The United Nations Human Rights Council decided Wednesday to dispatch an international committee of inquiry to the region to look into the events of the Gaza flotilla. A total of 32 countries voted in favor of the committee of inquiry, nine abstained and three - the U.S., the Netherlands and Italy - voted against.
In this council, there is a majority of countries with ties to Arab nations. This makes it easy for them to create their own agenda in the voting procedures. Israel had been condemned 15 times in less than two years. By April 2007, the council had passed nine resolutions condemning Israel, the only country which it had specifically condemned. The council voted on 30 June 2006 to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session. The resolution, which was sponsored by Organization of the Islamic Conference, passed by a vote of 29 to 12 with five abstentions. Toward Sudan, another country with human rights abuses as documented by the council's working groups, it has expressed "deep concern."
What is your bet on the next report? What fool is going to put his name on this one?
Obama has suggested that Israel probes the incident themselves (something they will do anyway), but under US supervision, although Netanyahu is delaying to come up with an answer due to internal disagreements in the government. To me, this seems like a more reliable solution than allowing the UN council to do it, a council that long ago diverted from the original dream of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassain and the other eminent figures that created the Commission of Human Rights at Lake Geneva some 60 years ago.
At the same time, Hamas is proving its dishonest intentions by blocking Israel from delivering the aids from the ships into Gaza. It surely makes me wonder how disastrous the situation in Gaza really is. On one hand, Hamas is known to confiscate aids for their own benefits and starve their own citizens, but then a Danish reporter presented an article (Danish) after visiting Gaza the other day, which shows that the problems look slightly different from what Palestinian media sources want to present. There are no real shortage of food and building material, but rather low employment rates, which prevent the citizens from buying the goods. This can can easily be explained by the agenda of the Hamas regime, who instead of focusing on building up the economy, direct all their resources on violent resistance against Israel. The blooming economy on the West Bank, where roadblocks and checkpoints continuously are removed should be proof enough.
To repeat myself, I am not defending the blockade. I find it non-effective on both preventing radicalisation and the continuous terror attacks, but the security question is real and valid and it needs to be taken into consideration. See what happened when Israel left Gaza the first time. Hamas is not any spring chicken. This Iran-backed theocracy butchers its own citizens if they open their mouths and confiscate humanitarian aids. What makes you think that they would stop if they had open borders?
4 comments:
Well written, Johanna! I wonder how many "blue-eyed", in the meaning of blåögd=naive, know what lies behind so many of these condemnations? In Sweden people generally put their trust in the UN.
I'm a long-time reader of Dry Bones and have seen the UN satirized over this situation many times an have read Eye-on-the-UN now and then. Whenever a new unilateral condemnation spews out , I think, ho-hum, here we go again. It is a scandal that a human rights council has been allowed to become a mobbing bully-council. Israel is used to it; doesn't expect anything else by now, I think. But what about all the violations of human rights elsewhere that go ignored?
Thank you A-K
Do you have a theory about why Barak is reluctant to the US-supervised Israeli probe?
Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador in the US wrote in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/opinion/03oren.html):
"Also found on the boat were propaganda clips showing passengers “injured” by Israeli forces; these videos, however, were filmed during daylight, hours before the nighttime operation occurred."
But of course also this will be rejected as fake Israeli propaganda by the flotilla defenders...
Dry Bones is great, but I discovered him pretty recently. The positive side of that is that I can always go to his blog and find for me new strips... ;)
Jojo, I am not good on israeli domestic politics. Sorry.
I wouldn't be surprised over fake film. It has happened before. And people have believed them.
Post a Comment