U.N.’s Richard Falk accuses “the organized Jewish community” of crimes against Palestinians

U.N.’s Richard Falk accuses “the organized Jewish community” of crimes against Palestinians

Published by in Richard Falk. 13 Comments

UN Watch

- at July 24, 2012

The U.N. Human Rights Council’s Richard Falk is now accusing “the organized Jewish community” of being “responsible for the massive and enduring confiscation of Palestinian land and rights.” This is only the latest of a series of Richard Falk outrages exposed by UN Watch. Below is the letter faxed today to President Obama and other world leaders and high U.N. officials demanding an immediate condemnation.

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Click here for PDF
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
United States of America
Dear President Obama,
With profound regret—and moral outrage—we are obliged to inform you that a representative of the United Nations Human Rights Council has breached his responsibility to uphold the high standards required by that world body.
Once again, Richard Falk, the UNHRC’s Special Rapporteur for the permanent investigation of “Israel’s violations of the bases and principles of international law,” has published racist remarks against Jews and Judaism.

Last week, on 20 July, writing in the same blog where he posted an anti-Semitic cartoon that was condemned last year by British Prime Minister David Cameron, U.N. High Commissioner for Human rights Navi Pillay, and your representative to the U.N., the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur Falk accused “the organized Jewish community,” as well as the U.S. government, of being “responsible for the massive and enduring confiscation of Palestinian land and rights.”  (See “For What,” R. Falk, 20 July 2012, at http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/.)
This absurd and slanderous collective accusation, reproduced in the Palestine Chronicle and on numerous websites, constitutes classic anti-Semitism. Moreover, by attempting to blame Jewish communities everywhere for alleged crimes against Palestinians, Mr. Falk effectively provides an international warrant for terrorism, employing the language and logic used by those who carry out attacks against Jewish community centers, synagogues and schools worldwide.
Mr. Falk published his anti-Semitic libel on the same day that Israel was burying the victims of last Wednesday’s brutal attack against Israeli Jewish tourists in Bulgaria, and on the same day a British court sentenced two homegrown terrorists to prison for planning attacks against Jewish communities in Manchester.
Mr. Falk was also surely aware that when Mohammed Merah opened fire on Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, on 19 March, it was out of the conviction, in his words, that “The Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” When Mr. Falk points an accusing finger at “the organized Jewish community” for alleged crimes against Palestinians, he willy-nilly uses his high United Nations position to encourage such attacks.
Second, all of this comes as Mr. Falk is also providing the cover endorsement for the book “The Wandering Who,” replete with attacks against Israel, Jews and Judaism. The material is so extreme that 20 anti-Zionist activists, including Omar Barghouti and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah, denounced the book and its author for racism and anti-Semitism. During the July debates of the UNHRC, on behalf of UN Watch I challenged Mr. Falk about his leading promotion of this tract, but he refused to respond.
Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Falk’s latest article dwells at length on his U.N. position, and that his book endorsement lists the same, his defenders will no doubt claim, as they have done before, that these racist remarks were published “in his personal capacity.”
Given that his previous such attempts to evade responsibility failed to block the condemnations of him by your Administration, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other world figures, I have no doubt that you will speak out and denounce these latest instances of incitement to racism on the part of Mr. Falk, who, in many respects, embodies the ongoing bias and bigotry of the body he represents, the U.N. Human Rights Council.
To ensure that your message is heard loud and clear in Geneva and around the world, we urge your government to request that your statement be circulated as an official document of the UNHRC at the upcoming September session.
The cause of human rights and the founding principles of the United Nations must not be subverted. Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.
Sincerely,
Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch

Israel Commemorates Munich 11

 

 

 

