Tanasinn wrote:The point people are making, I think, vis. Saudi Arabia condemning anyone ever on human rights has to do with the fact that many view UN resolutions as nothing more than tools of realpolitik or exercise of international vendettas using holier-than-thou pronouncements.
"You too" is not, in and of itself, a valid argument, but when you're dealing with an organization like the UN that allegedly tries to exert positive, humanist change through dialogue and diplomatic pressure, then it is very important that that organization be seen as impartial if you want anyone involved to take it seriously ever.
THIS.
Basically, every time the UN issues five condemnations of Israel and one of Saudi Arabia on women's rights, or four on Israel's treatment of Palestinians and none on (to pick the example given earlier) Burma's treatment of the Rohinga, the UN sullies its own credibility. It permits itself to be used as a tool. Used by nations that are trying desperately to use the UN as a tool to fight their proxy conflict for them, having failed when they tried launching direct attacks.
Since the UN doesn't even
have a meaningful function except in the context of its own impartiality and commitment to world peace and human rights... that's a problem.
If you want to spit on Israel, spit on Israel. Israel has a gift for giving people reasons to do that. But don't turn the UN into your personal attack dog, and don't tolerate others doing so.
mr friendly guy wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Friendly, does the fact that Israel's opponents propose a constant stream of anti-Israel UN resolutions 'because they can' mean we should not worry about whether some (or most) of those resolutions are poorly grounded?
You can be suspicious that some or most of these resolutions are poorly grounded. However you can only show it, not by pointing out they make lots and lots of accusations, but by looking at the evidence presented for each individual case (eg as Eyl did). Now if a particular source continues to make inaccurate claims again and again, we should by default disbelieve unless they show some effort this time to actually gather evidence. My problem is the article in the OP default to the former. Its the same as if I dismiss someone's claim on the grounds that they are bias, but wrapped around a bit more rhetoric.
So what?
Bluntly, all I'm hearing is a lot of noise about how we shouldn't do a thing. A thing which I for one am not doing.
Why are you working so hard to perform apologetics for a transparently bad practice? Why can't you just say "bias is wrong, maybe some of these resolutions are true, maybe none of them are true, but the UN should be above bias and should speak out against all abuses, not just the ones that people try to make it speak out against when they're using the UN as an attack dog?
Suppose, as eyl says, one of those resolutions was blatantly false to the point where momentary fact-checking could prove it wrong. That would be a great illustration of my point about how bias of the form 'we condemn you more than you deserve' can shade over into 'we condemn you by lying about you.' Morever, such a hypothetical groundless UN resolution serves to grossly undermine the UN's credibility on isues involving Israel.
Agreed. However you still needed to fact check that particular claim did you not? You didn't just go "ah these guys make a lot of claims against X, thus it must be bias and false." That's kind of my point. The article goes straight to the latter, and while some people respond well to that type of rhetoric, it just raises alarm bells with me when you use that type of fallacy straight off the bat.
You see the problem here? Making excuses for the country that proposed a groundless resolution is irrelevant. Saying they only proposed a resolution full of easily refuted lies because "that's the only way they can strike at their enemy" is missing the point. The UN is supposed to be above that, above being used as a tool for one nation to strike at another, above being so meretricious that they become a vehicle for political biases and ethnic feuds and don't even bother fact-checking the condemnations they deliver from whoever is pulling their puppet-strings today..
That is the real problem and the real concern here.
Its not an excuse, its an explanation why they do this. Lots of accusations doesn't necessarily mean the accusations are false, yet alone everyone of those is false. We can be suspicious, but ultimately we need to fact check before we start using the line "my accusers have an ulterior motive for doing so." We have to be careful not to do this in general, but this applies even more strongly to the IvP conflict, because after decades of conflict, neither side has clean hands anymore.
Except that it is nakedly obvious when the accusers have an ulterior motive for doing so, when there is a persistent pattern that blind chance does not explain.
As an example from the field of jury selection, suppose that you have eighty juror candidates drawn from a jurisdiction where 50% of the population is African-American. Four of the eighty candidates are African-American. Juror candidates are
supposed to be chosen randomly... but the odds of flipping the coin eighty times and having it come up 'tails' only four times are vanishingly low- on the order of one in a quintillion.
Basic common sense tells you there's jury selection bias going on in a situation like that.
At some point, there is just
no point in wasting time in apologetics, it becomes totally obvious that a system which is supposed to condemn injustices impartially is in fact being selective, and is only targeting those which it is popular to target, regardless of whether those are the injustices that merit the most time and attention.
And sure, maybe some of the UN panel's accusations are true- but who cares? Given that there is evidence of bias, if I want to know about the state of women's rights in Israel,
I cannot ask the UN anymore. Because they have a track record which makes it obvious that there is bias. I'd have to check the UN reports against some other, less biased source anyway... in which case the UN report is redundant, and I might as well check the less biased source directly.
It's like, if you want to know whether someone is at fault in a lawsuit, don't bother asking the lawyer who's paid to sue them. It's a waste of time- you
know the lawyer will tell you they're at fault, whether it's true or not. Sometimes it's true- but since you'd have to do your own research anyway because you can't trust the lawyer... why not just cut out the middleman and do the research anyway?
If the UN is willing to be complicit in a process by which nations that have enemies are being hit with disproportionate numbers of UN resolutions raised
by those enemies, regardless of the objective merits underlying the resolutions... there is no point paying attention to UN resolutions. Some of the allegations in the resolutions might be true, but it doesn't matter, because they are not a trustworthy source on the question. It's as simple as that.