Another one of those advisers within the inner circle of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's executive office. Another one upon whom the spotlight of malfeasance has shone. Another one who appears to relish his insight and the huge anticipation of political detractors to hear from him from his once privileged perspective what had 'gone wrong' in the PMO.

The minor headline read: Carson book says Harper wanted to shuffle Flaherty in 2007 ... as though this is some startling new revelation. Newspaper readers with a decent memory can recall that at the time something of that nature had been revealed. Prime Ministers do, after all, shuffle their Cabinet responsibilities from time to time, in the hope of giving a new impetus, appearing to do something of substance in moving a Minister from one portfolio to another.

In the hope, doubtless, that a better match will be achieved, that the Minister assigned to a new responsibility will jell better there than he/she had in the old one, distinguishing themselves, and in the process providing an improved performance, advancing the interests of the government and the country. Suddenly this is startling new news; profound enough in its implications to have been plucked out of a newly-published tell-all, to give it front-page prominence.

Somewhat like the cherry picking that was done with the publication of former Conservative organizer and confidant to Stephen Harper, academic Tom Flanagan. Whose own (temporary) fall from grace within conservative circles resulted from his having stated a personal position incongruent in its exculpation of viewers of child pornography with fundamental decency.

Bristling with resentment at the distancing of the Prime Minister with the publication of Mr. Flanagan's first unauthorized exploration of the politics and personality of Stephen Harper, this was Mr. Flanagan's obvious opportunity to strike back. And he did just that, to the best of his puerile ability. The Prime Minister of Canada has an authoritarian streak, and goodness gracious that is quite intolerable.

What he does not do, as the hugely respected (within Canada) American President Barack Obama states constantly is to remind the electorate during sober pronouncements, is that he is the Commander-in-Chief, and the President of the United States of America. Mr. Harper assumes that Canadians know who he is and what he represents; their best interests.

Now happens to be the turn of a formerly trusted adviser within the Prime Minister's inner circle. Yet another individual whom the Prime Minister trusted, former senior aide Bruce Carson. Mr. Harper does not abide being close to people whose actions betray justice and decency, and Mr. Carson qualified for the distancing that arrived when it was divulged that he had engaged in extracurricular corruption to benefit a mistress.

His revelation from his close personal recollection would have no relevance whatever had it not been for the recent death of former Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty. The esteem with which Mr. Flaherty was held by those of his colleagues who knew him well, and in particular by the Prime Minister belies any hint of malice on the part of Mr. Harper, but does point out his administrative concerns for the portfolios that are of such importance to the country.

That Exclusive Club

"We're increasingly denying ourselves a place at the table.
"We walk out of meetings because North Korea is in the chair. The reason you go to these meetings is so that you can engage all 193 (UN member states). You don't pick your friends and your enemies. They're all there. You go, you play the game ... if you're not at the table, you don't have a voice."
Carolyn McAskie, senior fellow, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

Just as well she's only an academic, a critic of the Government of Canada. She concerns herself with the administrative minutiae of United Nations issues, she is not elected to lead Canada in its affairs with the outside world. Among the Canadian electorate there are many who have become less than entranced with the performance of the United Nations, led by the nose by influential blocs of countries whose mission is to prolong their own agendas, not support universal rights.

She does have ample support in her contention of UN involvement where Canada should abase its own values and positions in the face of being seen to "go along to get along". Not only among other academics who feel their opinion is one of value in urging the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to heed their urgings, but the official opposition as well. Both the New Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada state their unhappiness at Canada's lack of UN 'involvement'.

