Antisemitism at the United Nations may be as ubiquitous as the United Nations' dead silence on human rights violations around the world, but rarely has it been as brazen and transparent as on Oct. 27, 2022.

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A presentation of a report to the General Assembly of a unique UN commission of inquiry on Israel, followed by a press conference with the three inquisitors at UN headquarters in New York, was nasty, brutish and long-winded. Responding to the evidence-based charges of antisemitism tainting the inquiry and its members, commission of inquiry chair Navi Pillay wailed: "They're all false and lies." A response to her lies is essential to recognizing the real dangers of this exceptional UN attack on Israel and the Jewish people.

Background

The inquiry was created in May 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council at the behest of the Organization of Islamic states, joined by HRC members and human rights aficionados such as China, Libya, Russia, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela. The "inquiry" garnered zero Western democratic support.

Quickly appointed as members of the inquiry were three individuals who clearly lacked objectivity, impartiality and independence, despite these qualifications being mandatory under UN rules. Navi Pillay, of South Africa, who was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, was named chairperson, along with Miloon Kothari of India and Chris Sidoti of Australia. All were extreme anti-Israel partisans who had pronounced themselves on the subject matter of the "inquiry" before passing go.

Public scandals soon followed. Over the past four months, Sidoti ridiculed accusations of antisemitism, Kothari said the "Jewish lobby" controlled social media and objected to Israel's membership in the United Nations and Pillay shamelessly defended them both. The United Nations circled the wagons and left all three reprobates still standing.

The commission of inquiry's official job description is to investigate "all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression."

But the official summary of the inquiry's first report to the General Assembly, issued on Oct. 20, 2022, announced that the only human rights it dealt with were Palestinian. The report ended with a recommendation section directed to Israel, the United Nations and member states, and to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Not a single recommendation was directed to Palestinians. The report never mentioned the word "terrorism," Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was, in short, a farce masquerading as law.

The General Assembly: Oct. 27, 2022

On Oct. 27, 2022, the three inquisitors demonstrated why the world's worst human rights violators are their biggest admirers, and how the UN system has been enlisted in the service of their anti-human rights and antisemitic agenda.

Pillay stage-managed the two-part event, both the "dialogue" with states and the news conference. She began by presenting the report at the General Assembly's Third Committee. This committee is composed of all 193 UN member states and is tasked with addressing human rights, even though the majority of UN members are not free democracies and think human rights protection is for losers. The sources of enthusiastic support for the "inquiry" in this environment was revealing.

Iran – currently engaged in a bloody crackdown on its own civil society – participated in the General Assembly dialogue with this:

"The Islamic Republic of Iran expresses support for the work of the Commission of Inquiry … The brutal Israeli regime has resorted to a new law in order to hinder the Commission's work and its cooperation with civil society … Madam Pillay, in your opinion, how critical is the role of civil society in resolving the question of Palestine?"

Iran thus reminded listeners of the true nature of the exercise – namely, cynical political gamesmanship.

Syria – which murdered its own population with weapons of mass destruction – told inquiry members and the General Assembly:

"I would like to thank the Chair and members of the Committee. We fully support your mandate, your efforts, and your report. And actually, we don't find what was mentioned in your report weird or unreal. This is an ordinary result for a continuous occupation since 1948."

Thus, Syria reminded listeners of the actual root cause of the conflict – namely, Arab rejection of Jewish self-determination.

Pillay's presentation was a no-holds-barred attack on Israel from the UN podium, where she sat beside her two colleagues, accompanied by the Third Committee's chairman, Ambassador José Blanco of the Dominican Republic. When she finished her tirade, Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan was given the floor.

Erdan criticized the report, pointed to the bias of its authors and introduced actual victims of Palestinian terror that were physically present in the seats behind him, dehumanized by the report.

The next move was extraordinary. The chairman did not proceed simply to call the next speaker. Instead, Ambassador Blanco said:

"Before we continue with the statement of the State of Palestine, I would like to recall to the Delegation of Israel that let's stick to the text of the document and let's avoid personal attacks or provocations for Members of the Commission."

Such a reprimand from the chairman of the Third Committee to the ambassador of any state – let alone a state responding to a direct attack on its legitimacy and its people – was unprecedented.

Blanco had no comment for the next speaker, the representative of the "State of Palestine," after her series of vicious slanders of apartheid, murder, maiming, domination and oppression. Just "Thank you very much."

A few minutes later, the chairman gave the high-ranking Deputy Permanent Representative of Czechia (the Czech Republic), Miroslav Klíma, the same treatment he had meted out to Erdan.

Klíma said: "We were shocked by a recent interview in which one of the members of the Commission used terms such as 'Jewish lobby' and questioned Israeli UN membership. We strongly reject any form of antisemitism. Such comments contribute to the polarization of the situation and threaten to undermine the impartiality of the UN human rights mechanisms."

Whereupon Blanco responded: "I remind all delegations that we should focus on the report being submitted and avoid personal attacks on members of the Commission."

This was not some trivial development in UN minutiae. It was an outrageous effort by the leadership of the General Assembly to silence the voices of member states objecting to antisemitism, and especially antisemitism emanating from a UN source. The UN apparatus had decided Kothari and his grotesque antisemitism, and his defenders, deserved protection, and that it was the Israeli ambassador and the Czech deputy permanent representative objecting to antisemitism who offended.

UN rules demanding impartiality, objectivity, independence, as well as personal integrity, are personal by definition. There's nothing impersonal about personal integrity. The authors of the report don't have immunity from fundamental breaches of key operating standards. And their bias goes to the heart of the credibility of their report.

So how did this contemptible action by the General Assembly's top brass to curtail member states from naming and shaming the purveyors of modern antisemitism occur? Pillay herself exposed the source at the subsequent news conference. She said:

"All three of us are not antisemitic. Let me make that clear. And then to add insult to injury, they said that the report is also antisemitic. Now, there isn't one word in this report that can even be interpreted as antisemitic. Of course, it's not new to us that this is always raised as a diversion. The President of the General Assembly [sic] asked them to address the content of the report … We should not be subject to abuse such as this, which is just totally false. I don't want to go into all the things they said. They're all false and lies."

The public criticism of the Israeli ambassador and the Czech representative – and the intimidation of all the other diplomats who might have attempted now or in the future to object to UN-driven antisemitism – had originated with the inquiry's antisemitic bullies themselves.

