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John Dugard - UN Special Rapporteur
A recent UN report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/7/17) by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard disregards international legal standards against terrorism and excuses the killing of innocents. We, the undersigned, urge the United Nations to reject categorically this attack on the standards of human decency at the heart of the UN’s origins.
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Terrorism is the targeted killing of innocents to intimidate a population or compel a government to act in a particular way. This definition reflects an international legal consensus, but UN Rapporteur Dugard disagrees.
UN Rapporteur Dugard claims “a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror…and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation.” He then categorizes the acts perpetrated upon Israeli civilians by Palestinians acting “against occupation” as the second kind of terror.
No terror is “mindless” in the sense of being politically unmotivated by a sense of grievance, however misconceived the grievance may be.
UN Rapporteur Dugard seeks historical support for his position: “History is replete with examples of military occupation that have been resisted by violence - acts of terror”, analogizing the Israeli occupation resisted by Palestinian terror to “the German occupation resisted by European countries in the Second World War.”
Not every act of violence is an act of terror. Comparing the murderers of Israeli civilians to the liberators of Nazi Germany (and thus the Nazis' victims to the Nazis themselves), is a slander against the Jewish state. In fact, the European Union includes in its working definition of anti-semitism “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
UN Rapporteur Dugard argues that Palestinian terror “must be understood as being a[n] inevitable consequence of occupation” and that “Until this is done [occupation is ended] violence will continue.”
Inevitability absolves Palestinian terrorists from moral responsibility for their murderous acts. It alleges they have no choice but to kill Israelis – whether blowing up men, women and children in restaurants or on buses on the way to school or at synagogue, work or play.
UN Rapporteur Dugard maintains the only proper course of action to end Palestinian terror is to meet its perpetrators’ demands.
By implication, these demands are reasonable. But Palestinian terror groups have declared that they will not end their terror campaign until Israel as a Jewish state ceases to exist. And yet according to Dugard there is no point in time at which Palestinian terror becomes “mindless.”
The words of UN Rapporteur John Dugard serve to incite terror – an egregious violation of human rights – against Jewish men, women and children living in the Jewish homeland. They therefore stand in direct contradiction to the principles and purposes of the UN Charter. We call upon the United Nations to withdraw this discreditable report from circulation as an official UN document and to reject it as a statement of UN policy.
In Support |