So, yes, when North Korea chairs meetings of the United Nations, Canada's official representative at the United Nations sees no merit in remaining, for his presence is an indication that Canada recognizes the right of the repressively dangerous-to-the-world regime to hold its standards up for recognition by the rest of the world. It is not, as Ms. McAskie characterizes it, a moment to recognize "friend" or "enemy", but a rejection of the psychically skewed mal-performance of the United Nations.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is telling the United Nations General Assembly not to be taken in by any Iranian charm offensives. (CP) | CP

The object of her criticism was in reference to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird's 2011 decision for Canada's UN delegates to vacate themselves from being presence during an odious charade when the role of chair of a UN disarmament conference became that of the dynastic cult of North Korea. One of the two countries of the world that the United Nations has tried repeatedly to lead away from nuclear proliferation, ending in dismal failure of defiance by North Korea.

North Korea's entitlement to ownership of nuclear weapons and the ongoing development of intercontinental ballistic missiles increasingly more powerful enabling it to choose between sending a nuclear-tipped missile to Saturn, or toward the western coastline of North America somehow seems to grate against the sensibilities of Canadians. And nor is it the sole country whose presence on an important peace-keeping committee is recognized as a vile betrayal of the values held by the West.

Here is the Islamic Republic of Iran which just yesterday as head of the largest bloc within the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, was elected by UN member-states to serve as the rapporteur of the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. Iran, whose bellicose threats against another UN member of its intention to destroy it and remove it from the map of the Middle East, whose nose-thumbing at the IAEA over its nuclear program still entitles it to mock peace and international security on the international scene.

These assaults upon the sane sensibilities of reasonable governments whose focus is authentically upon avoiding war, and upon sensibly doing their utmost toward taming the nuclear ambitions of rogue totalitarian governments does not generate trust in the United Nations or its various committees. The sham of remaining in place while murderous tyrants lecture UN member-states who know how to spell and practise human rights is simply a demeaning spectacle that Canada wants no part of.

At the General Assembly of the United Nations to which the Canadian government's critics insist it to be in Canada's best interests to attend, and to have Prime Minister Stephen Harper respectfully address the motley collection of the world's most notorious mass murderers, rapists, oppressors and war criminals represents in itself a crime against humanity. That a liberal, democratic nation lends itself gamely to the ongoing farce of the United Nations is anathema to the principled mind.

There is nothing isolationist or grandstanding about Canada's position with respect to the United Nations. Canada does have a high-ranking elected official who will address the General Assembly in lieu of the Prime Minister who attends to more important issues. And Foreign Minister John Baird does not engage, when addressing the United Nations, in the usual foppish flattery, but instead insists the world body has an obligation to address itself to the true issues requiring solution.

The Millennium Development Goals for maternal health and infant mortality, as an example, which Canada led through the 2010 G8 Summit "Muskoka Initiative".  Mr. Baird spoke to excoriate the lack of attention of the world delegates to the travesty unravelling in Syria, adding massively to the number of the world's threatened refugees. He spoke of the need to stop the sexual abuse of children by the 'cultural-religious' practise of promoting 'child marriage'.

Canada's position is principled and clear when it addresses topics that should be of primary concern to all present within the UN. But the world body just happens now not to reflect the purpose for which it was established. It has become ferociously dysfunctional, fastidiously sanctimonious. Within that culture and that environment there is no need for Canada to submit itself and its citizens to giving homage where none is due.

Should we become masochists among the repulsive sadists who abound within its chambers? Our "disengagement" criticized by many does not extend to Canada's withholding of its fees to ensure that the institution remain operational. In the now-faint hope that the United Nations in time may manage to rescue itself from its moribund lack of real purpose, Canada pays its $100-million annual dues diligently, and another $216-million for the costs of UN "peacekeeping" missions.

The Muskoka Initiative has seen Canada contributing almost $3-billion and another $300-million in support of the UN's costs relating to its catastrophic failures in persuading Syria's death-delivering tyrant to cease  his bloody onslaught against his civilian population. Canadians pay $5.5-billion yearly to the UN's World Food Program, the UN High Commission on Refugees and other needed services to keep civilization from utter collapse.

This is a country dedicated to providing aid and assistance to further the international public weal. It does not exist within the United Nations to help polish the credentials of failed states which threaten world peace and the existence of neighbours toward whom malign intentions are harboured. Canada maintains its dignity precisely through its setting aside the mantra of : "You go, you play the game".

