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How ironic that the US has decided to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Commission because it is one sided, at a time when the focus of the world is on the issue of the children of the immigrants being separated from their parents at the US borders. How brutal. But then of course the decision was mainly taken to avoid further embarrassment about shielding Israel from violations of human rights as well as international law.
What makes it more ironic is the reaction of Israel agreeing completely with the decision and bragging as usual that Israel is the only democracy in the region. Yet it emphasizes the fact that it is a Jewish State. How can it be Jewish and democratic when 25% of its population is not Jewish. Addressing the Congress on Judaism and Democracy, earlier this year, on the controversy over the Jewish nation-state bill, the Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked said that there is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of human rights.
I wonder who makes the human rights commission one sided? Isn’t the USA basically responsible for that fact, when it meddles in other countries’ affairs and wages wars in the name of democracy, and at the same time vetoes every resolution condemning Israel for its human rights violations. As a settler colonial power Israel has refused to implement any of the UN resolutions regarding the Palestinian plight, whether it was the right of return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees as stipulated in UN resolution 194 or the end of the occupation of the land captured in 1967 in accordance with resolution 242. But it seems that the powerful can get away with anything.
I was born and live in the 'land of the free and home of the brave' and contend the USA was never an honest broker for a just peace in the Middle East and we are all living George Orwell's nightmare scenario from "1984".
ReplyDeleteIn the Centennial Edition of "1984" Thomas Pynchon wrote the Foreword and Erich Fromm the Afterword, from which I excerpt:
"A working prophet, is able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away...the irresistible human addiction to power was already long in place. The means of surveillance in Winston Smith's era are primitive next to the wonders of computer technology: most notably the Internet."
"Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy. All the fighting nations have lost moral considerations...the unlimited destruction of civilian populations and atomic bombs. Can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?"
"Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war. Leaders have only one aim, and that is power and power means to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being. We spend a considerable part of our income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy one third or one half of our population and that of the enemy. Another example of doublethink-from a Christian standpoint is the evil of killing any other. Can a minority of one be right?”