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The U.S. Human Rights Report Travesty
(Commentary) Evelyn Gordon - The U.S. State Department's latest report on human rights practices around the world, published in March, channels the Israel obsession of the UN Human Rights Council. The document devotes 141 pages to the human rights situation in Israel and the territories, more than any other country except China, which gets the same number. Israel alone, excluding the territories, gets 69 pages; by comparison, Iran gets 48 and Syria 58. The report becomes even more surreal when you start examining the "crimes." "Residents suffered from the dust raised by construction [in the planned new town of Hiran]." Do State's human rights gurus seriously think people suffering from the dust of nearby construction constitutes a human rights violation? By that logic, we'd essentially have to shut down all construction worldwide. The report also traffics in unsupported libel: "NGOs reported employers subjected Palestinian men to forced labor in Israeli settlements." The State Department apparently just copy-pasted anything it could find from such organizations, no matter how ludicrous or unsubstantiated.