The UN has now answered:

Spokesperson:  Under resolutions adopted by both the Security Council and the General Assembly on the Middle East peace process, the Gaza Strip continues to be regarded as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.  The United Nations will accordingly continue to refer to the Gaza Strip as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory until such time as either the General Assembly or the Security Council take a different view.

Question:  Can I follow up on that?  It is the legal definition of occupation and why is Gaza considered occupied?

Spokesperson:  Well, as I have just said, there are Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that cover this.  For example, there was a Security Council resolution adopted on 8 January 2009 — 1860 — and that stressed that the Gaza Strip constitutes an integral part of the territory occupied in 1967.  And as you know, Security Council resolutions do have force in international law.

Furthermore, there is a resolution from the General Assembly from 20 December 2010, and while it noted the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank, it also stressed, in quotes, “the need for respect and preservation of the territorial unity, contiguity and integrity of all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”.  So just to repeat that the United Nations will continue to refer to the Gaza Strip as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory until either the General Assembly or the Security Council take a different view on the matter.

However, only three weeks earlier, her approach toward Syria’s role at UNESCO appeared very different. This is from the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), November 1, 2011:

Education Minister Discusses Prospects of Cooperation with UNESCO

PARIS, (SANA)- Syria discussed on Tuesday cooperation with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the framework of its participation in the UNESCO’s 36th general conference.

Minister of Education Saleh al-Rahed, heading the Syrian delegation, discussed with Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, means of boosting cooperation in all spheres.

The Minister underlined Syria’s support to the reform steps taken by the UNESCO and means of boosting relations with the Organizations and its offices.

“Being a member of UNESCO Executive Council has enabled Syria to participate in setting up the main strategy, plans, and programs of the UNESCO in the framework of seeking to upgrade relation with the organization in order to meet all its goals,” the Minister said.

He pointed out to the joint and vital projects carried out in Syria in cooperation with the UNESCO, expressing desire for further cooperation in the field of providing experts to help implement the activities and programs of the Damascus-based Regional Center for Early Childhood Development.

Al Rashed highlighted the UNESCO’s decision of granting full membership to Palestine, hailing its efforts toward giving the Palestinians their rights.

For her part, UNESCO Director-General underlined the importance of continuing cooperation with Syria in the framework of the Organization’s pursuit to help the member states achieve the activities and programs which are a UNESCO priority, particularly in the field of material and immaterial cultural heritage, education, quality, curricula, early childhood and youth, pointing out that these programs should be based on dialogue.

She said that the decision of granting full membership to the Palestinians has declared the time of real work, as efforts should be combined to achieve the Organization’s goals.

After UNESCO in November elected Syria, which already sits on its 58-member executive board, to a committee that judges human rights complaints, the independent UN Watch monitoring group launched a campaign of 55 parliamentarians, religious groups and human rights activists urging member states to reverse the decision.

In response, according to diplomatic documents obtained exclusively by UN Watch, the U.S., its EU allies, Canada, Japan and a handful of Arab states are now among a growing coalition of countries that is formally requesting an agenda item for next month’s UNESCO board meeting to “review” Syria’s controversial membership.

Continue reading…

In response, Professor Schabas states as follows: “I have never turned on my good friend Richard Goldstone, ‘with a vengeance’ or otherwise.” We have corrected the briefing and regret the error.

Indeed, a closer examination shows the  following. After the Goldstone Report was published, Schabas proclaimed that Goldstone “had better be on next year’s Nobel short list.” Schabas also shared his belief, on the same occasion, that Goldstone’s act of condemning alleged Israeli war crimes was performed “as a Jew.” “The world should be thankful that we have people like Richard Goldstone,” said Schabas.

However, when Goldstone retracted the core charge of the report, Schabas was among the first to respond, adopting a different tone toward his friend. He now accused Goldstone of being “certainly more indulgent towards Israel.”

Yet it’s clear that this pales in comparison to the actions of Roger Cohen and Richard Falk.

After the report  came out, Roger Cohen, in an article accusing Israel of acting from an “annihilation psychosis”  and a “perpetual state of exceptionalism,” lauded Goldstone as “a measured man” who, unlike Israel, knows how to deal with reality.

