Pro-Israel groups say they won’t let U.N. ‘kangaroo court’ go unchallenged

"A collection of pro-Israel organizations has decided that an unprecedented attack on Israel requires a response.

Israel faces a first-time-ever open-ended U.N. Commission of Inquiry created by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which includes notorious human-rights violators such as Cuba, China, Libya, Somalia and Venezuela. The U.N. General Assembly voted late last year to give the commission a budget of $4.5 million a year, allowing it to hire some 18 full-time staff members, almost the same number as the human-rights office branch of the United Nations covering all of Asia and 60% of the world’s population.

Israel is refusing to engage with the commission. But an alliance of pro-Israel nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) says it can play a role, and to that end is submitting troves of documentation to the commission.

'The U.N. Human Rights Council has arranged a kangaroo court where the fix is in, and it makes it impossible for a state like Israel to participate because to do so would undermine its clear sovereign rights and responsibilities,' Professor Anne Bayefsky, head of Human Rights Voices and the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told JNS.

'NGOs don’t have the same duties and responsibilities as states. Our rationale is to ensure that inquiry members can’t pretend they didn’t know and they didn’t have the data, and that it is Israel’s fault for not participating. We’re undermining their attempt to weave not only a false narrative but a story based on an alleged inability to garner alternative information,' she said...

Bayefsky is leading an effort to counter the established narrative of the commission, with her allied NGOs digging into their extensive databases, meticulous research, and original documents about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel terrorism, making 2 million unique submissions including individual names of victims on the Israel side. The participating organizations include Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

'The commission stands with eyes closed and we are telling them—forcing them: Look, read. They wouldn’t open their eyes, but we have to do it. We can’t just say they won’t publish it. We have to force them to see it. What can they answer? What can they say?' Yigal Carmon, founder and president of MEMRI, told JNS. The thousands of submissions from MEMRI include original video evidence of anti-Semitism and ethnic-cleansing goals within the Arab and Muslim world, and among Israel’s enemies—from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

'This is our duty,' stressed Carmon. 'There is an impact to accumulated information.'

The commission requested the names of specific victims and survivors of the conflict with no time limit backwards or forwards. Human Rights Voices, Touro and its partners submitted hundreds of thousands of names of Holocaust victims and Jews who fled persecution from Arab lands, according to Bayefsky.

Their submissions itemized more than a million victims of the Jew-hatred advocated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, a documented Nazi collaborator and promoter of genocide against all Jews who is revered and emulated by Palestinian leaders today. Also submitted were the individual names of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled persecution, ethnic cleansing, or were expelled from Middle East and North African Arab countries in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel. The submissions were accompanied by a synopsis of the tribulations of the Jews in Middle East and North African countries over the ages, their indigenous roots in the land of Israel and the journey of these refugees back to the land of Israel, their ancestral homeland..."