Although William Schabas, a longtime foe of Israel, has resigned from his position as chairman of the UN commission investigating last summer’s Gaza war, the commission is nonetheless likely to produce a catalogue of unfounded libels similar to the 2009 Goldstone report. Part of the problem with these reports, explains Hillel Neuer, is that they are written mainly by a staff appointed by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR)—an agency that stands out even within the UN as a bastion of hatred for Israel. Nor are the staffers chosen for their impartiality:
When I met with the Schabas commission on September 17, 2014 to personally hand them a written demand for Schabas’s recusal, there were only two staff members in the room, both of them from OHCHR’s Arab section. . . . One was Frej Fenniche, a Tunisian who was a spokesman for the UN’s notoriously anti-Semitic Durban conference on racism in 2001. The other was Sara Hammood, a former spokesperson for the UN’s most anti-Israel committee. Hamood also worked as a “policy adviser on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory” for Oxfam Novib, where she wrote one-sided reports and joined others in critical statements against Israel. This was the initial staff . . . who were presumably involved in hiring the others.
The current staff—Schabas has mentioned that it is composed of “a dozen specialists”—[also] includes Karin Lucke, OHCHR’s former coordinator of the Arab region team, . . . now listed as working for the UN in New York. Amnesty [International] notes that the current team includes the OHCHR staff from “Geneva, Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip.”
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/article/why-the-schabas-report-will-be-every-bit-as-biased-as-the-goldstone-report/