ELDER OF ZIYON: Great news from the Arab world Philippe Assouline made this excellent poster a while back:

How about a flotilla to Homs?

U.N. Today Adopts 9 Resolutions on Israel, 0 on Syria, Ignoring Assad Massacre of Palestinians

Resolutions on Palestinians omit mention of Syria’s massacre of Palestinians

GENEVA, Dec. 18 – The U.N. General Assembly today adopted nine resolutions on Palestinian rights and the Golan, sharply criticizing Israel, yet making no mention of Sunday’s massacre of Palestinians by Syrian warplanes firing missiles into a mosque in a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus. Nor did the texts mention the tens of thousands of Palestinians who continue to flee the camp.

By the end of this week, the current 2012 UNGA session will have adopted 22 country-specific resolutions on Israel – and only four on the rest of the world combined -- one each for Syria, Iran, North Korea and Burma, noted UN Watch.

Today’s resolutions criticized Israel for “the continuing systematic violation of the human rights of the Palestinian people,” and focused on “the extremely difficult socioeconomic conditions being faced by the Palestine refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

One resolution condemned Israel for holding on to the Golan Heights, demanding Israel hand the land and its people to Syria.

“It’s astonishing,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. “At a time when the Syrian regime is massacring its own people, how can the U.N. call for more people to be subject to Assad’s rule? The timing of today’s text is morally galling and logically absurd.”

“What is also outrageous is that these resolutions claim to care about Palestinians, yet the U.N. proves itself completely oblivious to the actual suffering on the ground, happening right now: Palestinians slaughtered, maimed and expelled by Assad’s forces.”

“Today’s farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the U.N.’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone's human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel,” said Neuer.

“The U.N.’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial and respected international body, and exposes the sores of politicisation and selectivity that eat away at its founding mission, eroding the U.N. Charter promise of equal treatment to all nations large and small,” Neuer added.

“With more than 40,000 killed in Syria, and millions of Syrian refugees suffering now in the cold of winter, it ought to shock the conscience of mankind that the U.N. will devoting more than 80 percent of this session’s resolutions to Israel, and just one, on Thursday, to Syria.”

Syria ‘Solving’ its Palestinian Problem and No One Seems to Mind There have been no rallies in Europe or Berkeley, not even in Ramallah. By: Yori Yanover

If you ask me, the IDF leadership as well as the entire Netanyahu cabinet should adopt the Syrian army’s play book, or at least large chunks of it. Not because I wish to see increased Palestinian casualties, I really don’t, but rather because President Assad and his crew appear to be speaking fluent Palestinian.

More than 95 percent of the Palestinians who used to reside in the Yarmouk camp outside Damascus have fled under heavy shelling, the Palestinian ambassador to Syria said Tuesday, according to Ma’an.

Syria hosts half a million Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, descendants of those admitted after the creation of Israel in 1948, and has always cast itself as a champion of the Palestinian struggle, sponsoring several guerrilla factions. In the current conflict, some fight against Assad, some against him. So government forces have used jets and artillery to soften the resistance. Some of the pro-Assad Palestinians appear to have been killed along with the rest.

Mahmud al-Khalidi told Ma’an that the refugees fled to UNRWA schools amid violent clashes between rebels and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

On the border with Lebanon, hundreds of Palestinian families fled across the frontier following the weekend violence in Yarmouk, a Reuters witness said.

Rebel and Palestinian sources said Syrian rebels took full control of Yarmouk camp on Monday after fighting raged for days in the district on the southern edge of Damascus.

Now, here’s the zinger: no one minded. There have been no rallies in Europe or Berkley, not even in Ramallah. Instead, Ambassador Al-Khalidi said he had contacted the Syrian Foreign Ministry to request an end to air strikes on Yarmouk, but Syrian officials insisted rebels must leave the camp first.

Quietly, discreetly, behind the scene, could you please reduce somewhat the killing of our people at your earliest convenience?

Oh, man, I’m shepping nachas, again, not because Palestinians are getting killed, but because, for once, they’ve met a government who knows how to communicate with them successfully – and everyone appears satisfied. Even those folks getting butchered in the streets of Yarmouk appear to be totally cooperative.