Pillay's outburst corroborated the very conclusion she was trying so hard to avoid. She had spent a high-profile career, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and thereafter, peddling dangerous falsehoods about Israel and the Jewish people: blood libels such as that Israelis deliberately target the innocent and murder children, and that the Jewish state is racist. The claim that charges of antisemitism are a "diversion" is the diversion of the antisemite. The whine of the abusers that they are the abused is the classic diversion from the hurt of their victims, the victims of the Palestinian violence that Pillay and company incite and excuse. What's totally false is that she and her crew are immune from criticism, and that well-documented charges of antisemitism are off limits because she says so.

Lies from Pillay and the UN commission of inquiry

Pillay's claim that the criticism directed at the inquisitors and their reports was "all false and lies" was deceptive propaganda. What follows is a closer look at just some of the lies that should not be allowed to travel around the world before the truth gets its pants on.

Lie number one

At the press conference, a reporter from I24News addressed the following question to the commission of inquiry members:

"You're already on record vocally as declaring Israel as an apartheid state. You're vocally a proponent of boycotting and sanctioning Israel. Three weeks before you were appointed chairwoman of this Commission, you were signatory to a letter to President [Joe] Biden attempting to implement punishment on Israel. So you have essentially prejudged every matter that is before this Commission in one form or fashion … How can you sit here and tell the world that this is an impartial commission?"

Pillay responded: "It's all news to me that I have done all this. I have signed no petition or made no statement … I'd like to see it. I've never seen it. You know, because then maybe somebody has used my name, I want to know."

That was a lie. She did sign the statement, an open letter to Biden dated June 14, 2021. It's easily accessible on the web – with her name on it, identified as former UN High Commissioner. It was issued shortly before she was appointed to the job of determining the same facts that the letter had pre-determined.

The letter says such things as:

"We, the undersigned global coalition of leaders … call for US leadership to take action to help bring an end to Israel's institutionalized domination and oppression of the Palestinian people … [T]he United States must address the root causes of the violence … Your administration must apply concerted diplomatic pressure to help end the ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression and ensure accountability for Israeli authorities that violate Palestinian rights."

(The undersigned global coalition of leaders – which included Pillay – made no call for pressure or accountability for any Palestinian violation of Israeli rights.)

Given that the mandate of the commission of inquiry is to find "all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression" – the charge of prejudging was exactly right.

Even if we pretend for a moment that she didn't sign the letter knowingly, she has certainly known for almost a year that her name was on it.

Numerous public complaints of bias have directed readers to her signature on that very document – and provided the link for her viewing ease. She has never removed what she now claims she didn't approve.

Lie number two

Pillay told reporters at the news conference when asked about her bias "all that's been twisted into that I'm a campaigner for BDS. You know, I truly am not."

On Nov. 29, 2017, Pillay spoke at a special event for United Nations International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Here she is in her own words, after speaking about the world-wide boycott and sanctions campaign against apartheid South Africa:

"I hope that the Palestinian struggle to end colonization gains this kind of momentum, especially in the civilian campaign of BDS, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions … On the BDS campaign. I'm very pleased to hear that there's so much activity and support from South African civil society activists as well."

On June 18, 2020, she signed a public letter organized by the South African BDS Coalition. The letter said:

"We endorse the Palestinian call for banning arms trade and military-security cooperation with Israel; suspending free trade agreements with Israel; prohibiting trade with illegal Israeli settlements and accountability from individuals and corporate actors complicit in Israel's occupation and apartheid regime … We demand that our governments fulfil their obligations under international law by: Adopting a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly which renews the call for, and provides the means to implement, targeted and lawful sanctions on Israel, including a military embargo."

Pillay's signature on the letter is accessible on the web, and has been for over two years, as has been drawn to her attention multiple times.

Lie number three

That the Commission of inquiry on Israel is not discriminatory – that Israel is treated in the same way as what the inquisitors consider to be the relevant comparisons: Ukraine (subject to a Russian invasion characterized by the daily targeting of civilians for 10 months); Syria (responsible for using chemical weapons against its own population, and the murder of over 200,000 civilians in the last decade); and Myanmar (where grotesque forms of ethnic cleansing, sexual violence and infanticide have victimized hundreds of thousands).

Not only is the democratic state of Israel not comparable to the human-rights degenerates running Russia, Syria and Myanmar, but the UN operations directed at these countries are not identical to the Israel "inquiry" – even according to Pillay and her colleagues. On the contrary, the Commission of inquiry members have repeatedly crowed that their mandate is a unique UN attack on Israel.

Here's Pillay at the October UN press conference:

"This morning we presented our first report to the General Assembly, and that alone is unusual. Commissions of Inquiry do not get the mandate to deliver in Geneva and here, and the reports we delivered are different."

She also said: "Unlike other commissions, we have an open-ended mandate."

At the General Assembly, Pillay expressly referred to "the unique mandate we are given."

Moreover, in a June news conference in Geneva, held after presenting their first report to the UN Human Rights Council, Pillay said: "We are very interested in the part of the mandate that requires us to identify individuals who are responsible and to work with judicial institutions for possible prosecutions and to secure justice. So all this is new."

On the same occasion, Chris Sidoti said: "The way in which accountability is framed in the mandate, it's different from other commissions of inquiry."

Lie number four

These anti-Israel and anti-Jewish partisans are very keen on establishing their credentials by bloviating that all they're doing is "law." Irritated by criticism, Pillay lectured states at the General Assembly: "If you read the report you'll see clearly it's based on law." And she told the press conference: "How would I exercise the prejudice anyway? I'm dealing with international law here."

Not so. They're political hacks hired by political actors to conduct a political onslaught. Here's "inquiry" member Miloon Kothari – who is not a lawyer – admitting to their non-legal agenda at the same press conference: "It's quite different, this mandate. If I may dare to say, it goes into the political issue rather than just reporting on violations, who killed who, and what happened."

Of course, there is a reason these inquisitors cannot accurately apply the law to what actually happened. They don't know the facts, including the realities facing military and security forces that might allow an armchair general to apply the legal standards associated with self-defense. And they don't care.

Pillay herself said at the June news conference: "We want everyone to take this commission seriously, because it's the first time it can look into political questions, which you can't do under the Human Rights Council regular mandates."

At the October news conference a reporter asked Pillay: "Imagine … the government of Israel, the leaders of Palestinians and even the president of the United States ask you, what we should do, what is the solution to our problem?"

Addressing the global audience in response was one person, an anti-Israel radical appointed by anti-Israel radical states and their UN entourage, an individual having no authority, jurisdiction, knowledge or expertise to decide the terms and conditions of Arab-Israeli peace – let alone overrule the negotiated terms of existing agreements between the parties. And yet, without hesitation, Pillay rattled off a list of demands only for Israel, and concluded with this: "I can think of a number of first steps that should be done before they enter into talks."

