Reject UN’s report

ON PAGE 4 of the Cape Times, “Mixed reception for UN report accusing Israeli army of war crimes in Gaza” (June 24), you draw the readers’ attention to the just-released report of the UN Human Rights Council, a body made up of largely undemocratic dictatorships whose behaviour towards their own citizens is as far removed from human rights principles as you can get.

The world we live in is an upsidedown, Alice in Wonderland world. This UN council claims to act in defence of human rights, but their actions and findings do not reflect this.

They give free passage to the worst abusers of human rights – countries that persecute religious minorities, suppress and kill women, throw homosexuals from high roofs, execute hundreds of dissidents every year, imprison, torture and slaughter their own citizens, separate citizens along religious and racial divides and create an entire underclass of second class citizens – without rebuke. Yet they rage against Israel, which does none of those things. It does not use torture, it does not execute anyone, not even Palestinian terrorists who have committed mass murder against innocent civilians and children – and all this while being forced to defend itself against more wars, more terrorist attacks and more hatred than is suffered by the rest of the world combined.

The UN Human Rights Council deserves to have its report rejected and deserves the contempt of decent people holding accepted standards of moral behaviour. We have a right to expect this.