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UNITED NATIONS - The lead human rights body of the United Nations Wednesday picked a Jewish academic to monitor Israeli treatment of Palestinians - but Canada said he was the wrong man for the job.An emeritus professor at Princeton University, Richard Falk(picture left) has compared Israeli actions affecting Palestinians to the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews.Canada used its seat on the 47-member UN Human Rights Council to question his commitment to "impartiality and objectivity" as the next Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories.Arab and Islamic states had been keen to see him named to the post, which carries a mandate to investigate "Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law.""Canada has serious concerns about whether the high standards established by the council...will be able to be met by this individual," said Marius Grinius, the Canadian delegate, as the council endorsed Falk among a series of other monitoring appointments."It is with disappointment, therefore, that Canada dissociates itself from any council decision to approve the full slate."The 192-member General Assembly launched the council in 2006 to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, which countries with poor human rights records had come to dominate in order to deflect criticism.But the new body has faced criticism for issuing successive condemnations of Israel while saying little about human rights violations elsewhere in the world.Indeed, cheers erupted Wednesday following the appointment of a second official who, among myriad anti-Israel and anti-Western statements, has also compared Israeli practices to those of the Nazis.Some 40 Council members elected Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss politician, to the council's new 18-member advisory committee. In 2005, he likened Israeli soldiers to concentration camp guards."Even within the benighted UN Human Rights Council, today was a dark day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring agency. "The very credibility of the UN human rights system is now at stake."Irwin Cotler, the Liberal critic on human rights, had appealed Tuesday to the Swiss government to withdraw its nomination of Ziegler for the UN post, writing a letter also signed by three other international human rights activists.They said Ziegler had shown support for serial human rights abusers such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Cuba's Fidel Castro, and also praised the work of Roger Garaudy, a French Stalinist whose book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel denies the Holocaust.Some of Falk's anti-Israel writing is contained in an essay he wrote last summer."It is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust'..." he wrote."Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."by Steven Edwards , Canwest News Service
As in the days of Noah....
