By Alan Hart

If more proof was needed (some of us think it isn’t) that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu lives in a fantasy world that exists only in his own deluded mind, his latest verbal assault on the UN Human Rights Council for its decision to appoint and despatch an independent international fact-finding mission “to investigate the implications of the (illegal) Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” is it. The Council, Netanyahu said in his fury, has “an automatic majority against Israel”, is “hypocritical” and “out of touch with reality”. He added that “It should be ashamed of itself.”

There is, in fact, some substance to the charge that the UN Human Rights Council is hypocritical. There are many abuses of human rights in many countries which it does not investigate because the African, Asian and Latin American majority on the 47-member Council say “No”. So there is most certainly a case for saying that this particular UN body is hypocritical, even out of touch with some realities and, in that context, appears to be obsessed with Israel-Palestine.

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