Only weeks before embarking this coming February 2018 to deliver cross-country lectures, media interviews, and an appearance in the South African Parliament, the Executive Director of the human rights NGO in Geneva, Switzerland, UN Watch, Hillel C. Neuer, received a “Banning Order” from the UK branch of Amnesty International preventing him from speaking in their headquarters.
Recalling the Apartheid era, South Africans should well recall ‘Banning Orders’, and the resonance that word still carries today.
Hillel C. Neuer
The international lawyer and diplomat who has testified before the United Nations and the U.S. Congress, taught international human rights at the Geneva School of Diplomacy. He also served as Vice-President of the NGO Special Committee on Human Rights in Geneva, is being silenced.
Scheduled to participate in a debate on the UN Human Rights Council’s treatment of Israel, he received notice only a few days before that was cancelled.
The UN and its affiliates today are transparently very selective when it comes to the protection of human rights. A perpetual battering ram against Israel while protecting the worst dictators and ignoring atrocities and massacres around the world, the UN reserves its wrath for Israel. It is not because of the Palestinian issue – Arab countries are the worst offenders of apartheid in their treatment of its Palestinian communities – but because of the Jewish issue.
Yes, anti-Semitism is alive and well at the United Nations and now at Amnesty International!
In a Press Release, Neuer exposes the hypocrisy of Amnesty International describing the ban as “a patent display of bigotry and intolerance.” After all, “a human rights group that is supposed to defend freedom of speech and the right to argue is shutting down a debate in their offices — a debate that features both sides.” The other invited speaker in the debate was the representative of the UK’s United Nations Association.
The reason Amnesty provided for the ‘ban’?:
“We do not think it appropriate for Amnesty International to host an event by those actively supporting settlements.”
However, as Neuer explained, “the event had nothing to do with “settlements,” and UN Watch does not take an official stance on the matter. This is a made-up pretext.”
Rather, the real reason, says Neuer, “is revealed by the Middle East Monitor – a website run by anti-Semites like Ben White who has close ties to Amnesty. It hyped up the rhetoric against UN Watch that has reported on Hamas terrorists working for UNRWA describing the human rights NGO as a “notorious pro-Israel pressure group”.
An obsessive Israel basher and Jew-hater, Ben White once stated:
The obsessive Israel basher and Jew-hater, Ben White.
“I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are.”
Although one should not “judge a book by its cover”, White’s bias of on the Middle East conflict is emblazoned from the titles of his books. Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, and Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy and his upcoming Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel. Bashing Israel from his proverbial soapbox is what White does!
Over the years, says Neuer, “Ahmadinejad, Assad, Gaddafi, Castro and Chavez have tried to intimidate and silence UN Watch. In debates of the UN Human Rights Council, ambassadors from Syria, Cuba, and the PLO routinely interrupt testimony from victims we bring. They urge the Chairman to rule that I am out of order. I’m used to that by now.
Yet never did I imagine that the world’s largest human rights organization would join their ranks!”
“UN Watch will not let Amnesty’s disgraceful ban bully us into silence,” says Neuer. “On the contrary, we will fight even harder to defend the truth.”
5th February, UN Watch will release a 50-page report documenting ten years of UN indifference to combating anti-Antisemitism. On the 20th, it will hold the word’s dictators to account – many of them UNHRC members – in a Geneva summit giving a platform to the world’s greatest champions of human rights, heroic dissidents who have been oppressed by regimes like China, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
South Africans will have the opportunity to be better acquainted with UN Watch and its Executive Director, Hillel C. Neuer when this indefatigable defender of human rights addresses audiences around the country in February 2018.
As apartheid South Africa discovered, “banning” does not work.
Hillel Neuer’s banned U.N. speech from 2007 became the most viewed and written-about NGO speech in the history of the United Nations. Slate.com described it as a “stunning rebuke of the U.N. Human Rights Council”, while the New York Sun called it “a diplomatic moment to remember.”
Unlike the United Nations and now Amnesty International that shamefully silences, we trust that South Africa – where freedom of expression is firmly embedded in its proud constitution – will welcome the voice of a true advocate for human rights when Neuer speak in February.
As the American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin said, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”
