Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Hail Haley

From The Australian, 21 March 2018, by Janet Albrechtsen:

...Nikki Haley, the first Republican in cabinet as US ambassador to the UN since the end of the Cold War...  has proven to be a formidable voice of reason on a body that is corrupted by its own membership — only 87 of its 193 members are full-fledged democracies or “fully free” according to Freedom House.
Last month Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Haley to “shut up” with her criticism of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Haley declined the advice. “I will not shut up,” she said at the UN Security Council. “I will respectfully speak some hard truth.” And she’s doing that is spades.
...Haley nailed her credentials to the wall last December after Trump decided to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In a withering speech, she relied on facts and logic, confronted the false piety of the UN and destroyed the hypocrisy of Palestinian leaders.
Haley said that Israel, like other nations, had the right to determine its capital city and Jerusalem had been its capital for thousands of years.
She pointed out that the decision gave effect to what had been US government policy since 1995, when the US congress recognised that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel and voted to move the US embassy there.
“This week, President Trump made the decision to no longer ignore the will of the American people,” Haley said.
In a speech that has been likened to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s speech in 1975 when, as US ambassador to the UN, he condemned the “Zionism is racism” resolution passed by the UN, the straight-shooting Haley said that UN was “one of the world’s foremost centres of hostility towards Israel”.
“The UN has done much more to damage the prospects for Middle East peace than to advance them. We will not be a party to that. The US no longer stands by when Israel is unfairly attacked in the UN. And the US will not be lectured to by countries that lack any credibility when it comes to treating both Israelis and Palestinians fairly...”
A fortnight later Haley rebuked members of the Security Council who voted for a resolution that slammed the right of a sovereign nation to determine where to locate its embassy. Her blistering speech against the anti-Israel bias of the UN had facts on her side.
There have been more than 400 anti-Israel resolutions in the General Assembly since Israel’s establishment in 1948, more resolutions than against all other UN members combined.
Between 2012 and 2016, the General Assembly passed 123 resolutions criticising individual countries, 103 (84 per cent) were about Israel. The best year for Israel in that period was 2016, when only 20 of 26 condemnatory country-specific resolutions (or 77 per cent) by the General Assembly targeted Israel alone. Syria attracted three, with one each for Iran, North Korea and Crimea.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley with Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Picture: AP.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley with Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Picture: AP.
In the 10 years since its creation, the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel in 68 resolutions — almost more than the rest of the world combined. The UN Human Rights Council was reformed because of the bias of its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. Alas, the name change hasn’t altered its anti-Israel agenda. It has one permanent agenda item, No 4, dedicated to “human rights abuses by Israel”. And another permanent agenda item, No 7, devoted to the “human rights abuses by the other 192 UN member states”.
Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. But the UN’s criticism of Israel, compared with its light touch towards countries from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran to North Korea, has destroyed its moral credibility....

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