We do not, and we will not, play that game.

 Ban Ki-moon Admits: UN is Biased Against Israel

by Elad Benari   -- Arutz Sheva 7 -- 18 August 2013

The head of the United Nations admitted this past week that the organization he heads has had a bias against Israel.

“Unfortunately, because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias and sometimes even discrimination,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon admitted during his visit to Jerusalem, according to the European Jewish Press (EJP).

Addressing students participating in the Rishon Lezion College of Management’s Model UN program at the UN headquarters in Jerusalem, Ban said Israel should be treated equal to all the other 192 UN member states.

The comments came in response to complaints by the students that Israel receives more criticism than any other member country in the world body.

Ban told the students he had come to the region for the sixth time to express his support for the renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

"I have never been this optimistic," he said, according to EJP, adding that the international community had never had such expectations and hope that the peace process would reach a solution.

“This time, I expect real peace,” the UN chief said, urging both sides ‘’to be patient’’ and adding that negotiations are still the best way to reach a two-state solution.

“The Israeli and Palestinian people are neighbors and have no choice but to live in harmony and peace, side by side,” Ban was quoted by EJP as having said.

On Friday, Ban met with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who told him that the Israeli-Arab conflict has nothing to do with the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and everything to do with Arab refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“As far as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, we have to get to the root cause of the problem and the root cause was and remains the persistent refusal to recognize the Jewish State in any boundary,” said Netanyahu.

“It doesn’t have to do with the settlements – that’s an issue that has to be resolved, but this is not the reason that we have a continual conflict. The conflict preceded the establishment of a single settlement by half a century and when we rooted out all the settlements in Gaza, the attacks continued because of this basic opposition to the Jewish State. I think it’s important to understand that if we build a few hundred apartments in Gilo or Ramot, or the other Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, or in urban blocks that everybody knows, including the Palestinian negotiating team, according to the Al Jazeera leaks, will be part of the final peace map in Israel, I think these are not the real issues that we need to discuss.”

Netanyahu called on Ban to look into the abuse of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) camps in Gaza which was running "peace camps" that were actually being used to "instill the culture of hatred and the ideas of destroying Israel amidst Palestinian children.”

Ban also called on Israelis and PA Arabs to overcome "deep skepticism" that he said risked thwarting efforts to reach a peace agreement.   

"We must overcome the deep skepticism that comes from 20 years of stalemate," Ban said at a meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli President Shimon Peres.

The Prime Minister's Detractors

Pretty pathetic, nothing less than that, when leaders of the opposition in the House of Commons mock common sense and common business and employment practice to desperately attempt to score another point. Their rabid assaults on Prime Minister Stephen Harper may make them feel good, and they may think they have raised their own credibility levels in the doing, but in fact they're simply pointing out how desperate they are to arouse voter rage over a non-issue.

Photographs...Toronto Sun -- left, Justin Trudeau, centre, Stephen Harper, right, Thomas Mulcair

The Prime Minister's former chief of staff Nigel Wright resigned in the realization that this is what he had to do. Had he not resigned, it would have been up to Stephen Harper, reluctantly yes, in view of past service, but necessarily, in view of a serious lapse in judgement, to remove him from that important post. Nigel Wright is held by all who know him to be an intelligent, honourable man whose business acumen is unparalleled.

He was, nonetheless responsible, in his lapse of judgement, for bringing a storm of controversy into the Prime Minister's Office, and in so doing unleashing a hurricane of febrile assaults against the veracity of the Prime Minister himself. Mr. Wright likely thought that as an executive assistant it was incumbent upon him to remove what irritants he could from the purview of the man whose best interests he sought to serve as best he could.

