Traditions At The United Nations
Now there's a vision of refreshing moral sanity for you. The General Assembly of the United Nations condemning a sovereign nation for taking steps to protect its population from the violent assaults of another population's administration. Israel, a democratic rarity in a sea of totalitarian governments whose treatment of their own populations is a human-rights travesty, stands accused of protecting itself from the vicious predations of a governing Islamist entity determined to destroy Israel and install themselves in its stead.The United Nations, a world institution representing all the countries of the world for the purpose of encouraging peaceful relations among them, and in the process also entreating governments to recognize their human-rights responsibilities to their constituents, has become the mouth-piece of anti-Israel rhetoric. The currently-presiding President of the General Assembly of the United Nations is a long-time diplomat, well versed in the inner workings of that august institution.
In fact, (His Excellency), Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki is also Libya's Secretary of African Union Affairs, served three turns as Libya's Permanent Representative to the UN, and chaired the General Assembly's Fourth Committee (Decolonization), representing Libya on the UN Commission on Human rights repeatedly. He owns other honours as well. He was elected President of the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly in June 2009.
A stalwart and proud representative of Libya, a country well known for its support and funding of terrorism, of its own human-rights failings.
He was ably assisted by the chief Palestinian official at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, in encouraging their Arab and Muslim allies to vote preponderantly to accept the Goldstone Commission report, slamming Israel for purported war crimes. Into the debate stepped a York University law professor, Anne Bayefsky, to offer to the assembled world representatives her view of the Goldstone Report, incidentally highly critical of the outcome of the General Assembly vote.
Ms. Bayefsky infuriated HE President Ali Treki and and Riyad Mansour for her demonstrated arrogance in presuming to lecture the General Assembly. "The idea that ... a terrorist organization is going to decide for itself whether or not it violates the rule of law is something that, I think, no serious democratic society will take seriously. You just have to ask yourselves whether this process has done anything in terms of bolstering the credibility of the United Nations", she concluded.
For her obligingly painstaking attempts to instill a sense of moral responsibility and intelligent balance into the proceedings, Ms. Bayefsky found herself surrounded by UN guards, who confiscated the two UN passes issued to her as director of Touro Law Center's Institute on Human Rights and The Holocaust, and ejected her from the building, after she had undergone some rigorous questioning by them.
Ms. Bayefsky, it would appear, erred on a number of counts. In presuming that she, as an accredited presence, might approach the assembly and present her studied observations as a legal expert, simply because others have also done so in the past, (thus serving as a precedent). Without regarding the simple truth that in so doing those others took great care never to criticize the United Nations, giving them a free pass.
In addition to which, she won no admirers within the kindly consideration of the greater majority of those present, pressing Israel's case, and condemning the contents and conclusions of a biased UN report.
And, actually, what else is new at the United Nations?
Labels: Israel, Traditions, Troublespots, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 08, 2009
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