(1) The UN as Enemy #1 - because it is the only international forum where all states meet as equals. It sets the standards of acceptable norms of behaviour and gives voice to less powerful countries in international affairs.
As Israel's foot soldiers, UN Watch and NGOM want the UN either to abide by their definition of the rule of law or damage the UN's international legitimacy while advancing their pro-Israel agenda. The ongoing vicious attacks by Israel and friends on Justice Richard Goldstone, himself a Zionist, illustrates the persistence and ruthlessness of the shock-and-awe propaganda troops. His crime? Producing a report that found evidence of war crimes by both sides during the Israeli war on Gaza in December 2008 - January 2009.
Peter Kent, Canada's Minister of State of Foreign Affairs (Americas), and member of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA), decided to attack the credibility of the UN Human Rights Council, instead of addressing the contents of the Goldstone report, by asserting that "theso-called fact-finding commission was the creation of one of the United Nation's most flawed bodies, the Human Rights Council, which includes some of the UN's least democratic states."
(2) Donors and partners of NGOs hypocritically accusing Human Rights NGOs of having a political agenda and conducting anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, activities when the NGOs are fulfilling their mandates.
The aim is to have agencies and foundations, such as the, sever their working relationships with NGOs and avoid using them as partners on projects, as New Israel Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute Canada did with KAIROS and UNRWA. Steinberg's voice is magnified in Canada, because he has access to the sympathetic ear of the government.
(3) Civil society itself - by making criticism of Israeli practices taboo, thereby inhibiting society's normally existing plurality of opinion.
Steinberg's group claims that civil society should endorse the government's policy and that it poses a danger to the state when it does not. In "The Trojan Horse", a report co-sponsored by the Institute for Zionist Strategies (Chairman Yisrael Harel is himself an illegal settler and a founder of the extremist Gush Emunim settler movement), Israeli NGOs are accused of being a fifth column because they receive funds from abroad. There is no criticism of ultra-nationalist groups receiving foreign funding from controversial sources in the report. NGOM itself receives funds from US-based family foundations, so by their own reasoning JCPA and NGOM themselves were and may become again Trojan horses, considering that although their position towards Israel/Palestine aligns with the current Israeli extremist government, it would not under a government that seeks a land-for-peace resolution of the conflict. Since donations through foundations are tax deductible, NGOM is in fact funded by the US taxpayers.
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So how does this affect Canada? The ideological insertion of Israel into our institutions and the politicization of human rights have a negative impact not only on the institutions themselves, but on our democratic rights as it makes impossible any pragmatic understanding of issues, and stifles the necessary strong debates that underpin democracies.
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