When Goldstone retracted, Cohen wrote a scathing piece which began thus:

We have a new verb, “to Goldstone.” Its meaning: To make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive.

He ended his article in the same tone:

To “Goldstone”: (Colloq.) To sow confusion, hide a secret, create havoc.

Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council’s permanent investigator on alleged Israeli violations  (who is so pro-Hamas that even the PA tried to remove him),  initially praised Goldstone as a “person of integrity,” “political balance,” and “an eminent jurist.”

After Goldstone retracted the main thrust of his report, first in the Washington Post and then in the New York Times, Falk suddenly accused “the new Richard Goldstone” of having “recast himself as the self-appointed guardian of Israel’s world reputation”; of “his seemingly opportunistic change of heart” and “wobbly change of position”; and said that Goldstone “abandons any pretense of judicious respect for either the legal duties of those with power or the legal rights of those in vulnerable circumstances.”

In a blog post entitled “Goldstone’s Folly: Disappointing and Perverse,” Falk referred to a “Goldstone hasbara effort to divert and distort,” “a stunning display of bad faith,” and of “shameless abandon.”

“The sad saga of Richard Goldstone’s descent from pinnacles of respect and trust to this shabby role as legal gladiator recklessly jousting on behalf of Israel is as unbecoming as it is unpersuasive,” wrote Falk.

Host Ricky Gervais’s irreverence for authority, and Madonna’s unrestrained immodesty were – for better or for worse – testaments to the universal right to express oneself freely.

Then came the solemnity of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s acceptance speech after Madonna announced that his film “A Separation,” which he made in Iran and is still showing there, had won the category.

Farhadi claimed that he had been approaching the stage wondering whom he might mention – family, friends or crew – when he decided he would say a word about the Iranian people.

“I think they are a truly peace-loving people, he said. The comment smacked of all the self-restraint you’d expect from a person who is aware that the authorities back home were watching.

Indeed, the movie – which touches on Iran’s suffocating laws and traditions as it tells of the breakup of a couple in their 40s – is reputed to be a favorite of Iranians who marched in the streets over the disputed 2009 elections that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency.

And so Farhadi was equally restrained when asked later to elaborate on the comment he’d made onstage.

“In my opinion the people of the two countries have no issues with each other,” he said. “The people of Iran, as I mentioned earlier, are very peace-seeking and peace-loving. I hope that, not just Iran, but anywhere in the world, no one experiences war, and war becomes something we just discuss from the past.”

None of his direct comments made it into Iran’s official press.

Calling the movie a “prize-magnet,” Press TV focused on the many other awards the film has received, and quoted The New York Times as predicting it will win the 2012 Best Foreign Film Oscar.

The Fars News Agency ran a similar article.

The Iranian Students News Agency, often described as a “semi-official” outlet, referenced Farhadi’s remarks, but failed to cite them exactly, saying instead he was “speaking highly of (the) Iranian nation.”

Farhadi said in a recent interview that he instinctively navigates Iranian censorship restrictions.

“Because I was born under these conditions, at times unconsciously, without even being aware my mind is doing this, I gravitate towards stories that are going to work in those conditions,” he said when asked how censorship affects his artistic choices.

After he mounted the stage at the awards ceremony, he noticeably did not shake Madonna’s hand. Not only is her music banned in Iran, but Farhadi himself recently received criticism in his country for shaking the hand of Angelina Jolie – in contravention of Iranian sharia-based law that forbids direct contact between men and women who are not related to one another.

The plights of Sithu Zeya, 21, and Hla Hla Win, 27, featured in the We Have a Dream presentation of Dr. Thaung Htun, United Nations representative of the opposition-in-exile National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.

They were serving lengthy prison terms – 18 years for Sithu Zeya; 27 years for Hla Hla Win – for dispatching news video to the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma news service (DVB).

The freeing Friday of more than 300 political prisoners prompted the United States to pledge it would restore full diplomatic ties with Burma as U.S President Barack Obama called the move a “substantial step” towards democracy.

But Sithu Zeya said the authorities attached conditions to his release – telling him that if he commits any “crime” in the future he will be forced to serve his full 18-year term, DVB reported.

