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The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Permanent Commission of Inquiry on Israel will present its initial report on June 13 and there is every reason to expect a biased anti-Israel report inspired by the poorly disguised anti-Semitic hatred of the commissioners. Leftist anti-Semitism at the UN is a long-standing issue, from the infamous 1975 resolution in which the defunct USSR got the UN to label Zionism as racism, giving wings to the anti-Semitism of the philo-Soviet which left a mark around the world, to the bogus Goldstone report of 2009 and the failed Durban anti-racism conference in 2001.
The UN rescinded its 1975 anti-Semitic resolution in 1991, after 16 years of legitimizing global anti-Semitic agitation and propaganda. Goldstone acknowledged to the Washington Post in 2011 that because it “ignored” the thousands of Palestinian missile attacks on Israeli civilians, the “war crimes” allegations against Israel in his report were “incorrect conclusions.” The damage had already been done and in 2001 the UN anti-racism conference in Durban relied on the Goldstone report to reinstate the fallacious 1975 discourse, equating Zionism with apartheid.
Why do I expect something similar from the commission’s report in the next few days?
Because the chairman of the UN’s standing committee on Israel, Navi Pillay, strongly supports the sustained anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Durban Conference. Because that is one of many examples of Pillay’s anti-Semitic hatred of Israel, as reported in detail by UN Watch to the UN itself; because David Litman revealed in a recent article in the Jewish News Syndicate that Pillay’s fierce anti-Israel bias is shared by the other two commissioners, Chris Sidoti, and Miloon Kothari; and because that commission’s budget is the second highest among the 33 such investigations at the UNCHR – surpassed only by the commission on Myanmar – endowing the commissioners with $11.8 million for the first three years, followed by $5.47 million per year, without a defined term.
Since, it is a fact that the UN’s frequent “incorrect” findings against Israel have always been far more publicized than its belated “corrections,” which has served to vilify and isolate the country and fuel both terrorist violence throughout the Middle East and a growing series of anti-Semitic attacks around the world.
And, because unlike Judge Goldstone, I did not look the other way during Hamas’s massive attacks on Israeli civilians, I am not unaware that the terrorists launched more than 4,000 missiles against the Israeli civilian population in 2021. Nor am I unaware that they set up their missile factories and launch sites among the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza to ensure maximum possible collateral damage among their own population from Israeli counter-attacks.
Nor am I unaware that the Hamas Founding Covenant affirms that all the land of Israel belongs to the Muslims. Something that was previously reflected in the Palestinian National Charter, the founding document of a PLO that still retains the Palestinian Authority government with Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.
I know that Hamas delegates held talks in Moscow in May with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, and in his final statement from those meetings on May 5, Hamas international relations chief Moussa Abu Marzouk asserted that an opportunity is emerging to change the status quo of the global system for the benefit of “the oppressed of the world.”
Walid al-Mudallal, a professor of political science at the Islamic University of Gaza, explained that although Moscow is unlikely to supply weapons directly to Hamas, it can do so through Tehran, which has forged an alliance with Russia against Washington. Iran already provides a range of Russian weapons to Hamas to attack Israel, which is why the Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades – Hamas’ military wing – announced on April 19 that it had used for the first time Soviet Strela surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles against Israeli military aircraft.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros