BOSTON GLOBE NOTICES UN IS NOT ENTIRELY FAIR TO ISRAEL

The Boston Globe (whaaa?) has a piece that is somewhat unsympathetic to the formal and binding decision by the UN Human Rights Commission to exclusively single out Israel for demonization. It's by Irwin Cotler, a Canadian member of Parliament and a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and he is not pleased:

This discriminatory treatment is not only prejudicial to Israel, but it is a breach of the United Nations Charter's foundational principle of "equality for all nations, large and small," and it concluded a week - and year - of unprecedented discriminatory conduct. The week began with Archbishop Desmond Tutu reporting to the UN Human Rights Council on the fact-finding mission to investigate the Israeli "willful killing of Palestinian civilians" in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, in November 2006. He received a standing ovation, an extraordinary reaction by a body that frowns even upon applause. I suspect the appreciation was as much for the man as anything else. For the mandate that authorized the mission was a sham. It made a mockery of the council's own founding principles and procedures.

We're not sure if this is Anglo understatement or genuine confusion, but our hunch is that the applause were for to the man and his mandate. We originally wrote about the UN's decision to send Tutu to Israel here. The title of the post was "UN Sends Committed Anti-Semite Anti-Zionist To Conduct Unbiased Investigation Of Zionists". Even by our admittedly jaded standards, it probably rose to the level of a rant - the rank bias was just that transparent. Cotler has significantly more on how how the bias has become even more shameless. Of course, among the anti-Israel resolutions that get debated are recurring condemnations of Israel's defensive actions against Hezbollah. Syria never seems to come up. Here's what a Lebanese Muslim leader thinks about that.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]