“It’s like we are being freed with leashes still attached to our necks. So I’m happy, but with a leash still on my neck,” he told DVB.

It was not clear whether the warning applied to all political prisoners being released, the DVB blogger noted.

In his September 21 UN Watch presentation, Thaung Htun described Sithu Zeya as a “colleague” as he recounted how the authorities had, just a week before, added 10 years to the video journalist’s earlier eight-year sentence.

Thaung Htun shared that Hla Hla Win was also a member of the National League for Democracy, which Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi heads. Hla Hla Win emerged from a prison in northern Burma, DVB reported.

Both journalists faced numerous charges under Burma’s panoply of repressive laws, which remain despite Friday’s prisoner release being hailed as the most significant reformist gesture yet of Burma’s nominally civilian government.

U.S. Secretary of States Hillary Clinton said the United States would “meet action with action” to encourage additional steps from  the so-called “reformist dictatorship,” which seeks an end to Western sanctions after assuming power in March from the former military junta.

But receiving less media attention were warnings that the United States and other Western powers may be re-engaging too fast.

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, said in a statement she was “distressed” by talk of reinstating a U.S. ambassador in Burma.

“I call on the administration to immediately cease talks with the ruthless tyrants in Burma until the junta has been replaced with a duly elected, democratic government that respects human rights and civil liberties,” the statement says.

Ros-Lehtinen argues there is no evidence that planned elections in April will be any fairer than the 2010 ballot that ultimately led to the installation this year of Thein Sein, a former military general who served as prime minister under the military junta, as president.

“Any concession to the dictatorship would be grossly premature,” she warns. “The world needs to see that the upcoming April elections are not the same kind of sham that we saw in 2010.”

Prominent pro-democracy activist groups for Burma are likewise urging extreme caution.

“The release of political prisoners is often timed to coincide with key political developments in order to try and convince the international community reform is on the way,” says Burma Campaign UK in a briefing on motives behind earlier prisoner releases.

“In the past, these releases have never been an indicator that change is on the way. They have been used by the dictatorship to try and secure positive publicity in order to ease international pressure.”

Canadian Friends of Burma (CFOB) notes that Burma’s framework of repressive laws remains, thereby allowing for the re-arrest of everyone released – as the warning handed to Sithu Zeya suggested can happen.

“All of the political prisoners released over the past few months could be jailed again at any time as there is still not a truly democratic system in place in Burma,” the group says in a statement.

Both Ros-Lehtinen and CFOB also emphasize scant attention is being paid to ongoing Burmese army offensives against eastern and northern ethnic groups as headlines focus on a ceasefire announced Thursday with the armed ethnic Karen group in Burma’s south.

“The Burmese regime’s ongoing military assaults, mass rapes, and atrocities against minority groups prove that it is far too early to regard it as ‘a partner and friend.’” Ros-Lehtinen says.

Fighting resumed in northeastern Kachin state under the current regime, CFOB stresses.

“In June 2011 – some three months after Burma’s nominally ‘civilian’ government officially took power – Burma’s army began its offensive against the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and the thousands of civilians who in live in KIO territory,” the group says.

“The Army’s decision to unilaterally end a 17 year cease fire with the KIO has brought much suffering to thousands of people in the north of country.”

CFOB says most of the world is “completely unaware” of the conflict.

“At least 60,000 Kachin refugees are thought to be currently trapped in a small strip of territory along the China-Burma border and are facing increasingly dire conditions,” it warns.

Thaung Htun also spoke Burma’s ongoing conflicts during his We Have a Dream presentation.

“There have been serious human rights violations, including attacks against civilians, massive internal displacement of people, land confiscation, recruitment of child soldiers, forced labor, and forced portering for the army,” he said.

One confirmed that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has been seeking ways to effect a waiver of the law that mandates immediate cessation of Washington’s contributions to any UN agency that allows Palestinian membership. But this official added that the one key person holding out is Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Indeed, the Florida Republican launched a call this week for the United States to “strengthen and preserve” the funding prohibition law. In a press release, she says that the Obama administration has “failed” in what she describes as efforts to “gut” the law and restore Washington’s UNESCO contributions.