It wasn't mere hubris. Pillay purported to dictate political answers by reciting a Palestinian list of demands – starting with derailing negotiations and eschewing an immediate unconditional halt to violence.

As even the Security Council has repeatedly reaffirmed, negotiations are the only hope for peace, because they necessitate acceptance or recognition of the legitimacy of the other, while Pillay's Palestinian clientele haven't accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state in 75 years.

Lie number five

Pillay told the General Assembly and the world's press corps: "I'm 81 years old, and this is the first time I've been accused of antisemitism." Guffaws could be heard in the room.

Take but one example I can provide, from as long ago as 2008. Pillay was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and busy mounting a massive campaign to convince countries to back a racist UN "anti-racism" Durban "review conference." Dubbed "Durban II," the conference was intended to regurgitate the 2001 "Durban Declaration" and its antisemitic message smearing one country – the Jewish one – with the charge of racism.

At the time, I wrote in The Australian: "Human rights commissioner Navanethem Pillay, who will be the secretary-general of Durban II, has unleashed a wave of misinformation intended to whitewash UN-based antisemitism."

I also wrote in Forbes: "Durban I was the 2001 UN world conference on racism, most famous for spreading antisemitism rather than defeating it. Pillay is engaged in a frenzied attempt to silence critics of round two."

In this case, Pillay's deceitful attempt to dodge and deny her role in enabling antisemitism vividly exploded. Pillay responded to the criticisms leading up to Durban II in a press release in March 2009: The "review conference has also been the target of a disparaging media and lobbying campaign on the part of those who fear a repetition of antisemitic outbursts. This is unwarranted."

A month later, the only head of state to attend her UN confab was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose invective from the UN stage included: "Following … World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings … The word Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religion and abuses religious sentiments to hide their hatred and ugly faces."

Lie number six

A reporter from The New York Sun asked Pillay at the October news conference: "I am told there were several NGOs that sent you all kinds of comments and reports that were ignored. Could you answer that?" Pillay responded:

"One of our first methods was to call for submissions … I think there were five million submissions or emails came from one address … It seems that they're really records of Holocaust victims and so on, so not relevant to us. Our mandate doesn't require us to look at the Holocaust."

The remark should be compared to Pillay's statement when she opened the news conference: "We are also mandated to investigate all underlying root causes of the recurrent tensions, instability, and protraction of conflict. So no time limit there. Look at the root causes from time immemorial to now."

So the inquisitors could deal with anything they chose, from "time immemorial," and decided that the murder of six million Jews who didn't have self-determination and the protection of a Jewish state were irrelevant.

Since I submitted the millions of submissions to which she referred, here's why the voices of Jewish victims ought to have counted in this UN "human rights" world.

The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi collaborator and propagandist. But Palestinian Arabs called him "Palestine's national leader," "our hero," and "the voice of the Palestinian people." He continues to be a singular role model to the Palestinian terrorists and political leaders of today. If Pillay and company were actually looking for the root cause of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict, al-Husseini's antisemitism is key.

He wrote the script for how to achieve the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by equating the Jewish presence in the land of Israel with an existential threat to the Muslim faith – thus rendering Palestinian Arab rejectionism of Jewish self-determination intractable, if not insoluble. But to Pillay and company, antisemitism was a "diversion."

Lie number seven

All of the submissions sent by myself and a group of other non-governmental organizations – in response to the public call for submissions by the "inquiry" – were described by Pillay to the same reporter as: "I think there were five million submissions or emails that came from one address … It seems that they're really records of Holocaust victims."

Another lie. In fact, we sent 4,890,902 unique submissions in advance of the inquiry's June 2022 report to the Human Rights Council, and another 180,316 unique submissions in advance of its October 2022 report to the General Assembly. These submissions were from multiple sources, on a wide range of subjects. In addition to submissions from the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and Human Rights Voices, they included: 11,699 submissions from Palestinian Media Watch (PMW); 11,132 submissions from AICE and its Jewish Virtual Library; 12,642 submissions from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI); 2,872 submissions from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and 7,807 submissions from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

The inquisitors advertised on the UN website that they wanted specifics about "victims." Over the course of seven months from February to August 2022, we obliged. In addition to the specifics of 4,987,090 victims of antisemitism during the Holocaust, and the role and legacy of Nazi collaborator, propagandist and Palestinian role model al-Husseini, we sent the individual names and details of 613,500 specific Jewish refugees and victims of Arab persecution in the Middle East and North African nations over the past 75 years, individuals who returned to their indigenous homeland in the land of Israel; 4,220 civilian victims murdered in Arab campaigns to eradicate Israel; and 24,092 Israeli forces who fell defending their country and its people from Arab Jew-hatred.

The inquiry repeatedly said that its central task was to identify the "root cause" of the conflict. So we sent the evidence that violent Palestinian Jew-hatred is at the root of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict – including the specifics of 5,875 attacks by Palestinian Arabs and their collaborators in the 21st century; seven Arab wars against the Jewish state from 1947 on; and 17 defensive Israeli military operations in response to Arab aggression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

So no, these submissions could not be obscenely dismissed as "only" records of Holocaust victims, nor were they only from one address.

Lie number eight

Pillay said during the news conference that the Commission of inquiry had called for submissions, but that in the case of our submissions, "Some of them are a bit difficult to read."

In fact, all of our submissions were in electronic form, readily searchable and clearly formatted using a standardized template.

Lie number nine

Pillay told the press, referring to our submissions, "We didn't ignore" them.

False. To give but one example, our submissions included the details of the historical connection of the Jewish people to Hebron from "time immemorial," and of the Arab massacre of the Jews of Hebron in 1922. The report mentions Hebron 14 times, goes back to 1922 and makes claims about historical ownership of the city. But it turns out that every one of these comments is about Israeli violations of Palestinian "rights" in Hebron. Palestinian violations of the rights of Jews in Hebron over an entire century is never mentioned. And the only historical connection to Hebron that these inquisitors could locate was that of Palestinian Arabs.

So yes, they did ignore them.

Lie number 10

Pillay boasted to the General Assembly about the "inquiry's" outreach to so-called "civil society," and about how much they value and utilize the input from civil society. In her words:

"We've consulted very many experts, both from Israel and Palestine and the rest of the world, and here we will continue to do that kind of research and get the opinions of civil society … this Commission began immediately by going straight to civil society representatives and academics who address these issues. Their role is vital to raise awareness of violations and possible international crimes."

