Have Leftists ever seen a jihadi they didn’t like and wish to shower with financial aid, as well as garland with spurious moral justification?
“Anti-Israeli Bias Continues Unabated in UN Agencies,” by Ioannis E. Kotoulas, IPT News, January 25, 2023:
When Francesca Albanese was nominated to be the next United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian territories last February, critics feared her well-established anti-Israel bias would taint her work.
“Francesca Albanese completely fails even the minimal standards of impartiality and objectivity,” said UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer, “because this is an individual who has quite simply devoted her life to militant advocacy against Israel, as even a fleeting glance at her social media and public statements reveals. She’s the very opposite of impartial.”
Her actions since then have only strengthened the argument.
The rapporteur is supposed to be an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and tasked with investigating human rights conditions in Palestinian areas. According to UN provisions, special rapporteurs are expected to demonstrate “impartiality.” The selection procedure dictates that there should not be “any reason, currently or in the past, that could call into question the candidate’s moral authority and credibility.”
This is not the case with the current special rapporteur.
Israeli officials protested her appointment last spring, saying they don’t “expect any fair, objective, [or] professional treatment from an activist who promotes outrageous libels, compares the Holocaust to the Nakba, and advocates for the de-facto destruction of the Nation State of the Jewish People.”
In December, Albanese downplayed Palestinian terrorist activities when she referred to Abu Hamid, a founder of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade who murdered seven Israelis, merely as a “Palestinian refugee from Al-Amar Camp, West Bank” who “was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, for alleged involvement in attacks against ISR forces during the 2nd Intifada.”
In late November, Albanese spoke at a conference held by a Hamas-affiliated think tank, along with operatives of the two most notorious terrorist Palestinian organizations, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other extremist Palestinian organizations.
Albanese took part in the conference, “16 Years of Siege on Gaza: Impacts and Prospects,” organized by the Council on International Relations Palestine (CIR Palestine).
CIR Palestine is a think tank that promotes Hamas views, including the “full liberation of Palestine,” meaning Israel’s destruction. In a 2021 communique, CIR Palestine announced that “the Palestinian people will continue their struggle and resistance to the occupation until liberating the entire Palestinian land and achieving their rights undiminished, using all means available and legitimate.” This wording is similar to the Hamas covenant: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
The December event Albanese addressed featured Hamas spokesman Abdul Latif Al-Qanu and Hamas members Basem Naim, Ghazi Hamad and Isam Al-Da’alis, as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad members Ahmad Al-Mudallal and Khader Habib. Other participants included Maher Mezher, a member of the Central Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who has called for terrorist attacks against Israel in the West Bank with knives, guns and Molotov cocktails.
In her address, Albanese, told Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members that “resistance against Israel is your right.”
A Consistent UN Bias
The UN special rapporteur’s worrying views are not an isolated incident, but part of a continuum of anti-Israel bias in that office. In 2008, the then-UN rapporteur described Palestinian terrorism as an “inevitable consequence” of Israel’s actions, while his successor had even blamed the 2013 Boston marathon bombing on “the American global domination project” and “Tel Aviv.”…
In response to all these revelations, Michèle Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, wrote that the Biden administration was “appalled by [the] recently uncovered antisemitic remarks … References to the ‘Jewish Lobby’ are an age-old trope; this is outrageous, inappropriate, corrosive, & degrades the value of the UN.”
The Israeli mission to the UN in Geneva issued a statement calling on the United Nations to “take concrete action in addressing systemic antisemitism within the United Nations Human Rights Council and its mechanisms.”
The UN has remained silent on this issue….