UN Turns a Blind Eye to Syria

As the Assad regime ramps up their campaign of repression, the UN Human Rights Council has stayed silent and focused instead on their favorite punching bag: Israel.

As Syria verges on eruption, with riots and widespread killings across the state, the Syrian propaganda machine goes into full swing, with Muhsin Bilal, the Information Minister, declaring: "The situation is completely calm in all parts of the country".

He sure has a twisted interpretation of the meaning of ‘calm’.

In sharp contrast, Amnesty International says that at least 55 people have been killed during a week of unrest, as Syrian security forces open fire on protesters, while simultaneously carrying out arbitrary arrests, torture and beatings.

Most NGOs, media outlets and eyewitness testimony corroborate this account.

In Deraa and Damascus, tens of thousands marched in funerals for some of the dead, chanting "Freedom." And as this YouTube clip of protestors ripping apart a poster of President Bashar Assad shows, clearly the situation in Syria is anything but calm, with the first real challenge to the 40 year Assad family stranglehold over Syria.

At the same time as Syria slaughters pro-democracy protestors, last week saw continued violence and human rights abuses rage throughout the Middle East – from Libya to Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, Gaza and elsewhere.

One would be forgiven for thinking that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), that august body charged with strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the world, would have stood up when it counted most. Wrong.

Instead, the only Middle East country to be singled out by the UNHRC for special opprobrium last week was none other than its favorite punching bag – Israel, with 6 resolutions condemning Israeli settlement activity and supposed human rights violations. Never mind for a moment that the UNHRC chose to turn a blind eye to the horrendous massacre of an Israeli family in their sleep in Itamar or the Jerusalem bus bombing earlier this week or the 100 plus rockets which rained down on Israel from Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

But then again, perhaps the UNHRC also thinks that the situation in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East is ‘completely calm.’

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