Opinion | America’s human rights chief is giving the job title a bad name

Both latter claims have been debunked by multiple investigative journalists and international human rights groups, including United Nations agencies. Instead, there is strong emerging evidence that both types of war crime have been committed by the Israeli military. Close to 200 staff from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) have been killed.

In May, Stacy Gilbert, a 20 year-veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest after it endorsed a government report claiming that Israel was not blocking humanitarian assistance into Gaza, a position which was vital for the Biden administration to legally continue to ship weapons to Israel to be unleashed on the Gazan population!

In an interview with Democracy Now, Gilbert said she was “shocked” by the report: “That is not the view of subject matter experts at the State Department, at USAID, nor among the humanitarian community. And that was known. That was absolutely known to the [Joe Biden] administration for a very long time.”

She said there had been a clear pattern by Israel “of arbitrarily limiting, restricting or just outright blocking assistance going in that has caused the very grave situation in Gaza”.

After the UN Human Rights Council issued a peer review on the city’s human rights, Zeya added more spice of her own to the UN report.

It’s ironic that the State Department functions as a secretariat of the UN with such reports, but attacks those same UN agencies at the drop of a hat when it and Israel become targets of UN criticisms.

But Zeya and Gregory May, the busybody consul-general in Hong Kong, must feel gratified that the local office of the Chinese foreign ministry took the bait and responded.

Don’t get me wrong. People should take the UN report on Hong Kong seriously, as the city can do better and shouldn’t automatically dismiss valid criticism by independent observers. But from the US, seriously? We don’t need the Americans to add their own spin on the city.

But that’s the modus operandi in Washington.

I was just reading this piece from Foreign Affairs from March, titled “Food weaponisation makes a deadly comeback: How to combat the revival of an ancient tactic.”

It was written by not one, not two but three former US secretaries of agriculture and another ex-congressional adviser on food and agriculture. So, these guys must know what they are talking about.

Their focus was naturally on Russia’s war in Ukraine, including its war on food supply. But there is no danger of famine in Ukraine compared to Gaza.

I have been looking at pictures of emasculated Gazan children dying or dead from lack of food and medicine. Six months into the Gaza war and not a word about Israel, while Gaza was mentioned only once in passing, in the article.

Do these people have no shame?