For friends and supporters of Israel, and those who care about human rights and truth more broadly, much news from the United Nations is bad news. But Anne Bayefsky finds some steps in the right direction from the most recent session of the General Assembly:
“The United Nations is a place where lies are told.” So said Daniel Patrick Moynihan on November 10, 1975. As America’s ambassador to the UN, Moynihan was addressing the General Assembly after it had adopted a resolution declaring the self-determination of the Jewish people—Zionism—to be a form of racism. Forty-six years later, on September 22, 2021, the General Assembly restated that lie. This time, though, 38 countries voted with their feet and boycotted the place where lies are told. That’s more than the 35 nations that in 1975 had voted against the resolution rightly characterized by Moynihan as an “abomination of anti-Semitism.” It was the first major global loss for the Palestinian legal and political war on the Jewish state in a long time.
The blow was delivered at the fourth iteration of the UN’s “anti-racist” world conference, which was first convened in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Durban IV had been carefully planned for over a year as a 20th-anniversary commemoration of what became a global anti-Semitic hate-fest—one that ended three days before 9/11. NGO representatives and members of so-called civil society roamed the conference grounds and the streets of Durban with signs that read: “For the liberation of Quds, machine-guns based upon FAITH and ISLAM must be used,” “the martyrs’ blood irrigates the tree of revolution in Palestine,” and “down with Nazi-Israeli apartheid.”
For the enemies of Israel who had high hopes that the 20th-anniversary celebration would fast-track Israel to political isolation and oblivion, the global gathering was instead a major setback. Not only did 38 states boycott the event, but they boycotted it specifically because they recognized the demonization of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/anne-bayefsky/un-anti-semitism-durban/