The United Nations Is Not Your Friend (But You Probably Know That Already)

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind is a fragment of a poem describing the United Nations headquarters in New York City as –

. . . that great glass palace
of mendacity, mendicancy and malice.

If you doubt that, mark the words of the U.N.’s “High Commissioner for Human Rights”:

The UN human rights chief on Tuesday said he was “troubled” by a series of “heavy-handed” steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests across university campuses in the US in support of Palestine.

 

“Freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly are fundamental to society – particularly when there is sharp disagreement on major issues, as there are in relation to the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel,” Volker Turk said in a statement.

 

Any actions taken by university authorities and law enforcement officials to restrict such expression must be “carefully scrutinized” to ensure that they go no further than what is demonstrably necessary to protect the rights and freedoms of others, Turk said.

 

He said such restrictions may be permissible for another legitimate purpose, such as maintenance of public health or order, adding: “I am concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts.”

 

Turk stressed that incitement to violence or hatred on grounds of identity or viewpoints “must be strongly repudiated.”

 

“Such conduct can, and must be, addressed individually, rather than through sweeping measures that impute to all members of a protest the unacceptable viewpoints of a few,” the human rights chief said. “Here, as elsewhere, responses by universities and law enforcement need to be guided by human rights law, allowing vibrant debate and protecting safe spaces for all.”

 

“It must be clear that legitimate exercises of the freedom of expression cannot be conflated with incitement to violence and hatred,” he concluded.

Anyone who has paid attention to the wave of anti-Jewish uprisings on college campuses and doesn’t get all his news from Al Jazeera knows how untethered to reality that accusation is. On the one side, we hear protesters (not just “a few” but crowds of hundreds) chanting slogans that demand a judenrein Middle East and a worldwide intifada against the Jewish people. We see them threatening Jewish students, building barriers to deny access to public spaces and, in the case of Columbia University, seizing control of the main administration building.

On the other side, we see that the police whom university officials belatedly and apologetically summon don’t employ deadly force, or much force at all. There is a little scuffling. Those trespassers who don’t flee are zip-tied and carted to jail, from which they are quickly released. There have been few reports of injuries. If anyone has been hospitalized, it hasn’t made the news.

The most serious breach of “human rights law” that any protester has claimed is that Columbia refused to deliver food to the students and non-students who occupied Hamilton Hall. Tiananmen Square? Soweto? Selma? The hands of authority in the United States are so light that it’s a surprise they haven’t floated away.

Herr Türk doesn’t base his accusations on even a scintilla of evidence. He needs no evidence, because he is certain in his heart that America is the crime lord of the world and Israel is its henchman. His malice is patent. He is probably a liar and a deadbeat, too.