His best in this particular instance, offering to hand over to the disgraced Senator Mike Duffy, who was facing an official call to return to the Senate finances funding for housing he was not entitled to, a gift of $90,000 to rescue the man from further ignominy. His spur-of-the-moment charity backfired badly. He obviously hadn't taken the time to think through the implications of what he had committed himself to, and by extension the man he served.

And those implications were not lost on those looking for reasons to try to embroil Stephen Harper within a conspiracy to favour and rescue a Conservative Senator who had proved as adept as Mr. Duffy was in fund-raising for the party. In offering that monetary assistance to Mr. Duffy, however, Mr. Duffy's own presumed neutrality in the Chamber of Sober Second Thought was effectively diminished.

Mr. Duffy's despicable, grubby behaviour is no longer the issue here. His feelings of entitlement as someone believing themselves to be irreplaceable and without peer as a fundraiser for the Conservatives led him to pursue his own path to perdition. But Mr. Wright by all accounts and as evidenced by the esteem in which he is held by his colleagues and by Mr. Harper, is another matter altogether.

He has left the employ of Mr. Harper. He obviously had signed a contract setting out his duties, his remuneration and any additional benefits normally accruing to someone in such an executive position. That would include vacation pay and it would include normal severance pay.  The belittling picayune demonstrations of sophomoric parliamentary debate being indulged in by the NDP and the Liberals is patently absurd in this matter.

As a matter of public curiosity some have been debating what severance and outstanding vacation pay would amount to for Mr. Wright, and the figure appears to be in the neighbourhood of $20,000; a modest enough sum considering the office and the office-holder and the contract he most certainly would have signed. Yet the opposition is hammering the Prime Minister on the matter.

"Mr.Wright will receive only what is required under law -- no more, no less", affirmed Andrew MacDougall, Mr. Harper's director of communications. This logical statement of intent does not sit well with the opposition however; they oppose this paltry settlement for a man who spent two and a half years performing a difficult job in a trying environment, and who lapsed into poor judgement with unfortunate results.

"Nigel Wright took sole responsibility because he acted alone, and what he did was not in the interest of Canadian taxpayers and it was not a responsible decision", Heritage Minister James Moore repeated, in the hope that the logic of the situation and its faultless inadvertence on the part of the PMO and the former chief of staff would finally penetrate the consciousness of the Prime Minister's detractors.

Why Doesn't the EU Condemn Palestinian Torture?

by Khaled Abu Toameh
May 24, 2013 at 3:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3727/eu-palestinian-torture

More than half the 306 complaints about torture last year came from Palestinians who had been detained or imprisoned by Abbas's security forces in the West Bank; 11 detainees died in Palestinian Authority and Hamas prisons according to a report by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights.

The EU has refrained from condemning the Palestinian Authority or Hamas in wake of a report that pointed to an increase in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This is the same EU that regularly condemns Israel for building in the settlements or seizing funds belonging to the Palestinian Authority.

More recently, the EU condemned Israel for demolishing 22 Palestinian structures in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

But when it comes to human rights violations committed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the EU is prepared to do its utmost to avoid angering the two Palestinian governments.

In response to the report, which was released by the Palestinian Independent Commission For Human Rights, the EU missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah, in an apologetic tone, only expressed "concern" over recurrent cases of torture and ill treatment of detainees in Palestinian prisons.

And instead of criticizing or condemning Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for human rights violations perpetrated by his security forces, the EU missions chose to "welcome" his instruction to respect the prohibition of torture in his detention centers and prisons.

It is worth noting that the EU and some Abbas loyalists, including Fatah propagandists and media outlets, were the only ones to "welcome" his decision to ban torture.

So not only is Abbas not condemned for the death of two detainees in his prisons and the crackdown on freedoms of speech and the media, he is in fact being praised by the EU for ordering his security and intelligence officers to stop torturing Palestinians.

One would have expected the EU to take a tougher stance toward the Palestinian Authority and Hamas human rights violations, as indicated by the report.

