- UNIFIL's job is limited to monitoring
- UNIFIL has no mandate to disarm Hezbollah
- UNIFIL is not allowed to search private property
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| UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti. Video screengrab |
An employer who agrees not to discriminate against any employee or job applicant because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, physical or mental disability, or age
Definition of 'Equality Opportunity Employer', Merriam Webster
Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.This is actually something new for Hamas that is not found in the actual Hamas Covenant.
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| For Immediate Release: March 19, 2015 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
Guess who is the number one violator of women's rights in the world today? Israel. Violating the rights of Palestinian women. At least that is the view of the UN's top women's rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). CSW ends its annual meeting on Friday, March 20 by condemning only one of the 193 UN member states for violating women's rights – Israel. Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Where in 2014 the Assad regime starved, tortured and killed at least 24,000 civilians, and three million people – mostly women and children – are refugees. |
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| For Immediate Release: December 17, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
Incitement against the Jewish state is directly related to the stabbings, raping and killing of Jews inside and outside of Israel. But doing something to stop it requires confronting a very troubling fact: the global epicenter for incitement is the "human rights" leviathan, the United Nations. From November 24, 2014 until December 5, 2014, UN human rights headquarters in Geneva mounted a public exhibit that was pure incitement. UN-driven antisemitism that takes the form of seeking to demonize, disable and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. |
“Syrian rebels linked to Al-Qaeda have seized UN weapons, uniforms and vehicles from peacekeepers in the Golan and set up a ‘safe zone’ to wage attacks, the Syrian ambassador said Tuesday.
“The United Nations on Monday was forced to pull back hundreds of peacekeepers to the Israeli-occupied sector of the Golan (sic) after Syrian rebels advanced on their positions.
| For Immediate Release: August 9, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
The Continuing United Nations War Against the Jews |
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| For Immediate Release: August 8, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
Gaza & The UN War Criminals: The Ugly Truth: The UN Encourages TerrorismAs the terrorist organization Hamas breaks yet another ceasefire, it operates with the firm belief that it will be protected on the international stage. That’s because the modern United Nations has become an instrument of war, just seven decades after it was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”It is time to face an ugly truth: The U.N. encourages terrorism. U.N. enablers on the ground in Gaza and U.N. broadcasters in the diplomatic comfort zones of Geneva and New York are partners in incitement to genocide against Israel, the Jewish state. |
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| For Immediate Release: July 22, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
| It is hard to imagine two more unwelcome, uninvited visitors to Israel in the middle of a war against Palestinian terrorists than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State John Kerry. But even more unwelcome is that they are working together. Their common cause is that although Israel has a right of self-defense in theory, Israel ought to be prevented from exercising this right in practice. Events over the past week have provided an extraordinary demonstration of this reprehensible nexus. On July 16, 2014, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a report stating: “the Israeli military delivered text messages to virtually all the residents of Ash Shuja’iyya and Az Zaitun neighborhoods in eastern Gaza city, approximately 100,000 people, warning them to leave their homes by 8 am today (16 July), ahead of attacks to be launched in the area.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also made phone calls and distributed leaflets. OCHA then describes what came next: “Subsequently, the Palestinian Ministry of Interior in Gaza reportedly instructed the residents to…not flee the area.” As a result, OCHA admits: “the vast majority decided to stay.” This story tells us both that Israel adhered to the Geneva Convention demand of providing “effective advance warning” to civilians and that Hamas violated the rule forbidding parties to “direct the movement of …civilians in order to shield military objectives from attack.” What was Hamas trying to protect when it used Palestinians as human shields in Shuja’iyya? The IDF refers to Shuja’iyya as the Hamas’ “terror fortress” in the Gaza Strip. The IDF has found more than ten openings to tunnels in Shuja’iyya and since July 8, Hamas has fired over 140 rockets at Israel from this neighborhood alone. As IDF Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz put it: “Hamas has built a war machine in residential areas.” This is another violation of the laws of armed conflict. By deliberately locating its terrorist infrastructure in the midst of Shuja’iyya’s civilian population, Hamas violates the prohibition on “locating legitimate military targets within or near densely populated areas." Following the warnings, the IDF went into the Shuja’iyya neighborhood – and is still there – for the purpose of destroying the tunnels that have been designed and used to attack Israeli civilians. This is Hamas’ most basic war crime of all. In the words of the Geneva Conventions, civilians “shall not be the object of attack.” On the night of July 19, 2014 in separate incidents in the Shuja’iyya area, Israel lost 13 soldiers, more soldiers in a single night than Israel lost in the whole of the three week 2008-2009 ground offensive Operation Cast Lead. These soldiers died in an ambush. An anti-tank mine. Trapped in a burning building. The IDF affords us the context. They “encountered fierce Hamas fighting in the dense urban environment” as Hamas tried “to defend their tunnel infrastructure.” In these circumstances, Palestinian civilians who remained in Shuja’iyya – despite the warnings – died. Data on fatalities, in OCHA’s own words, are “preliminary and subject to change based on further verification,” so the number of civilian casualties is unclear. What is clear is the outrageous reaction of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. On July 20, 2014 he said: “dozens more civilians, including children, have been killed in Israeli military strikes in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza. I condemn this atrocious action. Israel must exercise maximum restraint and do far more to protect civilians.”