She also warns that granting a waiver to the law would encourage more UN agencies to embrace the Palestine entity.

The funding prohibition law makes no provision for a presidential waiver in the absence of Congressional consent, which Ros-Lehtinen – speaking in the wake of renewed Palestinian pledges to advance the Palestinian statehood cause at the UN – restates that she strongly opposes.

“As the Palestinian leadership continues their destructive statehood scheme at the UN, the U.S. must act decisively to stop this ruse,” Ros-Lehtinen says in her statement released Monday.

“Other than our Security Council veto, the only roadblock in Ramallah’s way is that by law, the U.S. must cut off funding to any UN body that grants membership to ‘Palestine.’”

Ros-Lehtinen says the law has deterred other agencies from opening their arms to the Palestinians, and that any dilution of it would have the opposite effect.

“The Administration wants Congress to gut U.S. law and let the Administration fund UN bodies that support the Palestinian statehood scheme,” Ros-Lehtinen’s statement says.

“But the Administration’s diplomatic efforts have failed to seriously impede the scheme; in contrast, leveraging our funding to the UN has succeeded, as others see that we mean business and that they can’t take reckless, anti-Israel actions with impunity.”

The statute emerged in the wake of successful efforts by President H.W. Bush to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization – which preceded the Palestinian Authority – from joining agencies such as the World Health Organization and UNESCO.

“If we abandon this strategy now, we would telegraph an ‘all clear’ for UN bodies to grant de facto recognition of a Palestinian state,” Ros-Lehtinen warns.

The Congresswoman calls for the United States to respond with funding cuts to any UN gesture that enhances Palestinian status within the world body.

“We must further strengthen U.S. law to cut off funding to any UN body that not only grants membership to ‘Palestine,’ but even grants some other upgraded status to Ramallah,” she urges.

“That is how to stop this dangerous Palestinian scheme in its tracks.  Any maneuvers to undercut current law will serve to pave the way forward for the Palestinians.”

Irina Bokova, UNESCO director general, lobbied for a restoration of U.S. funding during a three-day visit to Washington last month, making the case that programs in Iraq and Afghanistan would be affected.

The United States provides all UN agencies with 22 percent of their respective budgets. UNESCO was also no exception to being granted extra-budgetary funding for specific programs.

Muslim nations make up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the “most severe” persecution, and 38 of the top 50, reports U.S.-based Open Doors in its 2012 World Watch List.

Topping the list is North Korea, where the Stalinist regime enforces cult worship of its leaders.

The results lay bare the sheer incongruity of the idea that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whose 56 member states control more than a quarter of the votes in the UN General Assembly, can be serious about promoting religious tolerance.

Yet that is what it claimed by successfully pushing for an assembly resolution titled “Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping, stigmatization, discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons, based on religion or belief.” The measure, which passed last month, mirrored an almost identical resolution in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva last March.

The assembly resolution, which the United Arab Emirates tabled on behalf of the OIC, repeats the prior HRC measure’s call for governments to “take effective measures to ensure that public functionaries, in the conduct of their public duties, do not discriminate against an individual on the basis of religion or belief.”

OIC member states want us to believe they are promoting that and the many other praiseworthy precepts of both resolutions even though a majority of them oppose the measures through their actions.

What’s more, a decade’s worth of Open Doors surveys shows that “the persecution of Christians in these Muslim countries continues to increase,” the group’s Dr. Carl Moeller reports.

And so the question begs: If most OIC member states practice the opposite of each resolution’s stated intent, why did the organization launch the initiative?

The answer lies in the language of early drafts of the resolution the OIC shepherded through the Human Rights Council. Those drafts focused heavily on the idea that states should show tolerance for Muslim peoples around the world.

Western negotiators explained to their OIC counterparts that they needed to “universalize” the language if the text was to stand any chance of winning Western support.

The OIC complied in order to see the Human Rights Council resolution succeed. Likewise, the current General Assembly resolution – approved by consensus in a key assembly committee Nov. 15, and by the full assembly Dec. 19 – conforms with universal rights doctrine when taken at face value.

