UN Shows Anti-Israel Bias by Ignoring True Human Rights Violations
Last week the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) released nine reports on the state of women’s rights worldwide, and only singled out one of the 139 U.N. member states by name throughout all of the documents.
Did they single out a country where the barbaric practice of female gentile mutilation is permitted? No.
Did they single out a country where women are prohibited from being in public without a male guardian and are physically punished if they do not wear mandatory clothing? No.
Did they single out a country where women are routinely subjected to forced sterilizations and abortions in the name of population control? No.
Instead, the Commission singled out Israel – a country where women actively participate in all aspects of society, including voting and serving in the military, and whose laws prohibit the discrimination of women.
So why then would Israel be the subject of scrutiny for their treatment of women? In a document titled, “Situation of and assistance to Palestinian women”, CSW slams Israel for contributing to a “humanitarian emergency with an unprecedented scale of destruction, devastation and displacement” in the Gaza Strip that negatively affects Palestinian women.
Yes, the United Nations is blaming Israel for the state of women’s rights in Palestine, where the Palestinian Authority has allowed a terrorist organization to seize power and control, using women and children as shields as it launches terrorist attacks against Israel itself. In fact, it is Palestinian terrorists who have launched over 300 knife attacks against Israeli citizens, literally stabbing women and children in the back.
In response to the report, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor told The Times of Israel:
If anyone has ever doubted that the UN is biased against Israel, today we got further proof. Of the 193 member states in this institution, dozens slaughter innocent civilians and impose discriminatory laws that marginalize women and yet they all get a free pass. The Commission on the Status of Women itself includes some of the worst violators of human rights, as Iran and Sudan.
And this bias is hardly new. For decades, U.N. bodies have unfairly and unfoundedly targeted Israel.
The U.N.’s Humans Rights Council (HRC), for example, consistently ignores gross human rights violations of member countries like China, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, while using its platform to blast Israel. In a recent op-ed, Anne Bayefsky of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, pointed out that in the history of the Human Rights Council, over one-third of its resolutions have been directed at the Jewish state. In the current session alone, the HRC will release four times more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation in the world.
In a 2006 speech to open the 61st U.N. General Assembly, even former Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted, “[S]upporters of Israel feel it is harshly judged, by standards that are not applied to its enemies – and too often this is true, particularly in some UN bodies.”
A decade later, this anti-Israel discrimination continues on the world’s stage. Either the U.N. is going to care about human rights or it’s going to be a politicized institution used to attack Israel for defending itself. It can’t be both.
As the Obama Administration reportedly prepares to target Israel at the United Nations Security Council perpetuating the institutional anti-Israel bias, we continue to stand with Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East.