170 to 4! Israel, Two Puppets and their Master Defy the World

From IPS:

As expected, this incongruous voting pattern was repeated Wednesday when the three loyal U.S. allies -- Israel and the two tiny Pacific Island nations of Palau and the Marshall Islands -- were the only member states to stand in unison with the United States when it rejected a resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council.

The vote in the General Assembly was 170 in favour and four against (United States, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau), with three abstentions (Venezuela, Iran and Belarus).

[ . . . ]

"The United States, despite its opposition to the Council, has claimed it will 'work with' the Council, and we can anticipate it will expect to win a seat in the first term," Bennis told IPS.

But such an effort should be rejected, she said, as countries evaluating human rights records keep in mind the continuing patterns of U.S. human rights violations both within the United States itself and internationally, where U.S. military or political officials are in power. "

No country with such a record of torture, secret detentions, extraordinary renditions,' rejection of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), denial of due process and generations of capital punishment, even for minors and the mentally disabled -- all as a matter of official policy -- should be allowed to serve on the new Human Rights Council," said Bennis, author of "Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N. Defy U.S."

If the General Assembly does indeed allow the United States a seat, she argued, special care should be taken to insure that the mandatory human rights evaluation carried out of all members be taken very seriously when it comes to the U.S., so that the claim that the so-called "indispensable nation" should be somehow exempt from human rights scrutiny will be rejected.

I've been hearing that the U.S. tried the reverse psychology trick. To spin it, the argument goes that Bolton and the U.S. wanted an even stronger resolution to form a Human Rights Council at the U.N. Sounds good, right? Actually, that's probably just a ploy. More likely, if the U.S. rulers had really wanted the resolution to be more extreme, it's probably so that the creation of a Human Rights Council would have failed to muster the necessary votes, and there would have been no risk to the U.S. for its plethora of incessant violations. The U.S. effort to block the creation of a U.N. Human Rights Council was resoundingly defated.

Since the U.S. government refuses to be accountable to its citizens, and since its citizens refuse to hold their government accountable, I welcome news that the U.S. government will at least have to be accountable to the rest of the world. Now that it failed to overcome this hurdle, what additional obstacles can the world expect the U.S. regime to place in the way of its being punished for its human rights violatons? Oh, yeah, history would suggest that we can expect to hear once again that the latest boogeyman will kill everyone if the world prohibits the U.S. regime from violating human rights as it pleases. Contrarily, there is considerable evidence that the more that the U.S. violates people's rights, the more boggeymen and terrorism there will be. When will the lesson be learned. It's a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling course of action.