Experts Worry UN Setting Impossible Standard For Other Jew-Haters

“The Council may feel it must lead in these matters, but that does not mean it should do so by making its own achievements untouchable.”

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Geneva, June 23 – The level of bias and cynicism at play in the United Nations Human Rights Council’s report on last year’s war between Israel and Hamas has experts concerned that few, if any, aspiring antisemites will be able to competently emulate it.

Yesterday marked the release of the report, compiled by an investigative team initially headed by William Schabas, a man who had declared long before the commission began its inquiry that he longed to see Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stand trial for war crimes. While anti-Israel bias among UN officials is nothing new, the nakedness of the phenomenon in the case of the Gaza commission quickly escalated to a scale unlikely to be matched by other individuals or groups that otherwise claim impartiality. If so, say experts, aspiring Jew-haters will find themselves striving for an out-of-reach goal, a recipe for emotional, psychological, and physical damage to them and those around them.

The escalation began with the Human Rights Council’s decision to frame the investigation as beginning the day after three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas members, thereby effectively divorcing subsequent Israeli actions from their context and implying no justification for them. It proceeded by not raising an eyebrow at Schabas’s own conflict of interest inherent in previous legal work he had done for the Palestine Liberation Organization, nor at his failure to disclose that relationship. When he did grudgingly step down, after most of the report had been prepared, no revisiting of the investigation was even considered, even in light of the potential bias. The staff who continued to compose the report after Schabas’s departure, moreover, are documented as indulging in much the same level of anti-Israel bias as he. Most haters could produce such a level of cynicism and prejudice only after years of sustained practice, says communication scholar Joe Goebbels.

“In most contexts no one can get still enjoy the veneer of respectability and credibility that the Human Rights Council pretends to have, even as they abandon any notion of fairness in practice,” said Goebbels. “The Council can thus engage in all manner of intellectual dishonesty, such as failing to compare the combatant-to-noncombatant casualty ratio to other conflicts. But other would-be vilifiers of Israel and Jews can’t go nearly as far as such chicanery if they strive not to be immediately dismissed as driven by hate. The Council may feel it must lead in these matters, but that does not mean it should do so by making its own achievements untouchable.”

Excessive implementation of the cynicism and hypocrisy occurred in the report’s use of objective or pro-Israel sources only to help whitewash or downplay Palestinian crimes, noted Goebbels. “But they made no such attempt to qualify or restrict the application of jaded Palestinian or pro-Palestinian sources – taking, for example, Hamas-provided civilian casualty figures at face value. By itself that exercise in duplicity is old-school, but taken together with the rest of the Schabas Commission package, this is an too high a standard for aspiring antisemites to have a hope of matching.”