Pillay and company did go straight to civil society representatives and academics – provided their contribution was more Israel-bashing. Those who she belittled at the June news conference as "pro-Israel" sources, those who she has labeled as "the extremist Israel lobby" and those who fellow inquisitor Chris Sidoti dismissed as "GONGOs" – the acronym for government organized (fake) NGOs – got no calls, no invitations and no requests for their opinions. They weren't consulted, they were avoided.

Dismissing the voices of genuinely independent Jewish experts and victims of antisemitism as Israeli government toadies is especially ironic in view of the affiliations of "inquiry" member and "independent" expert Sidoti. Sidoti, for instance, has had a close working relationship with the Palestinian Authority's so-called "Independent Commission on Human Rights."

Lie number 11

When the going got rough at the press conference, inquiry members took the unusual step of calling upon the moderator, a UN staffer, for answers. The UN spokesperson for the "Human Rights Council branch" answered a question about the Commission of inquiry's double standards this way: "There are several other open-ended mandates of the Human Rights Council, and all one needs to do is look at the website and you can see the large array of them."

Actually, on the UN website there is an array of all 36 "International Commissions of Inquiry, Commissions on Human Rights, Fact-Finding Missions and other Investigations" ever created by the Human Rights Council. In addition to the "inquiry" on Israel, only one other has no end date. That's the clearly distinguishable case of Myanmar, where there was a prior finding that crimes against humanity had occurred before the permanent mission was created. And if "open-ended" includes a permit to investigate from "time immemorial," the Israel-bashing license stands alone.

Lie number 12

After Pillay's presentation at the General Assembly, there was an unprecedented intervention by diplomats from 18 states, and the European Union. Each of them took the floor either to condemn the antisemitism of inquiry members or to register objections to the inquiry itself. Given the last word, Pillay attempted to brush them all off with a scolding:

"Let me make absolutely clear, we are not antisemitic. Now there was a reference to statement made by one of the commissioners. This has been dealt fully by the president of the Human Rights Council, who is the proper authority to clear up criticism of the mandate and clear up criticism of those he selected for appointment as commissioners. So I do encourage you to look at the president's website on that."

The claim was insulting and false on many levels. Kothari made his overtly antisemitic remarks on July 25, 2022. At the time, criticism was swift and widespread. Nineteen states and the European Union condemned his remarks. The President of the Human Rights Council, Federico Villegas (Argentina), apparently spoke to Pillay privately about his behavior. Pillay responded by producing a formal public letter directed to the Council President on July 28, 2022. In her riposte she made no apologies; on the contrary, she defended her colleagues – no doubt well aware of her own comparable vulnerabilities.

The Council President then produced a written and public reply to Pillay on July 29, 2022, in which he called Kothari's remarks "unfortunate" and said they "could reasonably be interpreted as the stigmatization of the Jewish people, which, as you're all aware, is at the heart of any expression of antisemitism."

As for taking action, he did nothing.

He whimpered that Kothari should "consider the possibility" of "publicly clarifying" his comments and intentions. Though his predecessor at the HRC had appointed all three inquisitors, Villegas took no action to dismiss Kothari and the others, or to garner support for dismissal in any number of ways at his disposal, starting with a simple declaration that any or all of them had violated the UN Code of Conduct and were unfit for office.

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On Aug. 4, 2022, Kothari wrote to the President of the Human Rights Council to "clarify" his remarks. He was apologetic for his "choice of words," which he twice called "insensitive."

"The offence I have caused by using these words has deeply distressed me," he said – and then slammed Israel for what he said was "non-compliance" with UN decisions.

And that was the end of it – for the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling on him to honor his pledge to stand "in the front line of the struggle against antisemitism" by taking the "necessary measures to bring about the immediate resignation of Ms. Pillay and the other commissioners, and the disbanding of the Commission." Israel's prime minister was completely ignored.

As far as the United Nations was concerned, antisemitism from a UN "human rights" official, whose job description it was to find "discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity" in a conflict between Jews and non-Jews (Arab or Muslim), had been dealt with "fully" by leaving the antisemitism exponent in the job.

Or more accurately, it hadn't been dealt with at all.

Conclusion

This UN "inquiry" has only been in operation a year, but has already left a deep stain on the United Nations. Its creators, enablers and mandate-holders are bent on the demonization and delegitimization of Israel and the self-determination of the Jewish people – the face of modern antisemitism. Evidently, they have no compunction about using deceit to accomplish these ends. Dishonesty that must not be allowed to stand.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post Why the UN 'commission of inquiry' was pre-destined to be anti-Israel appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Guilty of Nazi-like crimes. That's the verdict of a United Nations "commission of inquiry" on Israel that was created by the UN Human Rights Council to commit the Nazi-like crime of demonizing and destroying the Jewish state. Archetypal moral inversion.

The "inquiry" was created in May 2021 and released its first report to the General Assembly on October 20, 2022. Not one Western democracy voted to create the "inquiry," but the UN's top human rights body has rather unusual characteristics. Only 30 percent of Human Rights Council members are free democracies; Islamic states hold the balance of power through a system of regional groups, and its members include such human rights luminaries as China, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Venezuela.

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The "inquiry" is in keeping with its architects. All three members of the "inquiry" were selected because they had already declared Israel guilty of the crimes they were charged with investigating. The mandate of the "inquiry" oozes double standards in its massive breadth, scope and resources.

The "inquiry" issued a first report to the Human Rights Council in June and it didn't take long for its members to distinguish themselves by pushing antisemitic tropes. Member Chris Sidoti from Australia dismissed the voices of Jewish victims of discrimination with the retort that "accusations of antisemitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding." In July, member Miloon Kothari from India claimed that "the Jewish lobby" and its money controlled social media and the inquiry's bad press. He also suggested kicking Israel out of the UN

The chair of the "inquiry," former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, is herself a pusher of "the extremist Israel lobby" canard, the "apartheid Israel" slander, and BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions). So in August, Pillay unleashed an unapologetic, self-serving defense of her colleagues' appalling behavior. UN authorities did nothing to remove them from office. Obviously, they all had violated the basic UN rules requiring impartiality, objectivity and personal integrity – but that's why they were chosen in the first place.

While the new report to the General Assembly is, therefore, not a surprise, it is a disturbing testimony to the moral turpitude of the UN human rights apparatus and its functionaries.

The report is sprinkled with a series of highlighted quotations from Palestinians in Hebron. They are all undated, unsigned, anonymous accusations accompanied by no evidence, not so much as a footnote. One contains a blood libel about Jews arriving at Palestinian homes in the middle of the night and threatening to burn the human beings inside. Another claims that Jews are child molesters intent on feeling the breasts of Palestinian girls.

