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UN bowed to ‘fearmongering and threats’ from powerful governments to cover up ‘painful truth’ of Israeli apartheid — UN official’s resignation letter

Yesterday Rima Khalaf resigned as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia after the agency was forced to retract a report stating that Israel is an “apartheid regime.” Khalaf’s letter of resignation to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was translated and posted by poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha today on her Facebook page. Here is that translation: 

Honorable Secretary General,

I have given a great deal of consideration to the letter I received from your office, and I assure you that I in no way question your right to issue instructions to remove the report from the ESCWA web site, as I do not question that as employees of the United Nations, we must all execute the orders of our Secretary General.

I know very well your commitment to the principles of human rights in general and your position on the rights of the Palestinian people specifically. And I also understand the anxiety you must have in these difficult times that leave you with few good choices.

It is clear to me the kinds of pressures and threats to which the United Nations and you personally are subjected by states with authority and influence, because of the publication of the ESCWA report (Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid)[still available here]. I am unsurprised that these states, which are run today by governments with little concern for international principles and human rights, should resort to tactics of fearmongering and threats when they fail to defend their policies and practices which violate the law. It makes sense that a criminal would attack those who defend the cause of his victims, but I find myself incapable of bowing to such pressures, and not because of my role as an employee of the United Nations, but simply as a sane human being. For I believe—as you do—in the values and noble principles that have always represented the forces of good throughout history, and upon which our organization, the United Nations, was founded. And, like you, I also believe that discrimination against any human being on the basis of religion or skin color or gender or ethnicity is absolutely unacceptable, and cannot be made acceptable by political maneuvering or brute force. And I believe that to speak truth to power is not only a human right, it is our obligation.

Over the course of two months, I have been instructed to withdraw two reports published by ESCWA, not for any error or shortcomings within the reports themselves and not necessarily because you yourself disagree with their content, but because of political pressures from countries implicated by their blatant violations of the rights of people in the region and human rights in general.

You have seen with your own eyes how the people of this region are enduring episodes of pain and suffering unprecedented in their modern history, and that the deluge of catastrophes that has overtaken them today is a direct result of unchecked oppression which has been ignored, or covered up, or openly engaged in by governments with dominance and force within the region and outside of it. These same governments are the ones pressuring you today to silence the voice of truth and the calls for justice represented by this report.

In view of all that I have stated here, I can only insist on the findings of the ESCWA report, which state that Israel has built an apartheid regime which aims to give one ethnic group control over another. The evidence provided in the report is incontrovertible, and here it is sufficient to point out that anyone who has attacked the report has been incapable of calling into question a single word of its actual content. I see it as my obligation to shine a light on the truth and not to hide it or obscure the testimony and evidence it provides.

The painful truth is that an apartheid regime still exists in the 21st century, and this is unacceptable under any law and is morally unjustifiable.

As I make this statement, I claim no moral superiority and no greater clarity than you possess, the matter is simply that my statements are a result of an entire life spent here, in this region, witnessing the horrific consequences of stifling people and preventing them from expressing the truth of their suffering through peaceful means.

As such, and after great consideration, I realize that I too have no choice. I cannot withdraw, once again, a United Nations report, an exceptionally researched and well-documented report about grave violations of human rights. I also realize that the clear directives of the Secretary General of the United Nations must be executed. And so the only way to resolve this tangle is for me to step aside and leave it to someone else to do what my conscience prevents me from doing. I realize I have only two weeks of service remaining in my post, so my resignation is not meant to exert any political pressure on you. I am simply resigning because I believe my duty to the peoples of the region that we serve, and to the United Nations, and to myself, is not to silence the testimony about a crime that causes such suffering to so many human beings. For this reason, I submit to you my resignation from the United Nations.

Translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha prefaced the posting with these words:

Dr. Rima Khalaf, career diplomat extraordinaire, personal hero, and Executive Secretary of ESCWA, resigned today after the UN Secretary General tried to withdraw a report that correctly identified Israel as an apartheid regime. Anyone who cares about freedom and equality should read her letter of resignation, which I have translated here. Her letter is a document that is now part of the history of the struggle for freedom. And anyone in the west who’s super worried about women in the Arab world should sit down, because we have Rima and many women like her who just need everyone to get out the way so we can get our work done. Khalaf women don’t play. Palestinian women don’t play.

Thanks to Nada Elia.

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Rima Khalaf is indeed heroic and is the epitome of integrity. Her letter is stark, true, and extraordinary. So are her actions.

The truth that millions have known, suffered, and anguished over is out in the sunlight. Nothing and nobody can bury it ever again.

Thank you, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Nada Elia. Thank you, MW.

Chapeau off to this courageous woman, one has to ask, how many men would risk of their jobs to tell the truth? All UN Secretary Generals during the past 50 years or so are nothing, but agents of the west, cowardly old men!

A UN spokesman on Friday claimed the issue with Khalaf was not the content of the report but as a result of her failure to follow the necessary procedure before the publication.

“This is not about content, this is about process,” said UN chief Antonio Guterres’ spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

“The secretary-general cannot accept that an undersecretary-general or any other senior UN official that reports to him would authorise the publication under the UN name, under the UN logo, without consulting the competent departments and even himself,” he told reporters.

Al Jazeera’s Tyab said it was “highly unlikely” that the UN leadership was unaware of the report’s existence or the language inside it before its publication. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/official-resigns-israel-apartheid-report-170317182241142.html
Whats going on here, the Sec Gen seems to be using breach of procedure [so called] to withdraw a report for what appear to be pure political motivations. Is it the Sec Generals job to serve the UN and all its members equally and without fear or favour?
Apparently the executive summary is still on the UN website. It has a major error and differs from the full report.
“Domain 3 is the system of military law imposed on approximately 6.6 million Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestinian territory, 4.7 million of them in the West Bank and 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip”. Approx two million out.

This is being spun on US cable TV news/infotainment shows as a courageous stance by US Ambassador to UN, Nikki Haley–they tell the US public she is standing against UN’s biased attack on only democracy in ME, Israel. This media does not even mention any details of the report or even the name of Ms Kahalaf.

Respect!

Awe-inspiring Grace and Courage under pressure from a widely despised predatory parasitic wanna-be global player and its cowardly stooges.

Israel, as mentioned in Ms Khalaf’s letter, has no counter-arguments to any of the points made in the report, so it had to resort, yet again, to underhanded, same-old invectives and unseemly pressure on its useful idiot flunkies to do its bidding which can only be perceived as a backhanded admission that the report is true. History already knows that.

Similar pressure, albeit in a different, more deadly form, was exercised by the Nazis during the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. And yet, despite the deadly carnage inflicted on the rescuers, including so many members of my own family who had fought in the Resistance, that fight continued. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: all those people who had paid the ultimate price to save Jewish lives because it was the only just and acceptable option for them to pursue, inspire me today to fight for justice and freedom, inter alia, for a people who are suffering and dying at the hands of the descendants of some of those rescued way-back-then; the descendants who owe their existence to the massive Network of determined rescuers, their honour, courage and love of humanity. And their lives.

If the present-day cowards cannot bring themselves to acknowledge their mistakes, even grant respect to the humanity of their detractors then their community’s future is in jeopardy at their own hands. They are already witnessing the tribe’s slow dissolution b/c for many their shared faith is no longer a compelling reason to pledge their allegiance to organised cruelty usually associated with blood-thirsty fanatics. By visiting cowardly terror, in whatever its form, on anyone acting on his/her compassion for humanity, rather than convincingly argue their points, they will only give History further arguments for condemnation that their own not-yet-born descendants will have to live with for a very long time, and hope that there will be others who will, in the name of their shared humanity, stand up and protect them, again, from any violence, whatever its form.

The undeniable truth is out.