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UN Council's Anti-Israel Agenda
[Dallas Morning News] Adam Raskin - The UN Human Rights Council has become a shill for the international delegitimizing of a single nation: Israel. Since its inception three years ago, 80% of the business of the Human Rights Council has involved the censure of Israel. For a country with a democratically elected government that enshrines freedom of speech and religion, protects the rights of women, gays and lesbians and minorities - a country that has 80 human rights organizations of its own - all this attention seems a bit strange. In its most recent miscarriage of human rights, 25 member countries voted to support the deeply flawed, extremely one-sided Goldstone report, accusing Israel of war crimes during the 2008 Gaza incursion. (Six countries, including the U.S., voted against the resolution.) Remarkably absent from the UN council's condemnation was any mention of the deliberate Hamas targeting of Israeli cities and towns with rockets and mortars that precipitated the operation, which was Israel's last-ditch, desperate effort to protect its own civilians after years of negotiations and sanctions. When presidential candidate Barack Obama visited the rocket-pocked Israeli city of Sderot in July 2008, he declared: "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israel to do the same thing." Rabbi Raskin is president of the Rabbinic Association of Greater Dallas.