UN Human Rights Council elects Jean Ziegler, supporter of Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy

Switzerland ... here we go again: Swiss blasted for anti-Israel UN vote Swiss coincidence From JTA: "A Swiss writer who praised a Holocaust denier won an advisory position to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Jean Ziegler won 40 of 47 votes Wednesday to become one of 18 "expert" counselors. His election to the Geneva-based council, dominated by anti-Western authoritarian states, was virtually guaranteed and U.N. Watch, a United Nations monitor, had campaigned to convince Switzerland to withdraw his nomination. That culminated in a letter this week signed by 24 human rights activists and groups opposing Ziegler. Swiss officials dismissed the effort as politicking. Ziegler, a leftist theorist, has praised and supported dictators including Cuba's Fidel Castro, Ethiopia's Haile Mengistu, Libya's Moammar Ghadafy, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and North Korea's Kim Il-Sung. In 1996, Ziegler praised French Holocaust denier Roger Gaurady as "one of the leading thinkers of our time."In interviews, Ziegler says his critics are puppets of his Western opponents and notes that he had helped expose how Swiss banks hoarded funds deposited by Jews during the Holocaust. Also elected as an "expert" adviser to the council was Richard Falk, a Princeton emeritus professor who has likened Israel's dealings with the Palestinians to the Holocaust." Read also: To Sounds of Cheers, UN Human Rights Council Elects Khaddafi Prize Founder to Expert Post Norwegian Parliament Protests Jean Ziegler UN Nomination

Israel on trial in Brussels: Iranian and Syrian Ambassadors give standing ovation to judges

A prelude to Durban II?

A Durban-style mock trial of the State of Israel was held in February in Brussels, the capital of Europe. The Court declared "the Israeli authorities in charge of the 2006 war against Lebanon guilty of the following international crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide." No less!

John Catalinotto, Miguel Urbano Rodrigues and Ángeles Maestro (who coined a new word "falsimedia" for the occasion) complained that the European "corporate" media did not report the trial implying that they take their marching orders from their imperialist paymasters (Ramsey Clark's IA Center website), whereas Al Jazeera TV broadcast the proceedings in full to Arab countries.

What they failed to say is that the progressive anti-imperialist European media and blogs have not reported the trial either. An article by Lebanese journalist Scarlett Haddad may hold the clue as to why the "progressives" thought it wiser not to trumpet their unparalled triumph.

It transpires that the Syrian and Iranian Ambassadors to Belgium were at the trial and that they gave a ten-minute standing ovation to the judges after the reading of the verdict. Such shocking news would probably not have gone down well with European public opinion.

"The Ambassadors of Lebanon, Syria and Iran, as well as the Vice President of the European Parliament, Luisa Morgantini, were among the 300 odd attendees who gave the judges a ten-minute standing ovation after the reading of the verdict", excerpt from an article "The "tribunal of conscience" harshly condemns Israel from Brussels" by Scarlett Haddad for L’Orient-Le Jour. Posted on Islam in Belgium, tag: the Empire of Evil.

Let's see what two individuals Pierre Galand and Jean Bricmont who are well known for their obsessive anti-Israeli militancy did or rather did not do:

Pierre Galand is the head of the Belgian-Palestinian Association, which specialises in the most outrageous vilification of Israel. There is no mention whatsoever of the event on the association’s website.

One would be hard put to find a fiercer (and more ludicrous) critic of Israel than Jean Bricmont, a Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. Unsurprisingly, not only was he a member of the Peoples' Court Executive Committee but he also "gave political statements on the issues before the court". Bricmont too has kept silent about the whole pantomime. For someone who relishes the anti-Israeli limelight it is strange indeed.

On the Kangooroo Court:
Lebanon war mock tribunal condemns Israel and U.S.
Israel on trial in Brussels - a prelude to Durban II?

