Now the UN is also accusing Israel of “genocide” (still nothing on the massacres in Africa)

The so-called ‘independent commission’, established and long chaired by the new Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the South African judge Navi Pillay, has once again accused Israel not only of ‘genocide’, but now also of ‘extermination’. Vernichtung. The commission is chaired by the Indian legal scholar Srinivasan Muralidhar, flanked by Florence Mumba of Zambia and Chris Sidoti, an Australian and anti-Israeli figure, who has been reappointed to ensure the continuity of Pillay’s line. The three members were selected not for their expertise but for their ideological loyalty. The commission therefore accuses Israel of continuing to commit extermination and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Commissioner Sidoti has called for Israel to be “demilitarised” and has denied that it is a “democracy”. Sidoti also stated that Jews “hurl accusations of anti-Semitism as freely as rice at a wedding”. 

Hamas is never mentioned in the new UN report. However, the report does cite two alleged cases of sexual violence against participants in the Global Sumud Flotilla: “In one incident, a victim was forced to undress in the detention centre’s infirmary, where her genitals were inspected with a metal detector”.

According to a new database compiled by UN Watch, since its establishment in 2006, the Human Rights Council – which oversees these committees – has adopted 346 resolutions condemning a country. Israel is the subject of 116 (34 per cent) of these resolutions. And the Jewish state is the only one on which everyone – democracies and dictatorships alike – always agrees. Israel is the only country in the world to be subject to a specific agenda item dedicated to human rights: agenda item seven, entitled ‘The human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories’. All other countries are examined under agenda item four, entitled ‘Human rights situations requiring the Council’s attention’.

Furthermore, the Council has twelve ‘country mandates’, focusing on the human rights situation in individual states, such as North Korea and the Congo. These mandates are all subject to periodic renewal, with the exception of the ‘Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, which remains in force ‘until the end of the Israeli occupation’. In Sudan, the war between the Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023, has resulted in 150,000 deaths, 13 million displaced people and horrific famines. In Darfur, ethnic massacres against non-Arab groups (Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa), summary executions, sieges that have reduced entire towns to starvation, and a campaign of sexual violence on an industrial scale: gang rapes, sexual slavery, and the abduction of women and girls, with the explicit intention of ‘producing Arab children’.

The Human Rights Council has adopted weak resolutions on Sudan, consisting of sporadic measures, with no agenda item and no special rapporteur appointed for an indefinite period. In the Congo, militias and armed groups are using mass rape as a weapon of war on a systematic scale. In Tigray, there are massacres, induced famines and mass sexual violence. These events give rise to appeals and, occasionally, limited mandates to the UN, but not a permanent mechanism for automatic condemnation, nor an ‘independent commission’ composed of individuals selected to ensure continuity in making accusations, nor an annual stream of resolutions that brings democracies and dictatorships into agreement.

Meanwhile, Tehran expresses its gratitude: there are currently thirteen women on death row in the Islamic Republic, convicted of having protested against the regime in January.