Arab charter of wrongs

Editorial

The Arab world will have its own human rights charter come March. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights evidently being too universal, seven Arab countries have signed on to a local version of a human rights code.

The United Nation's high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court justice, warmly endorsed the Arab charter last month, but, when faced with a barrage of outrage when the contents of the charter became widely known, Arbour issued a statement recanting her earlier support, somewhat anyway, citing a few areas of concern.

"Throughout the development of the Arab charter," said Arbour's statement, "my office shared concerns with the drafters about the incompatibility of some of its provisions with international norms and standards. These concerns included the approach to the death penalty for children and the rights of women and non-citizens."

She also, en passant, belatedly took umbrage at the charter's Article 2, which states that "all forms of racism, Zionism and foreign occupation and domination [should be] condemned and efforts must be deployed for their elimination."

The clarity of the message is unequivocal. "All forms" of "Zionism" are condemned and "efforts must be deployed for their elimination." The only honest justification for misinterpreting this could be illiteracy, yet Arbour expressed no hesitation about this language two weeks ago. By the beginning of this month though, she had seen the light or, at least, felt the heat.

The problem, according to Arbour? The charter does not conform to the UN's 1991 resolution rescinding its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.

In a perfunctory statement, Arbour identified a stumbling block in the form of the UN's policy not to equate Zionism with racism. Moral questions aside, it was simply the small matter of a contradictory resolution. A technical matter, it seems, that the UN's high commissioner for human rights didn't contest during the development of the Arab charter, even though her office had been offering feedback throughout the process.

Had that bureaucratic technicality gone undiscovered, might Arbour have judiciously found no qualm with Article 2?

It is astonishing that the world's leading human rights official and a jurist of Arbour's calibre could miss the mark so catastrophically. Did she fail to notice the blatant call for the eradication of Israel on first reading? Unlikely. Instead, she probably assumed – like a huge number of others – that Arab mantras calling for the destruction of the Jewish state are acceptable and understandable, if not entirely laudable. Throughout the Western world, there has been a willingness to accept whatever contempt the Arab world displays toward Israel as a harmless necessity for domestic consumption. The assumption, exhibited in reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's genocidal threats and a million like it from clergy, political leaders, media and the Arab street for 60 years plus, is that despite all the medieval-sounding, blood-curdling threats, not to mention six decades of interminable wars and terror attacks, Arab animosity toward

Israel is nothing that a more generous offer at Camp David would not resolve.

No matter how genocidal or grisly the rhetoric, it is routinely dismissed unless and until Jews (because it almost always is Jews standing up, often alone, to this vitriol, invocations of Rev. Martin Niemoller aside) demand that it be condemned.

And so, we had the unseemly picture of the UN's top human rights official forced to recant the support she had gamely offered days earlier to a document that calls for the elimination of Israel. Yet it was as if Arbour still didn't quite get the offence for which she was artfully dodging an apology.

The issue goes beyond the right of Arab states to promise an end to Israel; that has been official policy for decades of every Arab state but Jordan and Egypt and the objective of annual rounds of Jew-baiting condemnations at the UN. No surprise here.

What is far more worrisome and frustrating than Arab rage is Western dispassion. With complete credulity, the West has accepted the Arab premise that Israel's very existence is a legitimate wellspring of torment and antagonism for most or all of the world's 1.3 billion Arab and Muslim people - to the extent that eradicating it emerges as Article 2 in the Arab Charter of Human Rights.

So complete is the Western blindness to irrational Zionophobia that it goes unnoticed by the world's top human rights official until it's pointed out to her. Meanwhile, most of the West is content to believe that seven million Jews on the edge of a continent in which they are outnumbered 2,000-to-one by people who, to varying degrees, would prefer them gone, have nothing to fear. And we are further asked to accept that there are partners for peace with whom Israel has an obligation to compromise. Just how gullible do they think we are?

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