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Ending the Anti-Israel Rot at the UN

March 7 2017

The U.S. is reportedly considering removing itself from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which serves primarily as a forum for representatives of states with little regard for human rights but eager to condemn Israel. But, writes Ben Cohen, the UN’s problem with the Jewish state goes far beyond the UNHRC:

On [November 10, 1975], the UN General Assembly passed the Soviet-inspired Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism—a resolution that was rescinded in 1991. Less well-known is another resolution passed on that day—3376, which created the grandly named Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, giving us the unwieldy acronym CEIRPP.

The “inalienable rights” that this committee represents include, as Resolution 3376 makes unambiguously clear, the “exercise by Palestinians of their inalienable right to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted.” Note the terminology used here—not “Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war,” but all Palestinians, including those born after 1948 in the Arab world, in Europe, in North America, and in Latin America. It doesn’t take tremendous insight to realize that this is a formula for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel—the very same formula that drives the BDS hate campaign against Israel and gives it the undeserved gloss of human rights.

For more than 40 years, and longer when you remember that the UN set up its first Israel-bashing committee, . . . the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories—yes, SCIIHRPOAOT—in 1968, the U.S., Israel, and other democratic nations have devoted precious resources to the UN even as it has deepened its institutionalized anti-Zionism. Since 1979, CEIRPP has been serviced by a Division for Palestinian Rights, churning out an endless stream of anti-Israel propaganda through international conferences and publications. (And no, there isn’t a division for Tibetan rights, or for Kurdish rights.)

All of this costs around $6 million annually. In international-organizational terms, that’s unremarkable, but when you consider how the money is spent, it’s little short of obscene.

Read more at Tower

More about: Anti-Zionism, Israel & Zionism, U.S. Foreign policy, UNHRC, United Nations

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic