Chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission rotates regionally and next year it is Africa's turn, giving the African states the right to select the chairman. The African bloc at the UN has nominated that bastion of respect for human rights, Qaddafi's Libya.

On October 4, 2002, in Geneva, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child condemned even-handedly Israelis and Palestinians for "terror on both sides." The UN committee equated the Arabs' murder of Israeli children as they slept or played or hiked or rode buses, to the defensive strikes by Israeli forces which have inevitably claimed some civilians among whom terrorists routinely hide. But then it was remarkable that the Committee criticized the Arabs at all, rather than treating Israel as solely responsible for terror.

The violently anti-Israel and anti Semitic rhetoric of the UN-sponsored International Women's Conferences in Copenhagen and Mexico City drove even some prominent Jewish feminists away. Letty Cottin Pogrebin describes her experiences at one of these conferences as the Jewish "click" which navigated her back to Judaism. The conference organizers saw no hypocrisy in the orgy of criticism by women from states that do not permit women to vote or drive or even uncover their heads in public.

The UN's 2001 World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, degenerated into a lynching of Israel with the usual vitriol and anti-Semitism, now standard issue for any meeting linked to the UN.

Even UNICEF, which provides help to children around the world and has resisted being embroiled in anti-Israel politics to the extent of other UN outfits, is becoming more openly anti-Israel. UNICEF's Pierre Poupard has issued a scathing memo accusing Israel of preventing 226,000 children in the Palestinian Authority from going to school. No mention that temporary curfews were due to Israel's effort to crack down on terror and suicide bombers.

David Bedein of the Israel Resource News Agency in Jerusalem contacted Poupard who claimed not to know that PA schools are used for incitement, that military training had become an integral part of the PA's educational system, that children received weaponry training in PA schools and school yards (even though the New York Times reported this back in August 2000), or how extensively the so-called Rights of Children are violated by the PA, which sends them to participate in riots and places them in the front lines of demonstrations against Israeli soldiers. Yet another straw in the wind: Syrian actor Dourade Lahham, who was officially reappointed in February as an honorary ambassador by UNICEF, described President Bush as a "modern-day Hitler" (according to the Beirut Daily Star, September 8, 2002), and declared he was proud of his association with Hezbollah.

Since Oslo, the sorry record of the United Nations has grown sorrier still. It is a comment on the stupidity of the Israelis that they believed criticism of the state as "occupier" and "oppressor of Palestinians" would fade once they had turned over rule of 98% of Palestinian Arabs to the Palestinian Authority. Instead, in session after session, whether of the General Assembly, the Security Council, or the innumerable commissions and committees, the UN devotes itself to a litany of the terrible wrongs inflicted by the mighty empire of Israel, comprising as it does fully 1/1000 the size of the 22 member-nations of the Arab League, whose own idea of how to treat others can be seen in their solicitude for the persecuted Copts, the gassed Kurds, and murdered Sudanese blacks, to name but a few.

Indeed, Israel has become such an obsession at the UN, whose mission appears to be adjusting almost any untoward event so as to condemn Israel, that it would blame Israel for El Nino if it could figure out a way.

Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, former Soviet bloc countries, so recently liberated from the yoke of Communism, have turned what used to be their knee-jerk anti-Americanism into routine endorsement of anti-Israel resolutions. In this they are joined by many of the representatives of the 84 free countries that blindly endorse the numbing barrage of hypocritical resolutions

November 2002               - 5 -               Outpost