Ban Ki-moon said nothing about Hamas having failed to protect Palestinian civilians. He said nothing about Hamas having put Palestinian civilians directly in harm’s way. In fact he said nothing about any “atrocious action” by Hamas. He also made no demand that Hamas “restrain” itself from fulfilling its stated goal, namely, that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” For the UN, no move that Israel makes short of surrender to the Palestinian mob, will ever be sufficient. When Palestinian civilians did heed Israel’s warnings and did not die, on July 16, 2014 OCHA complained “the relocation experience has been…traumatic…Women have reported stress due to their inability to maintain…modesty norms…[in] overcrowded spaces...” Five million Israelis have just seconds to run for a bomb shelter and save their lives. Older people have died from heart failure when the sirens go off. Small children flee rockets raining down on their kindergartens and spend hours trapped between four walls day after day. Let alone the parents and brothers and sisters of the 50,000 plus heroic young men and women on the front lines who spend every waking minute dreading a phone call, haunted by the prospect of kidnapping by very real monsters. The truth is the UN doesn’t give a damn about the suffering of Israelis. On July 18, 2014 the giant UN apparatus assembled in Geneva for the world press. There was OCHA, and the World Food Programme (WFP), the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA). Not one of these organizations said one word about Israelis. This is not merely indifference; it is gross negligence and collaboration. On July 17, 2014 UNRWA confessed to “discovering” rockets in one of their schools, then refused to make the photographs public, and promptly gave the rockets back to the rocketeers – or as UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness delicately called them, “the local authorities.” UNRWA had the audacity to claim “this incident is the first of its kind…” knowing full well that Hamas has directly involved UNRWA schools in its war crimes before – with video evidence over the past decade to prove it. Canadian reporter Patrick Martin happened to be visiting UNRWA’s Fakhoura School on July 15, 2014 and described the experience this way: “Heading toward the exit, we were overwhelmed by the jet-like sound of two rockets being launched from somewhere near the school. Hamas, or some militant group, clearly is hoping the Israelis won’t strike at the launchers…because they’re close to the school.” He adds that the kids were enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the weaponry; “as the Hamas-made missiles screamed off into the sky...the kids all cheered,” and one boy identified the make and model as the kind aimed at Tel Aviv. Israelis, by contrast, are not cheering Palestinian civilian deaths. On June 20, 2014, the UN Secretary-General gave a major speech on UN action on Syria and unashamedly declared: “Since June last year…the United Nations has not been issuing any statistics of death tolls. It is impossible and very sad and tragic to count all these dead bodies.” The UN does not count Syrian dead because it’s too sad, but throwing around unverified numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties serves a more palatable political endgame. When Ban Ki-moon comes knocking, therefore, his bona fides are non-existent. So why is Secretary Kerry by his side? On June 20, 2014, responding to a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about Palestinian civilian casualties, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel is “trying to be as pinpointed as we can.” Shortly thereafter, Secretary Kerry was caught on camera by Fox News talking to an aide who was apparently briefing him on the CNN conversation. Kerry reacted “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.” Set aside the 273 civilians across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, who have been killed unintentionally during the Obama administration’s limited endeavors to reduce terrorism. Think back to the President’s speech on America’s right to self-defense in the context of Syria – a country not on the U.S. border and not posing an imminent threat to three-quarters of the American population. Addressing the nation on September 10, 2013, Obama declared “the United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.” One rule for Israel and another for everybody else, evidently appeals to both the UN and the Obama administration. A shameful scheme in Israel’s hour of need. Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her@AnneBayefsky. |
For more human rights and United Nations coverage see www.HumanRightsVoices.org. |
it below. Thanks! 
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| For Immediate Release: March 31, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
President Obama’s hemorrhaging foreign policy is creating an increasingly embarrassing mess at the United Nations. A four-week session of the U.N.’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, ended in Geneva on March 28, 2014, with a series of humiliating defeats for the president’s calling card of indiscriminate engagement. Joining, and legitimizing, a U.N. Human Rights Council with no human rights conditions for membership was one of President Obama’s first foreign policy moves. Hence, the United States was elected to the council in 2009, re-elected in 2013, and currently sits alongside such human rights luminaries as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. This session took place against the backdrop of Russia’s aggressive takeover of parts of a sovereign country, in gross violation of the human rights of Ukrainians. And yet the Council itself couldn’t manage a peep. A U.S.-backed resolution at the U.N. General Assembly adopted on March 27, 2014, criticized Russia, but failed to take what would have been the truly isolating step of removing Russia from the Council. So what did the Council do while it was in session? |
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| For Immediate Release: January 22, 2014 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People:Palestinians, and their undemocratic UN cohorts, are off to a roaring start for 2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. |
| For Immediate Release: November 18, 2013 | Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org Follow us on Twitter |
Duplicity as the UN Secretary-General Visits AuschwitzToday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will pay a visit to Auschwitz where he will make a show of concern for the demonization of Jews in the past century. However, at the very same time his UN staff is actively discriminating against Jews at UN Headquarters in the here and now.On Friday, November 15, 2013, an official UN-accredited Jewish non-governmental organization had its security clearance to attend an open UN meeting in New York revoked at the behest of the UN Division for Palestinian Rights. |
Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.Now a pro-Palestinian activist, George Bisharat has filled in details as to how this process will work. In Why Palestine should take Israel to court in the Hague he writes:
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Steven J. Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum's Washington Project and former foreign-policy director at AIPAC, addressed the Middle East Forum on December 17, 2012, via conference call. Steven Rosen and MEF President Daniel Pipes recently met with Israeli officials to discuss strategy and policy in the wake of Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority's (PA's) upgrade to a non-member observer state by the UN General Assembly. Mr. Rosen shared some insights and conclusions of these discussions.
