On Tuesday, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza. As the UN website itself admits, “the resolution does not condemn Hamas or make any specific reference to the extremist group.” Likewise, the text speaks of “the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population,” but makes no equivalent comment about Israelis. No fewer than 153 in favor countries voted in favor.
In her speech at an October conference on the Catholic Church and anti-Semitism, Mary Eberstadt recounted her exposure to anti-Semitism while working at the U.S. mission the United Nations in the 1980s, under Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. There, she explains, she learned that hatred of Jews wasn’t merely “some harmless outpouring of ineffective malevolence,” as she had previously assumed:
Anti-Semitism, usually but not always under the guise of anti-Zionism, was the central theme sounded through that vaunted institution’s marble halls. To judge by what the representatives of many governments at the United Nations maintained in one venue after another, the most ominous problem on earth was not, say, nuclear weapons. Or the Gulag archipelago that still existed, imprisoning millions. Or that so many people around the globe knew nothing but crushing poverty and ill health. Or that terrorism was once more ascendant.
No: according to the sententious declarations of not one, but sometimes a majority, of foreign representatives, the pre-eminent threat to what was incomprehensively dubbed the “international community” was something else. One small nation—the longest-running functioning democracy in that area of the world. Which just happened to be the one and only nation run mostly by Jews.
Read more on First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/10/catholics-against-anti-semitism