But unspoken UN convention will ensure that the imprint of the earlier Muslim-specific language will remain in spirit. This will have the effect of giving Islamic countries added force when they speak out against incidents they believe to have slighted the Islamic faith.

Obvious past examples of perceived slights include the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper in 2005.

For more than a decade, the OIC sought protection for Islam by annually pushing through resolutions that explicitly granted faiths the right not to be “defamed.” It abandoned that cause last March when Western-led opposition had grown big enough to defeat it. The West argued that human rights protections extended only to individuals, not to beliefs.

In exchange for dropping the “defamation” language, the OIC was rewarded with massive Western buy-in of their resolution. These included most famously the high-level events endorsing the resolution by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, first in Turkey and then in Washington, in joint appearances with the OIC leadership.

But while the OIC’s adoption of universal language for its “combating intolerance” initiative won it Western support, no one is expecting change on the ground in the bulk of Islamic countries any time soon.

Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iran, Maldives, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Iraq and Pakistan complete the Open Doors Watch List’s top ten persecutors of religious minorities – in that order after North Korea.

Discrimination against religious minorities in these and many other Islamic countries on the Watch List is so deeply entrenched that it’s inconceivable they have the slightest intention of conforming to the precepts in the OIC draft they themselves have authored.

As such, the problem is not with the document per se, but with its sponsor. Simply put, the OIC initiative was not an honest one. That in itself should have raised alarm bells – even as the language used appears to be generally in line with universal standards.

The mission is headed by Sudanese General Mohammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, whose main expertise on human rights abuses lies in committing them on a mass scale. As the Telegraph reports in detail, al-Dabi visited Homs and reported seeing no tanks, while a video shows the monitors standing next to a tank. The general tells the Syrian victims to believe in “dialogue.”

You may ask: What does the Arab League know about democracy, and about making independent, critical evaluations ?

A glance at its Internet home page is revealing.

On the bottom left of the page, the Arab League features a poll asking visitors to vote on how they like the new Website. Here are the choices:

1. “Excellent”

2. “Very Good”

3. “Good”

There are no choices offered of 1. “Boring”; 2. “Ancien Regime Spin”; or 3. “Has Far Too Many Empty Spaces.”

According to the results at the time of this posting, an amazingly impressive total of 100 percent of respondents find the Arab League’s new Website to be “Good” (41%), “Very Good” (29%) or “Excellent” (30%).

Is there any reason to think the evaluation forms on Syrian conduct now being filled out by General al-Dabi’s monitors don’t feature the same rich variety of probing categories?

That’s the official Chinese backstory – presented at a press conference this week – to a Dec. 28 shootout in the restive province of Xinjiang, where indigenous Muslim Uyghurs are struggling to preserve their culture in the face of a still-rising presence of Han Chinese.

Uyghur exiles give a different account of the shootout, which also left one police officer dead. They say police opened fire when locals clashed with officers during a demonstration outside the police bureau to protest a recent security crackdown.

Branding Uyghurs as “terrorists” when they’re involved in clashes with China’s authorities fits a pattern that Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent Uyghur businesswoman and human rights activist, outlined in detail when she spoke at UN Watch’s “We Have a Dream” human rights summit in New York in September.

“In an attempt to label Uyghurs as ‘terrorists,’ the Chinese government has used our Islamic faith as a pretext to conflate peaceful dissent with ‘terrorism,’” she said.

“Since 9/11, hundreds of Uyghurs charged with alleged ‘terrorism’ have been executed, and thousands arrested and sentenced.”

Kadeer’s 18-minute presentation can be seen in full by clicking here; her uninterrupted statement begins at minute eight.

The full presentation provides valuable context to the news stories about the Dec. 28 incident in Xinjiang province, not least on how China’s characterization of Uyghur dissent as “terrorism” is a clear effort to find common cause with the West’s struggle against extremist Islamism. Kadeer explains there is no connection between two.

“The Chinese government hides behind charges of ‘endangering state security’ or ‘splitism’ or ‘terrorism’ when it wants to silence Uyghurs,” Kadeer explains.

“The truth is that Uyghurs who contradict the official narrative of Chinese Communist Party ‘benevolence’ are severely punished. Uyghur dissent has effectively been criminalized.”