The UN Commission on the Status of Women has delivered its official statement on the status of women on planet Earth. Only one nation was singled out as a violator of women’s rights. That nation is…
(wait for it)
Israel.
U.N. Dishonors Women, Anne Bayefsky, National Review Online, 2007-03-19
Are you sure that wasn’t a satire? I mean Jesus, forget about Saudi Arabia — American women are treated worse than Israeli women.
I’m sick today and not able to really do research very well. Is this for real? The site that the article was on had an ad celebrating the “Reagan Revolution”, so I am dubious of it’s bias.
Here is the link to the 51st session. Can someone help me parse this data?
Their objection appears to be against this resolution, and these statements in particular:
Israel isn’t the only country-specific resolution; there’s three other resolutions up there currently, involving Lesotho, South Africa, and the United States. So that would be a plan lie, or they’ve added more since then (since these are draft resolutions, it makes sense they’re unfinished and some more may be added. That Israel be focused on in a report about Palestinian women seems pretty reasonable, to me. Note also that the conclusions of the summit do not refer to Israelis specifically. Note on top of that that the report says it is “On behalf of the Group of 77 and China” - it may be that the report was made because they were asked to make it.
I love, however, that at the UN, even a convention on feminism can be used (tenuously, desperately) to make a slam on Israel. The circus continues.
The other resolutions weren’t targeted at Lesotho, South Africa, and the US; they were sponsored by them.
You’re right, of course. :smack: But this does make one point clear - why did they choose to make a report focusing on Palestinian women? Because they were sponsored to do so.
The UN sucks.
Yeah, I said it. The UN sucks.
It really does.
I cannot get the link from Fear Itself to open. I also cannot find that language in any of the documents on the site for the 2007 conference.
I did find a reference in the 2007 meeting to an earlier document that looks like it might be the one Fear itself quoted, but that resolution was published in 2004–along with nation-specific resolutions for a lot of other countries.
What is the path from the 51st session website to the anti-Israeli resolution? (I’d really prefer to not get all up in arms about something that Bayefsky has misquoted or quoted out of context.)
It is a PDF file, so you will need a PDF reader to open it.
the fourth document in the list. Click on ‘E’ for English.
It won’t open for me either.
There is an end-user problem. If you have reached this site from a web link,
Thank you.
I’m already at Adobe Reader 8.1; I don’t think I can do any more on that front. 
(The other path worked, however.)
No, it’s a partisan crock of shit. The UN Economic and Social Council Commission on the Status of Women in its 51st session did not issue a general report on the status of women worldwide in which it identified Israel as the only violator of women’s rights. Instead, as other posters have noted, the Commission put out a number of reports on various issues relating to the status of women, one of which was a report on the status of Palestinian women “in accordance with ESC resolution 2006/8 of 25 July 2006”.
Wait, so we cite the UN for every topic imaginable as a good source and then all of the sudden they need to be nuked because they say something we don’t like. The link provided, to me, says nuke Israel, not the UN. If someone is going to make a case for nuking the UN, I would like some cites for that.
disclaimer: I think the UN is rubbish and should be nuked but for entirely different reasons.
Nuking the UN over this is like nuking your neighbourhood association because all of your neigbours are assholes. The problem with the UN isn’t the institution, but the membership. Most governments in the world are shit, and they all get an equal vote apart from the five permanent members, who are split 2-3 between completely shit and pretty shit, and can overrule pretty much anyone.
Israel is one of the whipping boys, because most members can agree that they don’t really like Israel, apart from the US, who like Israel so much they veto anything more than cosmetic resolutions against it.
In much the same way most members don’t really like North Korea, apart from China, who like it enough to veto most non-cosmetic resolutions against it.
So you get lots of stupid twaddle like this, where various countries feel they can score a few anti-Israel points because the US Representative either can’t veto it or can’t be bothered.
Hence the desire to form non-UN bodies that can actually get things done and have some credibility, like the G7. Until, that is, they had a brain fart and invited Russia in, at which point it too became a craptastic talking-shop.
Since when has the UN been a moral authority?
If there’s one SDMB thread an FBI agent has opened, this is the one.
And he/she is still checking it periodically . . . just to be sure.