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4.2.12
WC: 191694

103 have been hijacked by hard left ideologues who focus disproportionate attention on imperfect democracies at the expense of victims of far more serious human rights abuses by tyrannical regimes.

The worst offender in this inversion of human “rights” and “human wrongs” has been the U.N. When my mentor Arthur Goldberg was appointed as United States Ambassador to the U.N. in 1965, [check year] he asked me to help him in an informal capacity as an advisor on human rights and matters of international law.

I worked closely with him on a number of such issues, meeting with him regularly in New York. In 1967, following Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, Goldberg asked me to consult with him on the drafting of Security Council Resolution 242 which sought to provide a framework for peace in that troubled part of the world. The Resolution, which was carefully crafted in diplomatic language—“U.N. speak”—called for Israel to return “territories” (not all territories or even the territories captured in the defensive war) in exchange for recognition by the Arab stated and secure borders. Israel accepted 242, but the Arab nations held a conference in Khartoum, where they issued their 3 infamous “no’s.” “No peace. No negotiation. No recognition.” This led Israel’s U.N. representative Abba Eban to quip that “this was the first time in history that the winners of a war sued for peace, while the losers demanded unconditional surrender.” [get exact quote]

From that point on, the U.N. (most particularly the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, Unesco, and several other agencies) began its downhill spiral away from neutrality and toward becoming an organization focused almost exclusively on the imperfections of democracies such as the United States and Israel, while virtually ignoring genocides and repressions by non-democratic nations.

The year 1975 was perhaps the Apex (or Nadir) of the inversion of human rights, especially at the United Nations. While Pol Pot was murdering millions, how did the world community react? Surely the murder of so many innocent people would prompt the United Nations to swift preventive action. And yet, just as it did during the Holocaust, the world community did absolutely nothing to prevent the atrocities. Indeed, not only did the United Nations take no

alleged trends cited in the report, but she still refused to provide anything more than a recommendation that we Google “pretty much all the NGOs” in the region. It is impossible under these circumstances for any outside researcher to replicate AI’s study and to confirm or disconfirm its conclusions.

The NGO Monitor, an organization based in Jerusalem which analyzes reports made by other NGOs, blasted the AI report on the ground that “Palestinian men are condescendingly excused from taking responsibility for their actions.” This is true, as a careful reading of the AI report shows. Listen to the excuses AI provides: "Restrictions on movement and curfews which confine people to their homes for prolonged periods, and increased unemployment, poverty and insecurity, which have forced men to spend more time at home, as well as the increase in crowded conditions in the home, have contributed to the increase in violence against women, including sexual abuse, within the family.". By providing these “abuse excuses,” AI places its own political biases ahead of the interests of the female victims. The NGO Monitor correctly characterized the amnesty report as based on “biased sources” and lacking in “credibility.” It is also categorically false, as a simple matter of fact. But that doesn’t matter to Amnesty International, because the counter-factual “increase” in honor killings after the Israeli occupation fits its ideological and political agenda better than the truth.

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