Again: Antisemitism, welcomed and cheered, Anne Bayefsky

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 will go down in history as the day the United Nations General Assembly provided a platform for a head of state to spew unadulterated, vile antisemitism - and the assembled nations of the world clapped.

The United Nations has become the largest global purveyor of antisemitism in the world today. In the full knowledge that the president of Iran denies the Holocaust and advocates the destruction of the U.N. member state of Israel, the U.N. invited him to mount the dais and gave him a megaphone.

[ CONTINUED ... ]

Dictators have pontificated at the General Assembly before. Terrorists like Yasser Arafat have come and gone. But in the halls of an organization founded on the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's effort to promote another Holocaust from center stage stands alone.

While the United States and Israel left their ambassadorial seats empty, here is the Jew-hatred greeted by enthusiasm at today's U.N.:

The dignity, integrity and rights of the European and American people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premiere nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support...

This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against they will...

Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters.

Antisemitism often masquerades as anti-Zionism - a denial of the right to self-determination only for Jews. At least Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did us the service of making the undeniable connection between the two. Disputing the legitimacy of the state of Israel, he said:

In Palestine, 60 years of carnage and invasion is still ongoing at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists. They have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people's land by displacing, detaining and killing the true owners of that land...The Security Council cannot do anything and sometimes, under pressure from few bullying powers, even paves the way for supporting these Zionist murderers...

In its entire history, the United Nations General Assembly has never adopted a resolution dedicated to denouncing and combating the scourge of antisemitism in all its forms. Now we know why. Less than half of U.N. members are fully free democracies and among them there is no consensus that discrimination and demonization of Jews and the Jewish state is wrong.

On the contrary, at the U.N. vicious antisemitism is met by a round of applause.

This article first appeared in National Review Online.

Posted:  Wednesday, September 24, 2008