Also, in all those encounters between the Syrian Army and the Palestinians I didn’t notice even one incident in which Palestinian teenagers pelted the Syrian soldiers with rocks. Amazing, how those Syrian soldiers elicit respect from those teenagers. It’s a gift, I’m telling you, a gift.

Here’s another nice point: President Mahmoud Abbas is monitoring the distribution of funds to refugees and has instructed al-Khalidi to provide housing for the displaced Palestinians, the ambassador said.

It’s so important that the president himself is taking an interest in the flow of Palestinian funds. They seem to appreciate it. I’ll bet you they’re utterly grateful for being allowed to keep some of those funds. I’ll bet you that none of them, say, Khalid Mashaal, would even dream of saying he’d like to see Assad removed from power – even if he is in favor of it. Because both Mashaal and Assad speak fluent Palestinian.

The battle in Yarmouk is one of a series of conflicts on the southern fringes of Assad’s capital, as rebels try to choke the power of the 47-year-old leader after a 21-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed.

Obama warns Assad

UNbelievable: Watch how the UN treats Syria with your own eyes

This is UNbelievable. It's video of a General Assembly session on Syria, and it deserves to go viral. Make sure you watch through to the end. Let's go to the videotape. Hey - it's just Muslims killing Muslims. As long as there are no Jews involved, who cares?

WSJ: Where Is the Flotilla for Syria? Assad's war has claimed four times as many victims in 20 months as have been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict in the last 20 years. By RON PROSOR

Last month, a group of Scandinavians pulled up anchor from a Swedish port and set off toward the Middle East under the pretense of delivering humanitarian aid. The Nordic fog may have clouded their choice of destination. The moral compass of these self-proclaimed human-rights activists steered them to the Gaza Strip, not Syria.

The fleets of flotillas, ferries, yachts, sailboats, canoes and catamarans and that have set sail for Gaza in recent years rival the size of the Spanish Armada. Yet one might argue that humanitarian flotillas are needed just a bit more urgently in Syria, where more civilians have been murdered by the Assad regime than those killed during Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 combined.

The conflict in Syria has also claimed roughly four times as many victims in the past 20 months as were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 20 years. The residents of Gaza continue to enjoy more international assistance than virtually any other population on the planet, but almost no aid is reaching the two million people displaced within Syria—roughly 10% of the country's population.

The flotilla crowd has different priorities. They prefer to work around the clock to protest Israel's legitimate defense against the terrorists who target its citizens and fire thousands of rockets into its cities. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: It's much easier to face news cameras in Tel Aviv than bullets in Damascus.

Enlarge Image

Reuters/Bob Strong

Demonstrators at an anti-Israel rally in Stockholm, May 2010.

Indeed, Israel is the luxury destination of choice for this type of "human-rights activist." In Israel, these weekend revolutionaries are free from the dangers of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution that abound in the totalitarian states that make up the rest of the region. Instead of trying to dig into the dark abyss of abuses in neighboring states, they prefer to lounge in the comfort of Israel's democratic institutions, civil society and independent media, which offer a wealth of easily accessible information that they use to attack Israel.

The burden of democracy is always heavy, and Israel is proud to carry it. With more reporters and human-rights activists per capita than anywhere else on the planet, we understand deeply the invaluable role of civil society, even though its institutions can sometimes be used and abused by those with the most radical of agendas.

Today much of the international human-rights arena resembles a masquerade ball, where the most extreme views can be easily masked beneath the empty utterance of words like "democracy" and "human rights." Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, the leader of the Scandinavian ship to Gaza, was recently suspended from the Swiss World Peace Academy for a series of anti-Semitic rants. He recommended that all university students read "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the infamous piece of 19th-century propaganda used in Nazi classrooms.

Far from criticizing the tyrants of the Middle East, the flotilla crowd often joins hands with them. Just this May, the British activist group Viva Palestina enjoyed the hospitality of Bashar Assad, making a pit stop in Syria on its way to trying to enter Gaza. Around the same time that Assad's thugs were gearing up for their massacre of children in Houla, members of Viva Palestina were proudly tweeting their whereabouts and posting photos on Facebook of themselves next to the regime's representatives.

Instead of dancing with dictators and tangoing with tyrants, what if the flotilla crowd actually set sail in the direction where aid is so desperately needed?

—Mr. Prosor is Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.