LONDON — Complaining that the Olympic movement is still ignoring their pain, Israelis marked the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre on Sunday with a modest service in the atrium of a London apartment block.
Prayers were read for the 11 murdered Israelis, wreaths were laid for them and a plaque unveiled about four miles (six kilometers) from the Olympic Stadium.
However, there will be no minute of silence for them at Friday’s opening ceremony.
“The International Olympic Committee have a moral commitment to commemorate the 11 athletes, coaches and referees,” Israeli Olympic Committee secretary general Efraim Zinger said. “Not because they were Israelis, but because they were Olympians and were murdered during the Olympic Games.
“It’s been 40 years since that dreadful day and I hope that the day will come that the IOC will recognize all 11 athletes as victims and find the proper way to commemorate their memory.”
IOC President Jacques Rogge reiterated Saturday that the opening ceremony was not an appropriate arena to remember the dead despite pressure from politicians in the United States, Israel and Germany.
In talks over several years with Israeli officials, the IOC has not been able to agree to a suitable way of remembering the slain athletes at each games, according to Zinger.
“The frustrating fact is that until now, none of the alternative ways to commemorate was practiced,” Zinger said.
Rogge does plan to honor the dead at a reception in London during the games on Aug. 6. IOC officials will also attend a ceremony in Germany on the anniversary of the attack on Sept. 5 at the military airfield of Furstenfeldbruck, where most of the Israelis died.
The tranquility of the Munich Games was shattered in the second week when eight members of the Black September militant group penetrated the laxly secured Olympic Village and took Israeli team members hostage. A day later, all 11 were dead.
Ben Helfgott, who was at the 1972 Olympics, said at Sunday’s commemorations that the memorial service immediately after the massacre was “trivialized” because the murders of the competitors was equated with the deaths of the terrorists.
In front of a tightly packed audience featuring a relative of one victim, London Mayor Boris Johnson recalled watching the events unfold as an 8-year-old child in England.
“What sticks in my mind is that sense of sacrilege and a feeling of horror that the world’s greatest sporting event should suffer such an attack, and that an attack should be mounted against people who had been training for what should have been the greatest event in their lives,” Johnson said. “And I think the world watched with a sense of numb disbelief as those events unfolded because sport should transcend politics.
“It should bring out the best in the human race. It should draw people together in admiration for achievement and for effort. And yet some people chose to profane that great celebration and to cut short the lives of 11 innocent (people).”
Johnson said he hoped the Olympics, which run until Aug. 12, are only remembered for sporting endeavors and that athletes of all faiths are able to “unite in a city that unites the world.”
But the games are starting against a backdrop of security fears surrounding the Israeli delegation, featuring 38 athletes.
Israel is on the alert for plots targeting its citizens overseas after five Israelis vacationing in Bulgaria were killed in a suicide bombing last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
“Unfortunately we are part of a very distinguished list of countries” whose teams are susceptible to attack, Zinger said. “We have to live with it.”
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Rob Harris can be reached at http://twitter.com/RobHarris

Last Days Of Jews In Islamized Europe

Last Days of Jews in Islamized Europe

By Giulio Meotti

A few days ago, security guards were patrolling the streets near Rome’s Jewish school with metal detectors, searching for possible explosive devices. Rome’s largest synagogue, one of the oldest in the world, today looks like a military outpost, with private guards and policemen at every corner. The Jewish school is also a “sterilized area,” protected by bodyguards and cameras, the windows plumbed with iron grates. I saw the same in the Jewish homes of Hebron and in the schools of Sderot, the Israeli city bombed by Hamas.

The March attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse, which resembled that of Itamar (when an Israeli father, mother and three children were slaughtered in their beds by a Palestinian commando), triggered “an explosion” of anti-Semitic attacks across France. According with the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, more than 90 anti-Semitic incidents took place in France only in the 10 days that followed the shooting, which left four people dead. In total, 148 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in March and April. It’s an anti-Semithic pandemonium totally silenced by the European media.

Anti-Semitism raises again its head in estern Europe. During the Holocaust, Europe dispatched its Jews to the gas chambers. Seventy years later, in the welfarist, multicultural and semi-Islamicized Europe, Jews have again come under attack. Enclaves of ultra-Orthodox Jews will likely survive in the main cities, but Jewish life as such has no future in Europe.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, delivered this apocalyptic vision: “The Jewish community in Europe is dying.” All the recent polls say that a third of Europeans show very high levels of anti-Semitism, while over half of Europeans view the State of Israel as “the greatest threat to world peace.”

For as comfortable as life might be in the arrondissements of Paris, the situation for the Jews will only worsen. A few days ago, Jews were nearly lynched in Lyon by an Arab mob armed with hammers and yelling “dirty Jews.” That’s why in the past few years, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel has doubled. Hundreds of French Jews have bought apartments in Israel. It’s their “pied-a-terre” in case the situation gets darker in Europe. “Jews in France, you are in ranger, your place is in Israel,” read some banners brandished by French-Israelis during a ceremony in Tel Aviv honoring the victims of the pogrom of Toulouse.

A few years ago, the UK paper Daily Telegraph ran a story under the title: “Is this the last generation of British Jews?”. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom, threatened by Melanie Phillips’ “Londonistan,” will decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080.

The President of Austria’s Israelite Community, Ariel Muzicant, warns that the Jewish Community is also dying out: “If a miracle doesn’t happen soon, the Jewish community in Austria will no longer exist in the foreseeable future.” In Sweden, a country described by The Guardian as “the greatest success the world has known,” Jews are leaving big cities such as Malmö due to security reasons, in order to escape anti-Semitic attacks.

Sixty percent of Dutch Jews are ready to pack up and leave the country. The cause is a boom of Islamic antisemitism in the famous multicultural Netherlands. Benjamin Jacobs, the country’s chief rabbi, declared to Arutz Sheva that “the future for Dutch Jewry is moving to Israel”.

Jews are fleeing Antwerp, the city in Belgium once proudly called “the Northern Jerusalem.” Last autumn, the ancient synagogue of Weesp became the first synagogue in Europe since the Second World War to cancel Shabbat services due to threats to the safety of the faithful. There are more than 1,000 Jews in Oslo, but you never see them. Not one. Today anti-Semitic inscriptions are being drawn on building walls in Marseille, Nottingham, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Berlin, Kiev, Barcelona and Rome. Jewish cemeteries are daily ransacked and Jews are attacked on the streets if they wear the kippahs.

