So long. You won`t be missed

Comments

Monday marked Louise Arbour’s last day as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The former Canadian Supreme Court Justice is stepping down after four years “for personal reasons.”

She won’t be missed.

In 2004, Arbour appeared a solid pick for the job. On top of her Supreme Court experience, she had also served as chief prosecutor for war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But over the last four years, she appears to have become entirely co-opted by the anti-Israel, anti-U.S. bureaucracy that controls United Nations agencies. On several occasions, she used her office to attack the U.S. war on terror, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

In the aftermath of the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, Arbour even went so far as to  suggest that the Jewish state had more blood on its hands than the terrorists who started the war in the first place: “In [the case of Hezbollah] you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent — the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad — but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved,” she said. “[But] how can you compare that with [Israel,] where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic.”

As one appalled National Post columnist (ok — it was me) noted in response: “It is true that more Lebanese civilians died than Israeli civilians. But that was a consequence of Hezbollah tactics, not Israeli cruelty. Indeed, the propaganda issued by the terrorist group during and after the war show that it relished Lebanese civilian deaths as a tool to sway world opinion. In the case of Ms. Arbour, this tactic obviously worked … What level of casualties must Israel (or any Western democracy) absorb before they earn the right to fight back vigorously? The rules of engagement [Ms. Arbour] seems to favour are those whereby terrorists barrage Western democracies while we retaliate by — what? — indicting Hezbollah commanders at the International Criminal Court?"

Arbour became the archetype of a recognizable breed: The Canadian “honest broker” who, in a bid to connect favourably with the fashionable foreign-policy elites of Europe and the developing world, internalizes their political bigotries. One wishes that her successor — from wherever he or she may hail — won’t succumb to the same temptation. Unfortunately, precedent doesn’t serve up much hope.

jkay@nationalpost.com