Say No to Human Rights: the U.N. Versus Human Rights

"The United Nations Versus Human Rights" - petition on LICRA's (Ligue Internationale contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme) website. To sign the petition go here. "The United Nations Versus Human Rights Will 2008 be the year when the United Nations celebrates the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights and simultaneously destroys its own principles? There is, indeed, cause for great concern because the institution has lost its way in recent years, becoming a caricature of itself. In 2001, the U.N. sponsored the World Conference on Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, the city where Gandhi began his law career. The phrases "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" were chanted in the name of people’s rights. In the name of cultural relativism, all remained silent in the face of discrimination and violence against women. Alarmed by the serious problems this highlighted within its Commission on Human Rights, in June 2006, the United Nations launched a new Human Rights Council, intended to correct these profoundly disturbing trends. Today, the picture is particularly grim. As the Durban II conference-- scheduled for 2009--takes shape, it is sanctioning those same trends. What is worse, if new official standards are developed and carved into the stone of a new and very unusual Declaration of Human Rights, that will mark the death of universal rights. Through its internal processes, the coalitions and alliances that are forming, the speeches being delivered, the texts being negotiated and the terminology being used are destroying freedom of expression, legitimizing the oppression of women and systematically stigmatizing Western democracies. The HRC has become a machine of ideological warfare conducted against its own founding principles. Unknown to the major media, day after day, session after session, resolution after resolution, a political rhetoric is being forged in order to legitimize the acts to follow and the violence of tomorrow. A "triple alliance"--composed of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, represented by Pakistan; the Non-Aligned Movement, in which Cuba, Venezuela and Iran play a central role; and China, with Russia’s cynical consent--is working to launch a supposedly "multicultural" revolution. Doudou Diène, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, has thus stated that criticizing the wearing of the burka constitutes a racist attack, that secularism is rooted in a slaveholding, colonialist culture and that the French law prohibiting students from wearing religious symbols at school constitutes anti-Muslim racism, renamed "Western Islamophobia." Confusion of thought reaches new heights when any criticism of religion is denounced as racism. The U.N. is sanctioning a radical threat to freedom of thought. By likening any criticism of these abuses on the part of those speaking in the name of Islam to racism--supposedly a product of neo-colonialist thinking--the spokespeople for this new alliance are tightening the noose they have placed around the neck of their own people. They are undermining the foundations of a civility that Europe achieved, at great cost, following the wars of religion. In September 2007, Louise Arbour, High Commissioner for Human Rights, participated in a conference in Tehran dedicated to "human rights and cultural diversity." Wearing the veil, as required by law in the Islamic Republic, the High Commissioner was a passive witness to the utterance of the principles to come, which may be summarized as follows: "an offense against religious values is regarded as racist." Still worse, on the day following her visit, twenty-one Iranians, including several minors, were executed in public. President Ahmadinejad renewed his call, in her presence, for the destruction of Israel, a member state of the United Nations created by that same organization. Questioned about her silence, the High Commissioner justified her passivity as a sign of respect for Iranian law to which, as an attorney, she felt herself bound and out of a concern "not to offend her hosts." "A man’s home is his castle," said Dr. Goebbels. He used that opportunistic argument when speaking before the League of Nations in 1933 to reject all criticism from an impotent international institution, but one whose principles were, at least, respected, unlike those of the United Nations today. Great political crimes have always needed words to legitimize themselves. Speech foreshadows the move to action. Examples abound, from Mein Kampf to the Mille Collines radio station, from Stalin to Pol Pot, confirming the need to exterminate the enemy of the people in the name of the race, the emancipation of the toiling masses and a supposedly divine order. Totalitarian ideologies have replaced religions. Their crimes and unmet promises of a "radiant future" have invited God back into politics. The greatest terrorist crime in history was committed in the name of God on September 11, 2001, just days after the Durban conference ended. Confronted by that strategy, the democracies--concerned primarily about their balance of trade--demonstrate an extraordinary passivity. What does the fate of the Tibetan people matter, compared to exports to China? What is the price of freedom for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch legislator, threatened with death after her friend, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, was killed in 2002, accused of blasphemy for his film, "Submission"? The examples of Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Robert Redeker and Mohamed Sifaoui prove that Islamist fundamentalism imposes its law through terror. How many Algerians, how many women in North Africa, the Near East, Turkey and Pakistan have already paid with their lives for refusing to submit to religious obscurantism? If by some misfortune, the U.N. were to enshrine such criteria, if blasphemy were to be considered racism, if the right to criticize religion were made illegal, if religious law were inscribed in international standards, that would constitute a regression of disastrous proportions and a radical perversion of our tradition of struggle against racism, which has taken place, and can continue to take place, only under absolute freedom of conscience. The December 2007 General Assembly has already begun to approve texts that condemn certain forms of expression considered as defamatory of Islam. The issue is clear and it is global: we are dealing with the defense of individual freedoms. Unless the democracies rally, following the example of Canada, which has just announced that it will not participate in Durban II, noting that the event could be "marked by statements of intolerance and anti-Semitism," and no longer abstain on or vote for resolutions contrary to the universal ideal of 1948, then religious obscurantism and its parade of political crimes will triumph--under the good auspices of the United Nations. And when words of hate turn into action, no one will be able to say, "We didn’t know."" Elisabeth BADINTER, Adrien BARROT, Patrice BILLAUD, Pascal BRUCKNER, Jean-Claude BUHRER, Chala CHAFIQ, Georges CHARPAK, Christian CHARRIERE-BOURNAZEL, Bernard DEBRE, Chahdortt DJAVANN, Jacques DUGOWSON, Frédéric ENCEL, Alain FINKIELKRAUT, Elisabeth de FONTENAY, Patrick GAUBERT, Claude GOASGUEN, Thierry JONQUET, Liliane KANDEL, Patrick KESSEL, Catherine KINTZLER, Claude LANZMANN, Michel LAVAL, Barbara LEFEVBRE, Corinne LEPAGE, Malka MARCOVICH, Albert MEMMI, Jean-Philippe MOINET, Jean-Claude PECKER, Philippe SCHMIDT, Alain SEKSIG, Mohamed SIFAOUI, Antoine SPIRE, Pierre-André TAGUIEFF, Jacques TARNERO, Michèle TRIBALAT, Michèle VIANES, Elie WIESEL, Michel ZAOUI, etc.

