Aside from Rep. Peter King’s resolution, Congress has been mute on Obama’s decision to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council. Jewish groups have similarly refused to confront Obama. We now see that meekness has not paid off. Far from confronting the thugocracies, the Obama team has sat idly by, if not encouraged, the despots. When the Human Rights Council condemned Israel for the flotilla, the U.S. did nothing. Now we learn:
On June 10, with the active involvement and approval of the Obama administration, the Council adopted a decision on human rights in Iran that was a sentence long and contained no condemnation whatsoever.
The context was a review by the Council of Iran’s human rights record, as part of the Council’s consideration of all 192 UN states. The review featured a vigorous defense by Iranian representatives of Iran’s stellar human rights achievements, followed by Iran’s rejection of a host of “recommendations” made to improve its actual behavior. The “outcome” was a sentence identical for dictatorships and democracies alike, in which the Council merely refers to a bundle of documents containing praise, criticisms and responses without drawing any conclusion attributable to the Council itself.
It gets worse:
The reaction from the Obama administration was to declare victory and to manufacture something positive to say about Iran. On June 10, U.S. Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe rushed to the UN microphones in Geneva to announce repeatedly: “I have to emphasize that we are very pleased that Iran was willing to participate at all. … In the case of Iran, we applaud the willingness to participate at all. … We’re pleased that at least they were willing to show up.”
Praising Iran despite its total disregard of the fundamentals of human decency is the antithesis of the supposed liberal human rights mantra. Instead of buoying the Human Rights Council’s performance, the Obama administration is sinking with it.
This is shameful. It’s time Congress and pro-Israel groups demanded that the Obama administration withdraw from the Council.