But the EU missions to Ramallah and Jerusalem are apparently reluctant to take such a position because of their direct and indirect involvement in funding and supporting the Palestinian Authority and various Palestinian institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The EU also seems to be afraid of criticizing the Palestinian Authority and Hamas out of concern for the safety of its representatives, especially those who operate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As the human rights group's report shows, there has been a 10% increase in the number of complaints of torture and mistreatment by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority during 2012 compared with the year before.

More than half of the 306 complaints about torture that were received last year came from Palestinians who had been detained or imprisoned by Abbas's security forces in the West Bank, the report revealed.

Altogether, 11 detainees died in Palestinian Authority and Hamas prisons last year, according to the report.

Still, the EU did not see any need to refer to these cases. Nor did the EU comment on the report's accusations that Abbas's security forces are continuing to crack down on journalists and academics and ignore court rulings.

Expressing "concern" over serious human rights violations will not deter the Palestinian Authority or Hamas from pursuing their anti-democratic practices against their own people.

Praising Abbas for instructing his security forces to stop torturing Palestinian detainees is like welcoming a convicted armed robber's promise to retire.

Related Topics:  Khaled Abu Toameh

 Moral Obloquy

"UN Watch calls on U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, EU High Commissioner Catherine Ashton, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon to make clear that when the United Nations imposes four rounds of sanctions on Iran for illicit nuclear activities, condemns it for illegally arming the murderous Syrian regime, and denounces Tehran's massive abuse of human rights, this kind of appointment just defies common sense and harms the UN's credibility.
"We urge world leaders to declare that allowing Iran to chair a UN disarmament body is simply unacceptable, given the fundamentalist regime's illicit activities in precisely the opposite direction."
Hillel Neuer, UN Watch, Geneva

If any one single act of mindless complicity might be pointed at to effectively demonstrate the utter and absolute uselessness of the United Nations as a world-class institute of universal human rights and global peace being held in contempt without an utterance of denial, it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, a truly abhorrent regime, has been named to chair the United Nations' most vital disarmament conference.

"This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women's shelter", Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based NGO UN Watch, stated with disgust. "Any member state that is the subject of UN Security Council sanctions for proliferation -- and found guilty of massive human rights violations -- should be ineligible to hold a leadership position in a UN body."

This is, after all a conference funded from the UN budget. It reports to the UN General Assembly. But this by no means represents a unique occurrence in crudely inappropriate UN activities.

 Yet, in his years of monitoring the events that take place within the United Nations and the ghastly antics of many of its members, this must surely represent the ultimate in cynical oblivion to reality. This is moral bankruptcy at its most unappealingly vivid, in bruised purple shades of blessing the devil among us to go forth and spread the evil that comes most naturally to its black soul.

Iran, working alongside its soul-mates North Korea and Syria, last week blocked the passing of a treaty in the UN to prohibit the sale or transfer of arms leading to acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.And for obvious reasons, since it is precisely these regimes who hold the value of committing acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes in the highest esteem, as usefully utilitarian acts of tyrannical dominion over others.

Iran is busy supplying rockets to terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, ferrying them through Syria and Sudan. Where on several occasions Israel has seen fit to bomb the rocket shipments to disrupt their journeys into terrorist possession. And nor is Russia also any less guilty of supplying barbaric totalitarian regimes like Syria with weapons. Yet it is the State of Israel that is held within the United Nations to represent a universal pariah.

The United States imposed increased sanctions on Iranian companies in assistance and complicit with their country's nuclear program. Iran's banks and oil industries have been hit with crippling economic sanctions in an obviously futile attempt to pressure the country's theocratic rulers from their goal of building nuclear bombs. The international pressure brought to bear on Iran has been to little effect.

Iran does have its friends within the global community, and two powerful such friends sit on the permanent Security Council.

And it is without doubt that Russia and China are themselves quite complacent about the prospect of Iran taking up the presidency of the Conference on Disarmanent on May 27 holding the position for four weeks until June 23. Described by the United Nations as "the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community".

