On
May 29, the OAS panel of “independent experts” convened in
Washington to build the case for toppling the Bolivarian government
and prosecuting Maduro at the International Criminal Court.
by
Elliott Gabriel
Part
3 - An advocate for “universal” human rights … with exceptions
Cotler —
an international human-rights lawyer and former Conservative, who
recently joined Canada’s ruling Liberal Party — has long stood at
the forefront of the West’s inquisitions against the governments of
the Global South. While he has made questionable claims that he
represented anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela in court, he has also
championed right-wing Venezuelan coup leader Leopoldo Lopez.
Speaking
to The Canadian Jewish News upon his appointment to the OAS panel
last October, Cotler said: “The international experts panel is
as timely as it is necessary. As Venezuela slides into dictatorship …
and the human suffering of the Venezuelan people intensifies, the
restoration of democracy and human rights while combating the culture
of impunity is an overriding priority.”
Yet
while Cotler has spoken passionately about the plight of human rights
victims in some parts of the world – earning the title of “Counsel
for the Oppressed” from flagship Canadian magazine Maclean’s –
the award-winning rights champion has simultaneously shown scant
concern for the plight of the Palestinian people suffering genocide
at the hands of an Israeli state that acts with complete impunity.
Surely
the plight of Gaza – which has been subjected to 11 years of a
suffocating siege by land, air, and sea – would elicit a twinge of
sympathy from any supporter of “universal human rights”? Sadly,
not only has this not been the case but Cotler’s antipathy toward
extending “universal” rights to Palestinians was made shockingly
clear in his unflinching accusation that resistance-movement Hamas
was to blame for the shocking massacre of 62 unarmed protesters in
the Gaza Strip last month.
If
Cotler deserves distinction, it is for his fanatical devotion to the
Zionist project, and his knee-jerk rallying to the defense of its
actions on the basis of defending the right of the Jewish “original
aboriginal people” to an ethno-religious colony built atop the
freshly-bulldozed or bombed homes of Palestinians.
Israeli
apartheid institutions deny the people of Palestine their own
universal right to self-determination by imposing suffocating
restrictions on their movement, travel, and trade. Israeli security
forces have been criticized by rights organizations for resorting to
the very kinds of excessive and wanton force for which Cotler has
castigated Venezuela — including the extrajudicial killing and
torture of unarmed Palestinians, including children. While Cotler has
called on Western countries to intervene in cases of genocide, he is
firmly against any criticism of Israeli apartheid or the construction
of huge settlements within the occupied West Bank, which remains
illegal under international law despite the apathy of Ottawa and
Washington.
In the
eyes of Cotler, the State of Israel and the Jewish People are one in
the same. For this partisan of the universal application of human
rights law, any criticism of Tel Aviv – whether its leadership is
Labor or Likud, liberal-colonial or fascist-colonial – is a
manifestation of the “new anti-Semitism” and the denial of
Israel’s right to live as equals in the “Family of Nations,” as
the tired old Zionist cliché goes.
It’s
as if Cotler — whose ruling Liberal Party prime minister, Justin
Trudeau, has apologized for Canada’s settler-colonial crimes
against First Nations peoples — sees the “Family of Nations” as
those countries — such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia — that
completely did away with their indigenous populations. So now the
European Jews who claim “Israel” as their home deserve a crack at
it. Understood.
But what
boundless cynicism does it require to claim with a straight face that
the human-rights situation in Venezuela is even worse than that in
the Gaza Strip – where Israeli bombings are routine, a blockade
prevents medical goods and foodstuffs from entering the enclave, and
the Israelis experiment with cruelly novel forms of repression and
over a decade of collective punishment against a people guilty of
resisting, and voting for what he calls “terror group Hamas”?
Of
course, Cotler has also explicitly called for the “Responsibility
to Protect” the people of Syria from “mass atrocity crimes”
committed by the “regime” of President Bashar al-Assad. What else
could one expect from such a typically hypocritical Western
human-rights imperialist?
As
Blumenthal noted in a recent interview with The Real News: “Whenever
Israel committed some kind of atrocity, the Mavi Marmara massacre or
one war after another in Gaza, Cotler would rush out, just like
Dershowitz, as Israel’s public advocate … So, he’s just a
suspicious, sort of morally dubious, figure. And for him to be on
this panel, I think they just deserved to be questioned about that.”
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