Fables From the UN’s Human Rights Council

The United Nations’ Human Rights Council can’t help itself. Its anti-Israel bias runs so deep and its commitment to demonizing the Jewish state is so intense that supposedly serious people who hold responsible positions in the world body lose their connection to reality and their commitment to honesty and truth as they manufacture antisemitic blood libels against the hated Zionists.

How else does one explain the bizarre, yet deeply troubling report, issued last week by the Human Rights Council’s “U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel”? Perhaps we should have anticipated the result from the title of the three-person commission formed in May 2021 to probe alleged human rights violations by Israel. But who could have anticipated that the commission’s three stooges would come up with such outrageous, offensive and wholly unsupported accusations?

According to the report, Israel “intentionally attacked and destroyed” Gaza’s main fertility center while imposing a siege on Gaza and blocking aid that included medicine meant to ensure safe pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care. And the report claimed that “Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.”

Fighting words, for sure. So, where is the evidence to confirm the horrendous acts of genocide claimed as the commission’s “findings?” Alas, there is none. Just a lot of fabricated fables in an effort to establish a false historical narrative and defame the
Jewish state.

The report cited testimony from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as support for its
genocide findings. But the very same commission reported last year that despite its best efforts it was “not able to independently verify” allegations of rape and sexual abuse by Hamas terrorists on and after Oct. 7, citing “a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigation by the Israeli authorities.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected anything more credible. The Commission of Inquiry’s three members include Navi Pillay, who orchestrated the discredited Goldstone Report and the Durban II Zionism is Racism conference and who routinely denounces Israel as an “apartheid” state; U.N. Special Rapporteur Miloon Kothari, who complained about the “Jewish lobby” and challenged Israel’s right to be a member of the U.N.; and Chris Sidoti, who famously belittled accusations of antisemitism as being “thrown around like rice
at a wedding.”

Israeli leadership, women’s groups and Israel’s mission to the U.N. rejected the report as wholly unfounded and antisemitic, saying it attempted to equate Israel’s fighting during the Gaza war with horrific acts of sexual violence committed by Palestinian terrorists during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the report “one of the worst cases of blood libel the world has ever seen.”

We see little point in piling on. The U.N. Human Rights Council and its Commission of Inquiry are an embarrassment. Their ingrained dishonesty and Jew-hatred is obscene. As far as we’re concerned, the Trump administration can’t defund the useless Human Rights Council fast enough. ■