UN Quiz: Who’s the Prime Minister of Israel?

Despite the criticism of the UN’s Goldstone Report, including by Goldstone himself, the UN seems determined to do it again.

Goldstone investigated "Operation Cast Lead," the war between Israel and Hamas in December 2008 and January 2009, or more precisely he ignored Hamas and investigated Israel. Now the UN Human Rights Council has appointed a commission to investigate the current conflict, and once again Israel alone is to be the target. There will be no investigation of the rocket and mortars fired at Israel by Hamas, nothing about the purpose of the terror tunnels dug by Hamas into Israel, nothing about human shields, nothing even about Hamas’s use of UN facilities as storage sites and launching pads.

This kind of investigation requires the right leader, and the UN appears to have found him: a Canadian law professor named William Schabas. No nonsense about objectivity here: Schabas is on record denouncing Israel repeatedly, as UN Watch has documented. But it gets worse: he is also on record as saying that Prime Minister Netanyahu should be "in the dock" for the crimes Israel committed during Operation Cast Lead. Minor problem: Netanyahu was not in government at the time; Ehud Olmert was prime minister then.

Such small details do not apparently trouble Schabas: what’s the difference, prosecute one Israeli or another. His own intense hostility to Netanyahu, also documented by UN Watch, may have led to this little mistake--which shows not only hostility to Israel and Netanyahu but a cavalier attitude toward the facts. All in all, he’s exactly what the UN Human Rights Council is looking for.

Canada’s foreign minister John Baird had it right when he tweeted "UN Human Rights Council continues to be a sham for advancing human rights; today’s ann’t for members of its Gaza inquiry reveals its agenda."