So how did the inquisitors conduct their "fact-finding"? They issued a "call for submissions" in the fall of 2021 and officially claimed they wanted specifics about victims of "systematic discrimination and repression" as well as "underlying root causes" of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. There was no start or end date on facts, perpetrators or crimes.

In response, through the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and Human Rights Voices, I facilitated over five million unique submissions relating to Jewish victims of said "systematic discrimination and repression" and the roles played by Palestinians and other Arab perpetrators. Over the winter and spring of 2022, carefully documented photos, videos, statements, names and statistical evidence from such research centers as Palestinian Media Watch, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), the Jewish Virtual Library and CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) were all transmitted to the "inquiry" – and those transmissions were meticulously recorded at our end.

These submissions were an unprecedented response in the history of the UN human rights system. Also unprecedented: Every one of our submissions was thrown in the UN trash, apparently without being read. Specifically addressing our submissions at a UN news conference in June, Pillay declared, "I've not seen them" and "all of them would be pro-Israel."

We didn't stop. Over the summer, we facilitated the submission of 180,316 additional files. They detailed 190,161 individual Jewish victims of persecution and oppression, as well as the Palestinian Arab connections to those events. They specified 5,875 attacks by Palestinians and their collaborators in the 21st century. And they chronicled six Arab wars against the Jewish state, in addition to eight defensive Israeli military operations in response to Arab aggression in the 20th century.

In light of the latest "inquiry" report, we now know that those submissions were also all trashed, proving the UN "investigation" is phony, a con, period. The inquisitors do boast that they conducted interviews "with primary and secondary sources" and "in-person and online discussions with stakeholders." And their report has 65 sourced "citations" from 18 organizations. But every one of them trash-talks Israel and nothing from a single participating so-called "pro-Israel" NGO or "stakeholder" sees the light of day.

The shameless prejudice exhibited in the report is shocking, even by UN standards. The "Summary" of the report to the General Assembly – a summary of an inquiry billed as discerning "all underlying root causes" of the conflict – brazenly announces that it is only about "the human rights implications for Palestinians." Not any "human rights" of Jewish Israelis.

In this setting, historical revisionism runs rampant. One anonymous, undated "inquiry" factoid quotes a Palestinian declaring that Hebron is "our land and our father's and grandfather's land." There's no footnote there either. Perhaps because in fact, Hebron is the world's oldest Jewish community, the site of the first parcel of land purchased by Abraham and owned by the Jewish people in their promised land, the burial site of almost all of Judaism's patriarchs and matriarchs, mentioned dozens of times in the Bible, and only periodically rendered Judenrein in parts of the 20th century by Arab massacres of its Jewish inhabitants, British expulsion and Jordanian use of force.

The report's declarations of Israeli human rights violations run wild. Among them, Israelis are at fault for Palestinian women and girls' hygienic issues when menstruating.

The report launches a new celebrity "victim": the Palestinian female mistreated by the Israeli male. The silence on honor killings, discriminatory laws and rampant domestic violence perpetrated by the sexist, chauvinist, abusive Palestinian men who sully their own inequitable society is deafening.

Also missing in action? The word "terrorism" is nowhere to be found. Palestinian perpetrators have vanished. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad never appear.

There is one passing remark that Palestinian demonstrators "threw…on some occasions Molotov cocktails toward Israeli forces." However, it turns out that was just "in reaction to" Israeli evil-doers, and nobody was hurt in the "throwing towards."

Not mentioned: Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks, suicide bombings, incendiary kites, pipe bombs, small arms fire, arson, vehicular attacks, assaults, grenades, IEDs, sniper fire, anti-tank fire, anti-aircraft fire, kidnappings, stabbings, rape, torture, stoning and beheading.

In the only other throw-away line on Jewish victims, the report refers to the years 2000 to 2007 this way: "the Commission acknowledges the significant detrimental impact of armed attacks and security incidents." "Detrimental impact" was how they described the Jews blown apart in the Palestinian suicide-bombing reign of terror. Not as a human rights violation.

The report ends with conclusions and recommendations that take the assault on human decency to the next level.

The inquisitors advocate that Israelis be hunted down, prosecuted and jailed for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) – for the Nazi-like crimes of "persecution" and the "transfer of populations" (knowing full well that the latter meant transfer to the death camps).

On the other hand, they couldn't name a single Palestinian crime worth prosecuting.

The list of recommendations is directed only at "the Government of Israel," the ICC prosecutor, and various UN bodies and member states. And not one recommendation is made to Palestinian authorities.

And last but not least, Americans should be under no illusions that they are safe from this toxic international pogrom.

The report demands that the International Court of Justice, the UN's "World Court," be instrumentalized to manufacture duties "of third states" to chase after alleged criminal Israelis.

The final paragraph of this masterpiece of modern anti-Semitism announces just how far the spider is now casting the web. In kitchen-sink legalese, the inquiry demands that UN member states start "investigating and prosecuting persons suspected of committing or otherwise aiding and abetting or assisting in the commission or attempted commission of crimes."

What crimes? Crimes in the eyes of the very men and women committing, aiding, abetting and assisting the criminal enterprise of destroying the Jewish state and decimating its inhabitants.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The United Nations has started a dangerous process that its creators hope will conclude with the end of the Jewish state. But events over the past two weeks indicate that arriving at that ignominious result will also ravage the bedrock rules upon which the system of international law and justice depends.

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A year ago, the United Nations' top human rights body created a "Commission of Inquiry" on Israel, and on June 7, 2022, the "inquiry" published its first report. On June 13 and 14, 2022, the three inquisitors presented their report to the Human Rights Council and a specially convened press conference for global media outlets.

With falsely-accused Israel in the docket, the essential requirements of the rule of law – objectivity, impartiality, fairness, due process and non-discrimination – were torched.

This paper is the third part of a series on the "inquiry." The first presented the origins and nature of the inquiry. The second considered the inquiry's initial report. Finally, this paper shines a spotlight on the procedure – the disturbing methodology of peddling modern antisemitism on the world stage.

The three members of the "inquiry," headed by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, were appointed by the UN Human Rights Council precisely because of their non-objectivity, partiality and bias. Pillay (South Africa), Miloon Kothari (India) and Chris Sidoti (Australia), were each on record as having already declared Israel guilty of the crimes the commission was tasked with investigating. Moreover, in her role as High Commissioner from 2008 to 2014, Pillay herself was intimately involved in producing a host of UN reports and statements that she then turned around and cited as evidence for the "findings" of the inquiry's report.

When it came time for inquiry members to engage in an "interactive dialogue" with the representatives of states, national human rights institutions and NGOs, Sidoti's compromised role was also on display. An Australian human rights attorney, Sidoti makes no bones about being "a close friend and ally of the [Palestinian Authority's so-called] Independent Commission for Human Rights." On June 14, 2022, Sidoti sat on the HRC's podium while the HRC's vice-president introduced the representative of that organization as speaking for the national human rights institution of the "State of Palestine." The representative congratulated Sidoti and company and "confirmed" their findings.

Taking her audience for fools or collaborators, Pillay told the world's press, "We don't come with any preconceived notions."

Two of the three "inquiry" members (Pillay and Sidoti) are legally trained, making their flagrant denial of due process in Israel's case even more disgraceful. The presentation of the report devolved into a series of readily demonstrable falsehoods.

Pillay told the HRC: "We made a general call for written submissions, and we received several thousand written submissions."

On objectivity and impartiality

That was a lie. A group of NGOs, including mine, submitted millions of unique written submissions and names of Jewish victims of Arab violence and incitement to Jew-hatred.

The "inquiry's" call for submissions advertised an email address and a "cloud" address; a mailing address was provided upon request. We logged all the submissions we sent: 78,771 by email, 2,665,313 by "OwnCloud" only, and 4,890,902 by courier (a total that included the prior electronic submissions).

Pillay told the HRC: "Shortly after our report was finalized, the Commission also received what appears to be one submission with over 2.5 million attachments."

That was false. There was not one submission. Each of our millions of submissions was unique and numbered. And they came from multiple NGOs.

And here's another lie. We can prove that the Commission received over a million unique submissions before their report was finalized, flatly contradicting Pillay's representation.

A draft report from the inquiry was circulated on April 19, 2022. By that date, we had already sent 1,065,267 unique submissions by email and OwnCloud. The finalized report was dated May 9, 2022, and by that date, we had already sent 2,666,801 unique submissions by email and OwnCloud. The report was published for the world to see on June 7, 2022, and by that date, we had sent 4,890,902 submissions by email, OwnCloud and courier.

Pillay told the Council: "Since the finalization of this report, we have sadly received reports of continued violations of individual and collective rights, including excessive use of force, sometimes lethal, by Israeli security forces against Palestinians."

Actually, since the finalization of the report, the inquiry had received – as we logged and numbered – 28,312 reports of lethal force by Palestinians and other Arabs directed against Israelis. But for Pillay, these reports were not sad; they were not even counted.

Pillay told the Council: "Israel's refusal to allow the Commission to visit Israel does make hearing from Israeli victims and witnesses more challenging."

That was a falsehood. Our submissions contained the specific names of 5,483,502 victims (some submissions containing multiple names):

• 600,000 specific Jewish refugees and victims of Arab persecution in the Middle East and North African nations in the past 75 years;
• 4,220 civilian victims murdered in Arab campaigns to eradicate Israel;
• 24,092 Israeli forces who fell defending their country and its people from Arab Jew-hatred;
• 4,812,829 victims of antisemitism during the Holocaust, and the role and legacy of Nazi collaborator and propagandist, "Palestine's national leader," "hero" and role model, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini.

Pillay told the Council: "The Commission has underlined … the need to hear from all concerned parties, all duty bearers, victims, and witnesses."

That was a lie. After May 4, 2022, the inquiry's advertised OwnCloud service for submissions started rejecting our submissions as "unauthorized" (a "401" status code). We responded by mailing submissions instead.

Nor was that the first time our efforts to make submissions had encountered hurdles, all of which we fully documented.

On Feb. 5, 2022, the United Nations' OwnCloud service went offline ("this site cannot be reached"). Subsequent messages from the cloud service preventing our submissions read "Internal Server Error." Then, on March 22, 2022, the cloud service started responding to our attempted submissions with "out of storage space" responses. And by May 4, 2022, we had hit the "unauthorized" wall.

Pillay boasted at the inquiry's press briefing, "We are listening to all stakeholders of whatever political point of view… We are welcoming submissions from anyone, everyone."

A verifiably false claim

At the press conference, she abandoned the "several thousand submissions" claim in the report and in her comments before the Council. Instead, she was now saying, "We've actually received 2.5 million." And then she immediately segued into denigrating those submissions by adding this description: "All of them would be pro-Israel."

Off in her count by two and a half million submissions, she continued: "It's one website that has sent 2.5 million submissions."

That was also false. The multiple websites of the various NGOs making submissions were clearly identified.

Then Pillay belittled them by referring to them as a simplistic list, telling the press: "It appears to be a record of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust, so it's a long list of names."

Another lie. All submissions naming Holocaust victims also spoke to the relationship between the Nazis and Palestinians, from al-Husseini until today.

Furthermore, by Feb. 8, 2022, the inquiry had been sent 11,699 submissions from Palestinian Media Watch (PMW); by March 1, 2022, 11,132 submissions from AICE and its Jewish Virtual Library; by March 5, 2022, 12,642 submissions from MEMRI; by March 9, 2022, 2,872 submissions from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and by March 10, 2022, 7,807 submissions from CAMERA.

These submissions included solid documentary evidence, photos, videos, original documents and detailed research and analysis of all of the Arab wars against the State of Israel; Palestinian terror attacks; Palestinian hate speech; incitement to violence; and irrefutable proof of Palestinian Arab efforts to erase Jewish history, promote genocide and terminate the Jewish state. This was in addition to 1,017,200 specifically identified Jewish victims of antisemitism, together with the Palestinian connection, sent by March 22, 2022.

At the end of March, there was no doubt about two more facts.

First, Pillay's inquiry was still in the information-gathering stage; Pillay admitted at the press conference that she and her entourage had traveled to Jordan on March 31, 2022, to conduct four days of meetings.

Second, the inquiry used that information to come to its own conclusions. Inquiry member Miloon Kothari informed the press, "The report is not only based on what has preceded us."

Then came the most shocking admission, blowing Pillay's cover wide open. Referring to the newly hatched claim "we've actually received 2.5 million," she announced to the world's press: "But I've not seen them personally."

The scandalous moment was caught on camera. The chair of this UN "inquiry" admitted to never having looked at any of our submissions! Any of what she labeled "pro-Israel" submissions.

Ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, she had no trouble answering the central question of this inquiry by declaring that the Arab-Israeli conflict was Israel's fault. She told the press, "The root cause is clearly the occupation." Israeli "discrimination" was the other "core underlying root cause of ongoing violence."