A moral farce so absurd as to make the devil fall off his perch in amazement that a mere mortal entity could be as evil as the fallen angel.

When in Doubt, Blame the Jews…or the Settlements  

March 14, 2013 21:12 by Alex Margolin

It may not beat the unbridled anti-Semitism expressed by British peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, who, according to the Times of London, blamed Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels” for his 2009 jail sentence for his role in a fatal car accident. But you have to give Guardian assistant editor Michael White credit for trying.

The trouble started on Thursday when Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein posted a tweet wondering why the BBC had made no mention of the Lord Ahmed story. The tweet apparently annoyed White enough to generate the following unbelievable exchange, dragging settlements into the discussion for no reason:



And that was only the beginning.

As more people challenged White’s apparent need to bring Israel in out of the blue, White dug deeper into his position, sparring with everyone from Jeffrey Goldberg to host of Tweeters puzzled by his increasingly obscure arguments and insults.

Finally, White unleashed his best defense for the BBC’s failure to report thye brazen anti-Semitism from a Peer. The delay was caused by the BBC’s need to check its sources since Lord Ahmed’s interview was conducted in Urdu for a Pakistani network. It’s an ironic argument, especially in light of last week’s UN report clearing Israel in the killing of a child in Gaza which the BBC had previously – and incorrectly – blamed on Israel.



Standards do matter, Mr. White, but apparently not when it comes to Israel. Oh well, must be because of those settlements…

Men Of Honour

Canada has had and continues to have its share of social misfits, those whose ideology they claim to be honourable, and which is clearly at odds with the social and political attitudes of their time. They tilt at windmills in a somewhat less than honourable manner all too often, while proclaiming themselves to be motivated by social justice and honour.

One such is former FLQ member Paul Rose, who died Thursday from a stroke. The other is Amir Khadir, a Member of the Quebec National Assembly with the pro-sovereignty Quebec solidaire party. MNA Khadir felt that the Parti Quebec government and its ministers should offer a public condolence in respect of Paul Rose.

 

  Paul Rose

 

This is a man who was a convicted FLQ terrorist. A man whose activities and those of his associates committed to violent actions like placing bombs in mailboxes and kidnapping people to make their point of the necessity for Quebec to separate from Canada. Their actions raised the level of security imposed within Quebec to that of an apprehended insurrection. Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by imposing the War Measures Act.

The crisis ended with the murder of Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte during the 1970 October Crisis by members of the Front du liberation du Quebec. Mr. Laporte had been abducted from the front lawn of his home while playing a game of touch football with his nephew in October of 1970. That was the last time his family saw him alive. His strangled body was discovered in the trunk of a car.

Canadian troops were sent into the province to give the provincial police back-up as they carried out arrests of suspected FLQ members. The entire situation caused Canadians to look at themselves and their leaders with a certain amount of disbelief and in some quarters abhorrence for the wholesale manner in which people suspected of involvement in the FLQ were arrested, their civil rights 'arbitrarily' suspended.

The Parti Quebecois government has issued no formal comment on the death of Paul Rose. And Mr. Khadir felt this to be a unfortunate lack of sensitivity on their part. "You can share the reservations he had about his past in the FLQ, but no one can question his sincerity, his devotion, his integrity, his intellectual honesty", he insisted. It takes sincerity, devotion, integrity, and represents intellectual honesty to endanger the lives of people.

Not everyone's passion, disrupting peace and security is honourably sincere in the opinion of those who are adversely affected. And then there is the honourable MNA Amir Khadir, a physician and infectious disease specialist whose world view has been shaped in part by his birth in Iran, though he came to Canada as an immigrant with his parents when he was ten. He has been involved in humanitarian work in Zimbabwe, India, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So much so good. And then, on the other hand, as though to point out how complex peoples' sensibilities are, the man also is rather notorious. Not only as a passionate separatist, but claiming to have modeled his protest alongside students last June over tuition hikes, as modelled on Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. Bill 78 was to be disobeyed, according to this member of the Quebec legislature.

