Congress members calling for defunding of racist UN Commission of Inquiry into Israel

If the Trump Administration was still in office, the UN’s Committee of Inquiry against Israel never would have gotten off the ground. However, without any fear of a backlash from the Biden Administration, the anti-Semitic UN is engaged in a full on diplomatic assault against Israel. One of the committees most prominent promoters is Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Sha Mahmood Qureshi. A vile anti-Semite who said that Jews “control the media” on a CNN segment. Watch below.

🚨The #antisemitic roots of the UN's latest effort to harm Israel🚨
Meet Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi. He attended a meeting at #UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to promote a resolution targeting the world's only Jewish state with a new "Commission of Inquiry". pic.twitter.com/w3tidqRWXY

— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) January 25, 2022

Congress members call for defunding of UN Commission of Inquiry into Israel

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By JNS, January 27, 2022

(January 25, 2022 / JNS) A bipartisan group of legislators in the House of Representatives is calling for the United States to defund the U.N. Committee of Inquiry (COI) on Israel.

Led by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), the 42 members sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a news release on Tuesday, calling the COI, which was recently approved in the United Nations, “outrageous and unjust.”

“We urge the U.S. to lead an effort to end the outrageous and unjust permanent Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was created by the UNHRC in May 2021,” the members wrote in the letter. “This commission will not only focus on the actions Israel took in Gaza as it sought to defend its citizens from unprovoked rocket attacks. It will also have a carte blanche mandate—in perpetuity—to investigate any allegations against Israel in the past or in the future; whether in the West Bank or Gaza or in all of Jerusalem and even within the recognized pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel.”

The letter recalled the administration’s stance against the COI when it controversially announced last year that the United States will return to the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), despite having withdrawn from it under former President Donald Trump, with Blinken stating that the United States will oppose actions that unfairly target Israel.

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“COI’s mandate is designed to accelerate the political, economic, and legal challenges to Israel and undermine its legitimacy by pressuring international legal institutions to take action against Israeli leaders,” the members wrote. “Shockingly, the COI resolution makes no mention of the terror group Hamas—which initiated the conflict by launching missile attacks on Israel—and does not include any mention of Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The members wrote that the United Nations already has six other bodies that unfairly target Israel, including the Division of Palestinian Rights; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine; the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories; and the United Nations Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

With the coronavirus pandemic causing scarce resources and an already slim budget, the world body does not have the funding for the COI investigation, according to the letter.

It also stated that the number of organizations unfairly targeting Israel should be zero, and there was no need to add another. The legislators pointed to nations around the world that violate human rights, including those investigating Israel, but none have a permanent agenda item at the UNHCR.

Backgrounder:

UN Ditches its Rules for an anti-Israel “Inquiry:”
No Impartiality and No Objectivity

This article first appeared on 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 U.N. Human Rights Council last May and funded by the U.N. General Assembly at the end of December. The three members appointed to the new “Commission of Inquiry” make a mockery of the most elementary preconditions of fairness and legitimacy.

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 U.N. 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 U.N. 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 U.N.’s anti-Semitic 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 U.N. “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 Centre 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 U.N. office (the same U.N. 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’s 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.”

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.”

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 U.N. 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 U.N.-appointed a Queen of Hearts and two knaves—“sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

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 U.N. qualification.