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American and Israeli flags (file)
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| By Israel Insider staff July 26, 2007 |
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An American congressional delagate to the United Nations, Norm Coleman, is urging the American government to halt funding for the UN Human Rights Council because of its disproportionate attacks on Israel and failure to investigate other countries.
"You've got countries like North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe where you have state-sponsored brutality, and what we have is deafening silence," Coleman, also a Republican senator from Minnesota, said, according to Haaretz.
A U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee panel will review the Human Rights Council's performance at a hearing Thursday. Last month, the committee approved legislation Coleman proposed to cut off U.S. funding of the council.
Echoing Coleman's criticisms, Assistant Secretary of State Kristen Silverberg called the council's first year a serious disappointment. She reproached member states for abandoning their responsibility to defend suffering peoples in countries like Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe, and Cuba and instead devoted their energies to attacking Israel.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon came under attack on Wednesday for joining the chorus of critics against the disproportionate condemnation and scrutiny of Israel . He remarked that Islamic countries in the UN Human Rights Council had ignored abuses around the world and targeted Israel instead.
In related news, Congress is set to review two resolutions that will require any international discussion about Palestinian refugees to make reference to Jewish refugees that were forced to flee from Arab countries. Estimates show that 850,000 Jews fled Arab states following the creation of the State of Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The resolutions aim to provide balance to international dialogue regarding Israel. According to the resolutions' supporters, grants unwavering credibility to criticisms by Arab countries of Israel's Palestinian refugee crisis without taking into account that Arab countries have a refugee crisis of their own.
"The fact that we have been successfully absorbed by Israel doesn't take away from the fact that our home civilization has been destroyed, and that we are extinct from North Africa, where we were for 2,500 years," Regina Bubil-Waldman said, cofounder and chair of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, human rights advocacy group.
"We need to rectify a historical injustice that has gone on for 60 years, and return the narrative of Jews from Arab countries to the Mideast narrative," Irwin Cotler, human rights activist and former justice minister and attorney-general of Canada, told the paper.
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