Assad for OPCW!

The news story looked even more bizarre than the one in 2010 which announced that (then-prime minister) President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an had won the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. 

Saudi Arabia, which Douglas Murray at the Gatestone Institute realistically named as the ?world?s human rights sewer,? was appointed as head of a top panel of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The panel is ?or maybe was-- no joke: It selects leading officials for the task of shaping international standards in human rights and it reports on human rights violations around the world. 

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, had a perfectly legitimate point about the news, which most people must have thought was a piece from The Onion: ?It is scandalous that the U.N. chose a country that has beheaded more people this year than [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] to be head of a key human rights panel. Petro-dollars and politics have trumped human rights.?

Saudi Arabia and human rights? Four words that could come together only in dark black humor, if not unpleasant satire. But the words ?Saudi Arabia and human rights? are now a bitter reality. Looking at the UNHRC?s past records, no one should be terribly shocked, perhaps. Jagdish N. Singh forcefully reminded at the Gatestone Institute a line of similar black humor nature, quoting Navi Pillay, a representative by UNHRC commissioner, finding in a report that ?when Palestinian men beat their wives, it?s Israel?s fault.? 

Had the Saudis Wahhabis not been at war with rival jihadist groups, the UNHRC panel could have featured more colorful sessions with the participation of other human rights specialist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda?s...