The mountain of falsehoods about the process, therefore, had real consequences. The inquisitors were mandated to look for root causes and the victims of systematic discrimination based on race and religion. But we now know the search will proceed only so long as the root cause is not Arab hatred of Jews, the masses of victims of such hate are not dead Jews, and the refugees are not Jewish.

Inquiry members repeatedly contradicted themselves over other basics. On June 13, 2022, the first day of the dialogue, 22 states registered their objection to the inquiry, calling it "disproportionate" scrutiny of Israel. Among these nations were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. Pillay bristled. She claimed their job description was not exceptional, so there was no cause for complaint.

And then she told the press conference: "We have this very wide mandate to address the root causes… which is usually not the portfolio of human rights. So we are very interested in the part of the mandate that requires us to identify individuals who are responsible and to work with judicial institutions for possible prosecutions and to secure justice. So all this is new."

She also said: "We want everyone to take this commission seriously because it's the first time it can look into political questions, which you can't do under the Human Rights Council's regular mandates."

Sidoti likewise added, "In fact, the way in which accountability is framed in the mandate, it is different from other commissions of inquiry."

If it looks like discrimination, sounds like discrimination and quacks like discrimination, then it probably is discrimination.

On transparency and the secret "Star Chamber" proceedings

The inquisitors have done their best to conceal their conduct. As Pillay herself told the Council: "Individual acknowledgments of receipt of information and submissions will not be provided … The Commission has not made public who it has spoken to."

All that is known by the public and the states bankrolling this enterprise is that these three intensely anti-Israel activists are conducting secret meetings with highly select NGOs and criminal prosecutors – while feigning difficulty with regard to gathering or reading information from "pro-Israel" sources.

Pillay informed the press that the week of June 20, 2022, the "inquiry" was "going to be holding a roundtable of experts," a hybrid affair both in Geneva and online. So, in theory, an online meeting could have been open. But instead, the identity of the invitees is a secret.

Pillay added, "Twenty representatives of organizations" came to meet the inquiry in Jordan. Who they were, she wouldn't say.

Pillay insisted, "We are consulting a whole lot of experts on the occupation." Unnamed experts. Given the designated topic, not the "pro-Israel" kind.

At the same press conference, Kothari said, "We have done a series of secure online interviews with civil society leaders, academics and others." What leaders, which academics? And the "others" are all unidentified in the report, or to the Council, or the press.

Sidoti provided the punchline: "We are already in touch with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court [ICC], and later this week, we'll be having a further meeting with the Office."

In short, this "inquiry" is a quintessential Star Chamber. Covert meetings. Confidential accusers. Clandestine interviews. Classified. Restricted. Top secret. Until Israeli Jews, or supporters of the Jewish people's right to self-determination and self-defense, hear from international or national state prosecutors.

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This sham inquiry process is as rotten as the substance it fabricates. The inquisitors have been caught red-handed. They do not satisfy the criteria to hold the position of independent, objective, unbiased experts. And they are carrying that bias with them into every facet of the operation: what submissions they take, whom they meet, what they read, what they report, whom they lobby, what they collect and what they share.

We know with certainty that Pillay lied about what she knew and when she knew it.

If one is still pondering just how dangerous this venture might be, listen to the outrageous words of Chris Sidoti to the Human Rights Council at the end of the presentation of the report, after some speakers objected to the inquiry and the Council's treatment of the Jewish state. Sidoti said, "Accusations of antisemitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding."

A retort intended to mask the very real antisemitism inextricably bound up with this "inquiry," which is destined to cause serious harm to genuine victims of violence and discrimination unless it is stopped.

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The United Nations has declared an existential war on the state of Israel. Last year, the UN Human Rights Council contrived a unique "Commission of Inquiry" after Israel responded to another round of Hamas rocket attacks. The commission has just issued its first report. Now emanating from the UN's top human rights body is a brazen attempt to resurrect the old 1975 lie that a Jewish state is a racist state. The report's allegation that discrimination by Jews against non-Jews lies at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict is actually at the core of modern antisemitism.

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The "Commission of Inquiry" is chaired by Navi Pillay, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Zealously anti-Israel during her tenure, Pillay publicly slandered Israel with the apartheid label long before the so-called "inquiry" even began.

There are other telltale signs that the fix was in. Early on, the "inquiry" issued a call for submissions and the identification of victims. For the first time in UN history, such a call was answered by the delivery of more than 5 million unique submissions and individual names of Jewish victims of Arab incitement to Jew-hatred and violence. They emanated from a network of non-governmental organizations, which I facilitated, and their transmission was carefully logged. But the report says, "The Commission has received several thousand written submissions" and featured a tiny subset of select Israel-bashing "stakeholders."

Pillay's report claims the root cause of conflict is the "perpetual occupation" – that is, it's Israel's fault; discrimination by Jews – as she defines Jewish self-determination from the start – drives the violence; and that the solution lies in prosecuting the criminals and eliciting third-party responses [economic boycotts] from states and private actors.

The misinformation operation is outrageous: The report finds no Palestinian terrorists, no Palestinian terrorist organizations, and no Palestinian terrorism. The UN inquisitors merely speculated that the actions of Gaza's "de facto authorities" and anonymous "Palestinian-armed groups" could "spread terror among the civilian population in Israel." As for "Hamas," they are only named definitively as engaging in the "exercise of government-like functions."

The submissions that the "inquiry" ignored, however, testify to a different story.

We itemized the Jew-hatred advocated and spread by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini. A Nazi collaborator and propagandist, he was also venerated as "Palestine's national leader," "our hero," and "the voice of the Palestinian people," and remains a role model to the Palestinian terrorists and political leaders of today.

A real root cause? Under al-Husseini's leadership, the strategy of equating the Jewish presence in the land of Israel with an existential threat to the Muslim faith became an Arab template for attempting to achieve the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Our submissions also documented the unrelenting violent attacks on Jews prior to Israel's establishment in 1948 until today. The goal: eliminating Jews from the river to the sea in what amounts to genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights.

The "inquiry" touted that it would "adopt a victim-centered approach in all of its work." So we submitted the identities of 4,220 Israeli and other civilians remorselessly struck down in the various campaigns to eradicate the modern Jewish state, and we submitted the identities of 24,093 Israeli military and security forces who made the supreme sacrifice to protect their country from even greater harm, along with the more than 100,000 wounded.

