Discussion of the Rise of Global Anti-Semitism Held at the U.N.

The Economic and Social Council Chamber of the United Nations was perhaps a paradoxical setting Monday for a discussion on “Global Anti-Semitism: A Threat to International Peace and Security.”

The event, which drew more than 500 people, was sponsored by the Permanent Mission of Palau to the United Nations, and the Eng Aja Eze Foundation, which advocates for women and children caught in zones of international conflict.

The irony of the event’s being held at the U.N. — the organization that so frequently adopts an anti-Israel stance — was the focal point of several of the speakers’ presentations. Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and the President of Human Rights Voices, emphasized that the conference was not being sponsored by the U.N. per se, but by Palau and the Eng Aja Eze Foundation.

“The U.N. itself is a leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism,” said Bayefsky. While the U.N. may speak about human rights and global tolerance, the organization in fact “mass-produces intolerance against Jews.” Bayefsky went on to detail the outrageously disproportionate number of resolutions of the U.N. Human Rights Council — on which sit some of the greatest state violators of human rights — brought against Israel, the one true democracy in the world’s most unstable and violent region.

Furthermore, anti-Semitism at the United Nations has “taken a more treacherous turn, as the U.N. has launched a legal pogrom against the Jewish state,” appointing commissions to “investigate” so-called war crimes committed by Israel — investigations whose outcomes were determined before they even began.

Ron Prosor, Israel’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., pointed out that of the 193 flags flapping in the breeze outside the building on 42nd Street and First Avenue, “there are 25 flags with a cross; 15 with a crescent … and one with a Star of David.

“But for some people, that’s too many.”

In recent decades, anti-Semitism has taken the form of “anti-Israel” sentiment and actions, but this, said Prosor, is merely “the newest coronation of the world’s oldest hatred.”

Brigitte Gabriel, a leading expert on global Islamic terrorism, spoke passionately on why anti-Semitism should matter to the world at large. Not only is it a matter of morality, she declared, but “the world should care because of fundamental self-preservation.”

Gabriel spoke of how terrorist groups are threatening the free world at large, “killing members of every nationality, religion, and ethnicity.” These groups desire nothing less than “leadership of the world,” she said.

She recalled how, as a child growing up in Lebanon in the 1970s, she and her family were used by terrorists as human shields. The terrorists would fire at Israel from the cover of her family’s bomb shelter and then quickly run away, leaving her and her family vulnerable to Israel’s inevitable, necessary, retaliatory strikes.

Gabriel quoted at length from the charters of various terrorist organizations, as well as from Muslim religious teachings, which yearn for a world in which Islam crushes all Jews and other “infidels.”

“Savagery is not merely their strategy; it is an article of their faith,” said Gabriel.

“The war that ISIS declared on the world is the same war that Hamas has waged against Israel for decades.

“They won’t stop with the Jews. Once international mass murder was legitimized against the Jews, it was legitimized against civilized people anywhere.”

This article appeared in print on page 15 of the September 10th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.