Earlier this week, a pig briefly flew when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon joined Canada, the US and the European Union in condemning the United Nations Human Rights Council’s decision to single out Israel for special scrutiny. Ban said the decision neglected other parts of the world where human rights abuses were taking place and was unfair towards Israel. You don’t say. The systematic malice towards Israel displayed by the UN is only exceeded as a scandal by the silence of the so-called civilised world in the face of it, and the collusion of that world with the fiction that the UN has any credibility at all as a legitimate arbitrator of human rights and international justice.

Now Professor Irwin Cotler, a Member of Canada’s Parliament and its former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General has revealed that he turned down an invitation to serve on the UN’s ‘fact-finding mission’ (sic) to investigate ‘the Israeli wilful killing of Palestinian civilians’ in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, last November. He refused because the commission was framed in such an outrageously one-sided fashion. Its terms of reference deliberately ignored the Palestinian rocket attacks on the Israeli city of Sderot that preceded Israel’s actions. And it also violated the presumption of innocence.

The resolution establishing this fact-finding mission began by condemning ‘the Israeli willful killing of Palestinian civilians.’ The 19 Palestinian dead were a tragedy. But how could one participate in a fact-finding mission where the facts and the verdict were determined in advance — a kind of Alice in Wonderland inquiry where the conviction was secured and the sentence passed even before the proceeding began?

But of course, this is par for the course at the UN. As Cotler observes:

Regrettably, this discriminatory and one-sided approach has become not the exception but the norm. Council sessions of the past year reflected not only the same contempt for the rule of law, but the systematic singling-out of a member state for selective and discriminatory treatment, while granting the major violators exculpatory immunity.

Examples abound:
– There have been nine resolutions condemning one member state only (Israel) but none of any of the other 191 members of the international community, including, for example, no condemnation of the genocide in Darfur, or of the public and direct incitement to genocide and massive human-rights violations in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
– The continuing exclusion of one member state (Israel) from membership in any of the five regional groups that govern the council, thereby denying a member state the fundamental rights of due process and equitable standing.
– The council’s discourse, as exemplified in the session just ended, as an endless drumbeat of indictment and incitement against Israel, again contrary to the council’s founding principles and procedures.

Indeed, in a world where human rights have emerged as the new secular religion of our time, Israel, portrayed as a meta-rights violator, emerges as the new anti-Christ of the international arena. And as if this were not enough, the council has now institutionalized forever the Alice in Wonderland condemnatory process and the corresponding drumbeats of indictment. It has institutionalized the condemnation of Israel as a standing item on the council agenda and institutionalized the mandate of the special investigator on ‘Israeli violations of the principles and bases of international law’ in the Palestinian territories — its only indefinite, open-ended and one-sided investigative mandate.

Until and unless the UN is acknowledged to be a cartel of tyrannies and rogue states which winks at terror, and is replaced by a United Democratic Nations which really does promote human rights rather than double standards and corruption, the chances of peace and justice in the world remain vanishingly small.