President Biden wants the U.S. to rejoin the United Nation Human Rights Council, a body notorious for its leadership by rogue nations and its obsession with condemning Israel above all other nations.
With members such as China, Russia and Pakistan, 90 of the panel’s 160 resolutions criticizing individual countries have been about Israel. That means more resolutions have been directed at Israel than at all the other nations in the world combined, points out Hugh Fitzgerald for Jihad Watch.
The Trump administration quit the UNHRC in 2018 in protest after trying to reform it. But now the Biden administration says the U.S. plans to run for an open seat on the 47-member council, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will immediately join as a non-voting participant then seek election for the 2022-24 term.
“We humbly ask for the support of all UN member states in our bid to return to a seat in this body,” Blinken said at a virtual meeting of the council last Wednesday, opening its 46th session, which ends March 23.
Blinken praised the council’s work in highlighting human rights abuses, but he criticized it for its treatment of Israel.
“We urge the Human Rights Council to look at how it conducts its business. That includes its disproportionate focus on Israel,” Blinken said.
He said the council’s permanent agenda item, Item 7, regarding Israel, should be eliminated. The panel, he said, should “treat the human rights situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories the same way as this body handles any other country.”
Cajoling rogue nations
Fitzgerald commented that Blinken “is hoping to accomplish what no previous administration has managed.”
“He thinks that once the U.S. is again a member, of the Council, it will be able to persuade or cajole or pressure others to do away with Agenda Item #7, and to judge Israel by the same standards – neither better nor worse – as are applied to all other countries,” Fitzgerald said.
He said Biden’s U.N ambassador should raise the mistreatment of Israel at every session of the council, “making clear he will give the UNHRC a year or two – not more — to show a marked improvement in its treatment of Israel.”
The first task, Fitzgerald said, is to get the UNHRC to eliminate agenda Item 7 and then to raise “again and again the unanswerable, embarrassing, question: how is it that more resolutions have been passed against Israel in the UNHRC than against all the other 192 nations put together?”
“Third,” he wrote, “just as American inducements helped to persuade four Arab states to normalize ties with Israel, the American government has many things to offer or withhold, bringing considerable pressure, both threats and cajolements, to bear on other members, in order that they reconsider their senseless, mechanical, even robotic, anti-Israel stance.”
If the panel doesn’t budge, he said, the Trump administration “has already provided a salutary model of how to walk out.”
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