The comparison in that instance was to U.S. racial segregation prior to the civil rights movement. He became part of a 2010 boycott of a family-owned shoe store in Montreal carrying a line of Israeli-made shoes. He wrote a public essay in defence of Hezbollah's right to resist "oppression". And he spoke of the British royal couple Kate and William as parasites as they prepared to visit Canada in 2011.


Clearly a man of strongly-held convictions. Like Paul Rose. And he has just, coincidentally, called off his earlier insistence that Paul Rose be honoured in Quebec's legislature.

Shameful Bilingualism

To permit the merest hint of language accommodation in Quebec to enable minority English-speakers to access information otherwise closed to them through a lack of facility with French is to impose a humiliating experience upon public servants in that province. A province of Canada, which is an officially bilingual country and where federal offices and many provincial offices along with municipalities in the rest of Canada make concerted efforts to provide translations for their French minorities.

That federal agencies must do so is the law. Quebec has passed a language law that explicitly frowns on the provocative presence of the English language in that pure laine province. The sound of English is painful to the ears of French speakers. We have it on the highest authority governing the province. The introduction of Bill 101 consolidated that position, making it mandatory through the Charter of the French Language that children in Quebec must attend French schools unless they or their parents have attended English elementary schools, and they are Canadian-born.

Hearings are currently in session into the new Parti Quebecois government's introduction of a supplementary bill (Bill 14) to strengthen existing legislation in support of the primacy of French, and the exclusion of English in the province. The Syndicat de la fonction publique et para-publique du Quebec (SFPQ) tabled a brief at the National Assembly, pointing out the dreadful experiences foisted upon public servants when faced with non-bilingual citizens.

Examples they provided were: A technician asked to submit an English version of a form to a company based in the province since its payroll department was located in Winnipeg, where the staff located there was not functional in the French language. A rental board clerk who deals on occasion with those incapable of understanding file decisions written in French, so he must therefore translate vital passages into English to aid in understanding.

"What emerges from these few testimonials is the obligation for frontline staff to provide services in English under pressure from citizens. While they should feel supported by their immediate superiors [in insisting on working in French], employees fear the warnings and penalties that could follow", testily observed the union. The issue of "shameful bilingualism" is making itself distastefully known in the workplace, and it is an intolerable issue, according to union president Lucie Martineau.

The PQ's new Bill 14 updating the language charter fails to address this issue. Making it abundantly clear that the 'gaping holes' existing in the original Language Bill 101 are not being adequately addressed. A government advisory body on language had something to say about the dreadful situation as well; that fewer people in Montreal work exclusively in French than was common 20 years ago. Strange; this despite research showing that the French language is secure now, and more Quebecers are comfortable using it, but this is not sufficiently satisfactory for the language police of Quebec.

"We must repair the gaping holes left by Bill 101 that allowed rampant bilingualism to infiltrate the public administration. The SFPQ asks that Bill 14 clearly state that the public administration provide services exclusively in French [except in the case of school boards, health institutions and municipalities serving majority English populations.]"  From the very minute that immigrants step onto Quebec soil all provincial government communications should be French only. And that proviso should include First Nations members.

The requirement that knowledge of English be permitted when hiring if the position demands it should also be re-thought and removed. Communication outside of Quebec should be the only instance in which knowledge of English when hiring provincial workers, should be permitted, according to the union. 

Mayors of two Montreal suburbs made their own presentations. Their concerns revolve around the issue that Bill 14 would disallow official bilingual status to their towns, from communicating in English with their citizens, to posting bilingual signs and drafting bilingual bylaws. The mayor of Cote Saint-Luc had this to say: "I can tell you that if someone tried to come to Cote Saint-Luc to touch our bilingual status and say we are going to lose our bilingual status, you are going to have chaos, you are going to have opposition that you cannot even imagine with people in the streets and you are going to lose the linguistic peace."

Question: What linguistic peace?