Five hundred people gathered on the third floor of the United Nations recently for a conference on the rise of antisemitism. This conference, although held at the UN, was sponsored by the UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Aja Eze Foundation, not the UN.
“If you want to know why Palau is doing this–it’s a matter of practicing our faith,” said Dr. Caleb Otto, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Palau to the United Nations. Otto was first among seven speakers. “As a Christian nation,” he said, “we believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the 12 tribes of Israel…This God has said, ‘I will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel.’”
Pastor Mario Bramnick, vice president and chief liaison for Israel and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership, said, “Every single nation historically that has come against Israel has, in fact, been judged by God. This is a historic meeting. There never has been a meeting on antisemitism like this in the halls of the United Nations.”
The reason for this, said Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, is “because the United Nations itself is the leading global purveyor of antisemitism.”
Bayefsky noted that about 35% of all resolutions and decisions approved by the UN’s Human Rights Council condemn Israel. “That’s antisemitism,” she said. Fifty percent of the emergency sessions held by the UN’s General Assembly (GA) over the past 60 years “were convened to denounce Israel,” she said. In addition, in 2013, 70% of the GA resolutions targeting a specific country for human rights abuses focused on Israel.
“The UN is not having a conference combatting antisemitism, but we are,” Bayefsky reiterated. “So let us start by combatting the legal henchmen and human rights imposters at the United Nations.”
Brigitte Gabriel, CEO and president of ACT for America, took up that charge saying, “The United Nations Human Rights Commission spends most of its time and effort investigating and condemning Israel, while they gloss over or ignore massive and continuing human rights violations that occur in Iran, Cuba, and China.”
Ron Prosor, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations concurred. “Here in the UN, Israel is under attack on a daily basis,” he said. “The attacks are masked as criticism of Israel’s policies or the Israeli government, but let’s not be fooled when heads of state and ambassadors of this institution compare Israel to Hitler and the Nazis.”
However, this conference didn’t merely focus on antisemitism coming from the United Nations, but largely on the vast number of antisemitic incidents that have been occurring around the world. Prosor illustrated this, quoting World Zionist Organization figures from July: In the last year, European antisemitic incidents increased by 436%, American incidents rose by 130%, and antisemitic acts in South America rose by 1,200%.
“Where is the outrage?” he asked. “Where are the universal condemnations? The silence of 2014 sounds very, very similar to the silence of the 1930s…Seventy years have passed, yet there is little difference for European Jews in 1937 and 2014,” Prosor said.
“We see a surge in antisemitism not seen since before World War II,” said Bramnick. “If there are two things we take from the Holocaust, it is never again and we must not remain silent.”
Gabriel echoed these points, and added, “Seventy years ago, the world stood by while Jews went out of chimneys. Today Jews are not going quietly to the slaughter, as they sit on the front lines fighting for Western civilization, fighting for all of us. Those who seek to exterminate the Jews are not going to stop with the Jews. That should have been the lesson of the Holocaust. That must be the lesson of the rise of ISIS.”
Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian whose speech focused on the dangers coming from the Middle East, said, “The world should care about antisemitism because the world stands at a deep, dark precipice and at the bottom lurks another Holocaust that has already begun. The genocide is not only against the Jews, the so-called Islamic state is abundantly clear that it is also against non-Jews.”
Also focusing on the Middle East, Mark Langfan, the UN correspondent for Arutz Sheva and a security analyst, explained that “Israel’s fight today will be the world’s fight tomorrow.”
Langfan explained how “Israel is not only protecting Western civilization, Israel is protecting Lebanon, Jordan, and other moderate Muslims from falling to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS,” he said. “The anti-Zionism of today will lead to a terrible, terrible catastrophe for the world tomorrow, both for the Islamic world and the European world.”
Mindy Stein, a Teaneck resident who attended the conference, felt that the best way to fight antisemitism is by speaking out. “At a time when there is a global resurgence of antisemitism and when this new antisemitism is aimed at the Jewish state, it is important for us not to remain silent, but to raise our voices,” said Stein, honorary national president of Emunah of America and co-founder of BeCounted4Israel.
“With our voices and with our truth we are sounding the alarm in these halls to the leadership of the nations,” Bramnick added, “to the ambassadors and to the leadership of our nation here in the United States of America. It is time to arise and have mercy on Zion, time to awaken, time to speak the truth and it is time to lift up our own voices. ”
By Tova Domnitch
