Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel (NY-17) said yesterday that honoring former UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom was "a mistake."

Engel is the first Democrat to speak out publicly against the President's decision to give Robinson our country's highest civilian award.

In an interview with journalist Jennifer Rubin, Engel said that Robinson "always managed to find a moral equivalence" between Israel's fight for freedom and the terrorism Israel faces, and that Robinson "epitomizes all that is wrong with the United Nations" and its anti-Israel bias.

Engel went further in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that he hoped the administration would rescind the award.

AIPAC took the unusual step of publicly criticizing the White House, saying:

AIPAC is deeply disappointed by the Obama administration's choice to award a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson. AIPAC respectfully calls on the administration to firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state.

Robinson is widely known for the high-profile role she played in leading the deeply flawed U.N. Human Rights Commission and for presiding over the U.N.'s Durban Conference on Racism, which the United States boycotted for its unprecedented hostility to Israel and its final outcome document that equated Zionism with racism.  

...In addition to Robinson's dishonorable role in the Durban debacle, her tenure on the UNHRC was deeply flawed, and her conduct marred by extreme, one-sided anti-Israel sentiment...