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The UN "inquiry" claimed it was looking for "systematic discrimination." So we submitted the details of 598,000 Jewish refugees and victims of Arab persecution in Middle Eastern and North African nations over the past 75 years – a partial list of the more than 800,000 who constitute, together with their descendants, the majority of Israel's current Jewish population.

But the UN report styles the return of Jewish refugees from the land of Israel – the longest-standing refugees in human history – as an infringement of Palestinian rights instead of the reality of an arrival 2,000 years overdue.

The inquisitors claimed they were seeking "overall patterns, policies, historical legacies, and structural inequalities that affect the enjoyment of human rights." So we gave them another 46,862 submissions containing weekly situation reports, video and photographic evidence, legal documents, and analysis.

They had rock-solid evidence that: the Palestinian Penal Code forbids Palestinians from selling land to Jews on pain of "life imprisonment with hard labor;" Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas refers to Jews as "filth" to be shunned; the Hamas Covenant openly commits those running Gaza to genocide; the PA pays bounties for the killing of Jews; the PA and Hamas maintain a system of antisemitic indoctrination in schools, training camps, official media, and public affairs of all kinds; PA leaders publicly vow Jews will not be permitted to live in a Palestinian state.

But the report repeatedly claims Jews discriminate against non-Jews and could not muster a single example of the reverse. Nor does the report admit that Arabs have more rights and freedoms in the Jewish state than in any Arab state.

Throughout the report, the standard of "proof" is United Nations say-so, regurgitations of the same UN system of entrenched anti-Israel prejudice and unfairness. In fact, Pillay relies heavily on prior UN hatchet jobs that she herself had a key role in advancing as High Commissioner.

Although this charade is obviously tainted and flawed, indifference to it would be a grave mistake. The "inquiry" has no end date and is being financed in perpetuity. Now on the UN schedule are two reports every year, a perpetual drumbeat of modern antisemitism: the delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Report No. 1 is all the evidence that decent people and democratic states need to tear down this wall of hate and intolerance.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The United Nations has created a Star Chamber targeting the State of Israel. The inquisition was devised by the UN Human Rights Council last May and funded by the UN General Assembly in late December. The three members appointed to the new "Commission of Inquiry" make a mockery of the most elementary preconditions of fairness and legitimacy.

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The identities of the inquisitors are Navi Pillay of South Africa, Miloon Kothari of India and Chris Sidoti of Australia. Pillay was named chair, hence the fitting epithet of the UN offensive: "Pillay's Pogrom." The three were appointed in July by then-council president Nazhat Shameem, a Muslim lawyer from Fiji. With funding now assured, the "Inquiry" is underway.

The "Inquiry's" founding resolution was crafted at the behest of Islamic states and what the United Nations calls the "State of Palestine." It spells out a number of fantastically broad tasks connected by one overarching goal: to turn the Jewish state into a global pariah.

Internationally recognized credentials for any such inquiry demand "independence," "impartiality" and "objectivity." Even the United Nations calls these prerequisites "of paramount importance." Hence, a close look at the records of the "Inquiry" members, as compared to the "Inquiry's" assigned tasks, is compulsory.

The first task assigned was to investigate "all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity."

Pillay, who was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, has an answer to task No. 1 – already. The flagship enterprise of Pillay's tenure was resurrecting the UN's antisemitic hate-fest held in Durban in 2001 and reaffirming the slander of the racist Jewish state. Since then, she's been preaching, "help end decades of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people … recognized as apartheid."

As for the task of identifying root causes, Pillay's got that covered. In her own words: "The occupation continued to be the main cause of widespread violations of Palestinians' civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights."

"At the heart of so many of the problems plaguing the Israel-Palestine situation," she once contrived, was "that the Israeli government treats international law with perpetual disdain" – not the perpetual disdain of law and life by Palestinian rejectionists, racists, terrorists and enablers.

Fellow "Inquiry" member Kothari has also finished "Inquiry" task No. 1 – prior to the inquiry. A former UN "expert" himself, he's already reported on "the practice of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of land-based people and communities, as has historically been the case in Palestine." And the root cause: the affront of Jews living in the Jewish homeland. Or in his words, "Israel's long record of … implantation of settlers prior to and since its establishment as a state."

"Inquiry" member Sidoti brings a whole new meaning to "independence." Sidoti is "a close friend and ally" of the Palestinian Human Rights Commission created by a "Presidential Decree" of Yasser Arafat, and still delivering advice to the Palestinian Authority on Palestinian laws and policies.

Sidoti also "provides strategic guidance and advice" to the "Australian Center for International Justice (ACIJ)" and his NGO has an answer lined up to task No. 1: "Israel is also subjugating … Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line … under an institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression, which amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid."

The second task of these inquisitors is to "investigate … all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law," without a firm start or end date.

Done and done. Pillay spent six years as High Commissioner reporting on what she called Israeli violations and abuses. On her way into office in 2008, she said: "1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children have been forcibly deprived of their most basic human rights … in direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law." On her way out of office in 2014, she fulminated about what she called "the ongoing, routine abuses and human rights violations committed against the occupied population."

Pillay cited for her conclusions the work of "my staff" at her UN office (the same UN office staffing today's "Inquiry"). So, the head of this "Inquiry" has already headed inquiries on the issues before this "Inquiry."

A third "Inquiry" task is to "make recommendations, in particular on accountability measures." In another time-saver, Pillay has already told the Human Rights Council that her top choice is "referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court." And she wants the free flow of Iranian weapons, dual-use materiel and terrorists, in and out of Gaza – or as she puts it: "Israel must allow the free movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza and between Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria)."

One more "Inquiry" task is to "make recommendations on measures to be taken by third states to ensure … that they do not aid or assist in the commission of internationally wrongful acts."

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Done, done and done. Pillay's already urged third states to engage in BDS: "I hope that the Palestinian struggle to end colonization gains … momentum, especially in the civilian campaign of BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions." Kothari has already said – in a UN press release, no less: "I also urge the international community … to reconsider the continuation of military cooperation with Israel." Sidoti's NGO has already recommended "asset freezes against Israeli government officials and entities" and issued a call for "immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel."

With a job description to discover systemic discrimination and human rights violations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United Nations chose "independent," "impartial" and "objective" inquirers who have made careers of discovering systemic Israeli racism and criminality. Tasked with making recommendations on accountability following their findings, the UN-appointed a Queen of Hearts and two knaves – "sentence first, verdict afterward."

These are not "inquirers," and this is not a "commission of inquiry." They are hired guns on a global hit job. A con with life-threatening implications. An assignment no decent lawyer – or human being – would take. But then, that quality is not a UN qualification.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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