Fearing American Sanctions, an Anti-Israel UN Official Resigns, Leading Two Colleagues To Step Down as Well

A three-person committee appointed by a Geneva-based United Nations organ resigned Tuesday morning in the wake of Washington placing sanctions on another UN official long accused of anti-Israel bias and antisemitism. Two members of the UN Human Rights Council’s permanent investigation committee against Israeli conduct resigned after its head, Navi Pillay, also did so. Reports in Israel indicate that Ms. Pillay feared that America would place sanctions on her that would bar her from traveling to New York, where her daughter and granddaughter live. “It’s unprecedented to have the entire commission of inquiry resign,” the director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, an international lawyer who often addresses and berates the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, tells the Sun. “It’s never happened before, and this seems to be all a ripple effect from the sanctions. The dominoes are falling.”He referred to last week’s sanctions that Secretary Rubio announced against the Geneva-based rights council’s “special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories,” Francesca Albanese. Mr. Rubio cited Ms. Albanese’s “shameful efforts to prompt International Criminal Court action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.” Like Israel, America is not a member of the Hague-based ICC. Like Ms. Albanese, Ms. Pillay often presented the anti-Israel findings of her committee to the ICC, urging action against Israelis. As part of her efforts to influence the court, Ms. Pillay reportedly traveled to the Hague to meet the court’s deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan. The prosecutor, “coincidentally or not,” appointed Ms. Pillay to her Human Rights Council position in July 2021, Israel Hayom reports. Officially, Ms. Pillay on Monday night cited her age, health, and workload as reasons for resigning. The committee’s other members, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, also resigned. Mr. Kothari hinted at an “understanding” reached in a closed-door meeting with the council’s president. The Geneva-based UN organ has long been accused of being obsessed with Israel.The council “is not made up of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato,” Mr. Neuer says. “It’s dominated by about 60 percent tyrannies and other forms of non-democracies.” Arab and Islamic states, he adds, “get whatever they want, and they have hijacked the Human Rights Council to weaponize it as part of their political war against Israel, to delegitimize, demonize, and scapegoat Israel.”Ms. Pillay’s permanent investigation committee was established after the June 2021 Operation Guardian Walls, in which the Israel Defense Force struck terrorist targets in Gaza following a barrage of rockets being launched at Israeli population centers by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other groups in the Strip. The mandate of the council’s unprecedented permanent committee was to investigate only Israel. Like Ms. Albanese’s mission, the investigations are mandated to ignore attacks against the Jewish state, including those deliberately targeting civilians, which are defined as war crimes. As Mr. Neuer notes, a previous UN secretary general, Ban ki-Moon, publicly condemned Ms. Albanese’s predecessor, Richard Falk, for promoting a theory that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld were behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. In contrast, the current UN chief, Antonio Guterres, has denounced Mr. Rubio for sanctioning Ms. Albanese, even though she too promoted outlandish theories, including that the CIA and Mossad were behind the 2015 shooting at the Paris offices of a satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. “Our message is to engage diplomatically with the UN human rights architecture and don’t issue targeted sanctions,” Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun after Mr. Rubio announcement on Ms. Albanese. “The use of unilateral sanctions against special rapporteurs, or any other UN expert or official, is unacceptable.”Yet, the sanctions might tame the UN’s biases. As first reported by Israel Hayom, Ms. Pillay’s daughter, Isvari Pather, lives at New York, and the veteran anti-Israel and anti-American activist is concerned that sanctions against her would prevent her from visiting them. The UN’s humanitarian work “has grown far beyond what is required or reasonable,” a former American ambassador to Turtle Bay, Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote on X Monday. The world body “costs too much for what it delivers.” President Trump must lead a debate about the UN’s future because “the alternative is an organization in terminal decline and a huge amount of resources wasted.”

Fearing American Sanctions, an Anti-Israel UN Official Resigns, Leading Two Colleagues To Step Down as Well

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