Most Germans reject notion of 'special responsibility' toward Israel

This leaves 48% of Germans believing that they have a significant obligation toward Israel, although 91% wish to remain neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ...

From The Jerusalem Post:

"A little more than 60 years after the Holocaust, a public opinion poll shows that a majority of Germans believe their country has no special responsibility toward Israel.

A recent opinion poll conducted by the German television station Sat1/N24 and the Emnid polling organization revealed that 52 percent of 1,000 respondents see no significant obligation toward the Jewish state.

Sat1 spokeswoman Kristina Fassler told The Jerusalem Post that the finding is "extremely alarming" and displays "an ignorance of history" in Germany. (...)

The result of the survey prompted Chancellor Angela Merkel, who just completed a three-day visit to Israel, to say before her visit: "This is exactly the reason why we must place Israeli-German relations on a sustainable footing, and in addition we must remember our history." (…)

Josef Joffe, a leading German commentator and co-publisher of the widely read German weekly Die Zeit, told the Post that "What the government does is more weighty than what the pollsters find out."

Joffe sees Germany's "friendship with Israel not as a popular project but as a government project," and stressed that under Merkel's tenure German foreign policy had shifted in a more defined and clearer commitment toward Israel.

The gap between Merkel's defense of Israel's right to counterattack in response to rocket fire from Hamas terrorists in Gaza and German mainstream opinion remains dramatic. Joffe cited a Der Spiegel opinion poll in his Die Zeit commentary showing that 91% of the German public wish to remain "neutral" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and only 3% back the Israeli side, while 1% embrace the Palestinian view."