Europe is again approaching, as many prefer to avert their eyes, the horrible paroxysm of Jew-hatred that plunged the continent into its XX century abyss. In the current denationalized, universalist, third-worldist and secularized Europe, Zionism is casted as the cause of anti-Semitism, Bruxelles’ officials see the bombing of a synagogue in Paris as a reprisal for an Israeli incursion into Gaza, European ministers and MPs more and more call the Israelis “the new Nazis,” anti-Semitism is fading from the general consciousness and “Islamophobia” is declared the worst racism. In the old Europe that abandoned the internationalism of the proletariat for the transnationalism of the Islamic umma, there is no space for the Jews. Europe’s Arabized cosmopolitanism cultivates the fantasy of removing Israel from the Middle East. But Europe first will forsake and abandon its own post-Holocaust Jews. Only after Israel’s destruction the Jews will be allowed to return to their homeless status in France, England, Sweden, Germany. In Warsaw they might rebuild the ghetto, while from Baghdad to Haifa tens of thousands of miles will be covered only by the voice of Al Jazeera.

The Bulgarian terror attack shows why we must honour the Munich 11 in London

 

Reuters

Terrorists who attack civilian targets are cowards at the best of times. But killers such as those who blew up a bus carrying Israeli youth in the Bulgarian resort city of Burgas on Wednesday fall into a special category. They posture as “resistance” fighters willing to risk their lives to confront Israel. Yet they are unwilling to confront Israel’s military. So instead, they attack Jews where they are most defenceless — in places such as Europe, South America and South Asia, where Israel cannot defend them.
Terrorist attacks on Jews outside of Israel have been going on for decades. In 1976, for instance, pro-Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Air France flight to Uganda, and released all but the Jewish and Israeli passengers (the only exception being the non-Jewish pilot). In a famous operation, Israeli commandos rescued 102 of the hostages. (All the hijackers and four hostages died – including one whom Ugandan soldiers barbarically killed at a nearby hospital a day after the operation was over.) Since then, terrorists targeting Jews generally have avoided any possibility of rescue by simply slaughtering their targets outright.
Some of these operations were small. For instance, on July 4, 2002 — just over a decade ago — a lone pro-Palestinian terrorist named Hesham Mohamed Hadayet opened fire at the El Al ticket counter in Los Angeles International Airport, killing ticket agent Victoria Hen and Yaakov Aminov, a 47-year-old father of five.
Other attacks have generated much higher death tolls. In 1994, terrorists widely believed to be connected with Iran and its Hezbollah proxies bombed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building in Argentina, killing 85 people. That attack also took place on July 18, precisely 18 years before this week’s Bulgarian bombing — a fact that likely is no coincidence.
On Wednesday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Iran is responsible for the terror attack in Bulgaria.” While there is no publicly available proof of that claim, Tehran obviously is the number-one suspect. It is the world’s number-one state sponsor of terrorism, and its ruthless leaders — already pariahs except among such nations as Venezuela and Syria — feel they have little to lose given the country’s crumbling economy, and the harsh sanctions regime already in place. The intentions of Iran’s self-destructive leaders are difficult to scrutinize — especially since evidence has been emerging of competing power centers within the government in recent years — but one goal of such attacks may be to goad Israel into a first strike that serves to further push world opinion against the Jewish state.
Assuming Israel does not overreact, the Bulgarian attack likely will have the opposite effect: Increasing support for Israel on a continent that more usually is sympathetic to the Palestinians. From the point of view of Europeans, it is one thing to kills Jews in the West Bank. It is quite another to do so in a EU nation.
What is a proper response to the Bulgarian terrorist attack? Obviously, Bulgarian and Israeli officials will do their best to find the masterminds behind it, and roll up their cells. But beyond that, on a more symbolic level, it would be fitting if the incident prompted International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge to reconsider a proposal to observe a minute of silence at the 2012 London Olympics for the 11 Israelis slain by terrorists at the 1972 games in Munich.
According to Alex Gilady, an Israeli International Olympics Committee member, International Olympics officials believe a minute’s silence “may harm the unity of the Olympics” and “could cause some countries to boycott the Games.” But frankly, the Olympics would probably be a better event if nations such as Iran stayed home — thereby allowing us to avoid disgusting spectacles, as observed in the past, in which their athletes refuse to compete against Israelis, lest they be polluted by a Jew’s touch.
In any event, the Bulgarian attack shows that a memorial for the Munich 11 would not be a backward-looking political gesture; rather, it would serve as recognition that the scourge of human hatred, violence and cowardice that we call terrorism is a global human problem — faced by all the nations of the Olympiad. Yes, it was Jews killed in Munich — in very much the same bloodthirsty fashion as those killed this week in Bulgaria. But tomorrow it could be Christians, or Hindus, or Muslims.
Surely, the protection of all human life is consistent with the Olympic spirit — even if it is alien to the anti-Israeli butchers who performed Wednesday’s despicable terrorist act.
National Post
By Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @jonkay.