This article was published in one of my favorite online publications, FrontPage Magazine. Here are some excerpts:

The Human Wrongs Commission

THIS SPRING, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights held its 58th annual meeting, the month-long event at which it conducts all of its business. For the first time ever, the United States did not participate. The effects were evident...

Governments that routinely violate human rights have learned that membership in the commission is a good way to insulate themselves from criticism. Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria-five of the ten countries rated the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political rights and civil liberties-now sit on the commission...

The Islamic states, for their part, joined together to defeat the motion on Iran, even though most observers agree that human-rights violations there have worsened in the last year. The decision was trumpeted on Teheran's state-run television...

Unexpectedly, Russia also received help from the Islamic nations. Although Russia's forces in Chechnya are estimated to have caused the deaths of some 60,000 Muslim civilians, the Islamic caucus abstained from and thereby scuttled a resolution of condemnation. The caucus needed Russia's vote and influence, and had bigger fish to fry-namely, Israel and the American war on terrorism.

But this tea was too weak for the Islamic caucus, which pushed through another resolution sounding "alarm ... at the impact of September 11 on Muslim minorities and communities." Decrying a "campaign of defamation," it complained that "Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with humanrights violations and with terrorism" and reminded one and all that "discrimination against human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity." These high-minded sentiments were endorsed by, among others, Syria, whose president declared last May in the presence of the Pope that the Jews have tried "to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ," and by Saudi Arabia, which forbids the open practice of any faith other than Islam and where an official of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs recently expressed his "surprise . that the Christian U.S. allows the `brothers of apes and pigs' [Jews] to corrupt it."

None of the resolution's supporters explained why the commission should deplore attacks on Muslims in particular at a time when, in Europe, synagogues were being burned, Jewish cemeteries vandalized, and Jews assaulted on a daily basis-almost always by Muslim immigrants. Nor did they say why it was erroneous to associate Islam with terrorism and human-rights violations when about two-thirds of the terrorist groups named in the State Department's annual report on the subject are Islamic and when the world's predominantly Muslim states cluster together at the bottom of Freedom House's survey of civil and political liberty.

BUT THE hypocrisy in the commission's concerns about "defamation" of the Islamic world were as nothing compared to its treatment of Israel. While most states guilty of human-rights abuses went entirely unmentioned at the meeting, and the unlucky few who did not escape scrutiny were criticized in single statements, Israel was lambasted in eight separate resolutions, and in language far harsher than that applied to any other state.

The Islamic caucus and the remaining Communist states (China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea) instigated these attacks, but the lynch-mob spirit was very much encouraged by Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson. Referring to Israel's then-ongoing military operation to root out the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank, Annan proclaimed that the UN could not "afford to be neutral in the face of great moral challenges..."

In theory, the states serving on the UN's humanrights commission are supposed to put principles of international justice ahead of their selfish interests. When the world's single Jewish state locks horns with one of the 57 members of the Islamic Conference, the world organization is supposed to judge the dispute dispassionately. When Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and China serve on the commission, they are supposed to assess human-rights issues honestly. This never happens, of course, but it is considered retrograde to say so. Perhaps that is because, with its noble intentions and its execrable record, the human-rights commission provides as vivid an illustration as one could want of the wishful thinking behind the very idea of the United Nations...