Conversion: Magdi Allam, from Muslim to Catholic

From Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson's blog:

"How wonderful that Pope Benedict XVI should baptise one of Italy’s most prominent Muslims at the East Vigil service last night.

Magdi Allam, a maverick Muslim journalist loathed by his community for his support for the right of Israel to exist, is now a Christian convert. That gives Muslims yet another reason to hate him – even, perhaps to kill him.

Mr Allam is very brave to make his conversion so publicly, in St Peter’s Basilica. The Holy Father, too, has shown courage. Some of the Vatican’s inter-faith functionaries would much rather have done this quietly (if at all).

The Pope is sending out a potent message to Islam: you are not the only religion that seeks to convert all mankind. Only, these days, we do it peacefully."

What Angela Merkel couldn't say out loud

Manfred Gerstenfeld's column on Angela Merkel's visit to Israel in The Jerusalem Post (excerpts):

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel's successful visit to Israel came in conjunction with worrisome developments back in her own country. Few in Israel realize that a majority of Germans probably disagree with several key statements she made here about her country's past - including the mention of shame and guilt - in the Knesset.

In contemporary Germany there are significant expressions of anti-Semitism and racism. This includes attacks on Jews, their cemeteries and Holocaust monuments, together with ongoing anti-Semitic prejudice toward Jews among significant parts of the population. In eastern Germany particularly, there are no-go areas for non-white people in several cities, major racist incidents and sometimes even murders.

At the same time, there are efforts in Germany to rewrite the past. Books by historian Jörg Friedrich, who compares the Allied actions to his nation's atrocities during the war, are best-sellers. They promote "Holocaust equivalence" by using Nazi semantics to describe the Allied bombings of Germany during WWII. Another aspect of the same attitude is expressed by the many Germans who think that Israel is showing Nazi-like behavior toward the Palestinians. What they mean to say is, "If everybody is guilty, then nobody is." (…)

Given the character of her visit, and in view of today's German reality, Merkel sent, besides her explicitly stated messages to Israelis, a number of implicit ones to her own nation. I'd summarize them as follows:

You may think what you want about Israel and the Jews. Many media and others in Germany defame Israel. Yet I wish, publicly, to show on behalf of the German people our responsibility for the acts of our Nazi forebears, whom we elected. I want to do that in many ways, and my visit to Yad Vashem and my speech in the Knesset - which you may strongly dislike - best symbolize this.

Simultaneously, there was Merkel's implicit message to the world:

Since the war, Germany has been welcomed back into the family of nations and has again become a major political force. However, many abroad wonder how much of the criminal past is still latent within us, and when and to what extent it will reemerge. My frequent visits to Israel - and the nature of our relations with it - also show that I am well aware of that.

Merkel’s attitude probably also expresses a world view different from that of most other Western European leaders. It can, in part, be explained by her personal experience, having grown up and lived in communist East Germany. She knows what totalitarianism means, and not only from teachers of the history of Nazi Germany. Being trained as a physicist rather than in the humanities may also be helpful in confronting threats realistically.

Without saying it explicitly, Merkel seems to understand that various threats from the world of Islam, besides the Iranian one she mentioned, share the totalitarian characteristics of Nazism and communism. That is probably included when she says that threats to Israel are also threats to Germany."

Bruno Guigue, a French civil servant sacked over anti-Israeli article

Old habits die hard:

Source: Press TV

"France has sacked a senior civil servant over publishing an anti-Israeli diatribe on a web site, the interior ministry announced.

Bruno Guigue wrote in an online column this month that Israel was the only regime that allows "snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates," AFP reported.

Guigue, author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also wrote of the "Israeli jails where - thanks to religious law - they stop torturing on the Sabbath.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie dismissed Guigue, deputy prefect of the southwestern town of Saintes, after learning of the column on Wednesday. HE/PA "

Bruno Guige's column (in French) at Oumma.com
"When the pro-Israel lobby lashes out at the United Nations"
From UPJF
"Il arrive que justice soit faite: Guigue passe à la trappe qu'il avait préparée pour Israël"