United Nations committees adopted ten anti-Israel resolutions in one day on Tuesday—more than twice as many as they passed about the rest of the world combined this week.
Two of the resolutions denied Israeli ties to the Temple Mount, echoing two resolutions adopted by UNESCO, the UN’s cultural organization, in October.
One vote, to renew a special committee to investigate “Israeli practices,” passed 86-7. The United States, Canada, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau were the countries that voted with Israel.
Resolutions being considered by UN committees are voted on by all 193 members states before being referred to the General Assembly. According to UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog group that highlights bias in the world body, countries rarely change their votes between the committee vote and the final vote.
The other countries addressed during the week are Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Syria.
“Today’s farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: The UN’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a statement. “The goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel.”
“The UN’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the institutional credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial international body. Politicization and selectivity harm its founding mission, eroding the UN Charter promise of equal treatment to all nations large and small,” he added.
The UN also voted today: 10 times against Israel, 3 times on the rest of the world combined. https://t.co/xJVLJenvuo pic.twitter.com/4vBrBJpop9
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 8, 2016
The institutional anti-Israel posture of the UN goes back a long way. As Tower senior editor Ben Cohen pointed out two years ago, condemnations of Israel predate the Six-Day War.
On October 15, 1965, the New York Herald Tribune carried the front page headline “Soviet at UN Lumps Nazism and Zionism,” reporting on the stormy clashes accompanying the UN’s attempt to draw up its Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Soviet representative insisted that the committee had to condemn Zionism alongside Nazism and anti-Semitism.There were two reasons behind the Soviet position: First, cozying up to its Arab allies; second, deflecting international attention away from the persecution of Soviet Jews, which a condemnation of anti-Semitism might encourage. Sure enough, a typical UN compromise was reached, according to which the only form of discrimination condemned was “apartheid.” In other words, 20 years after the Holocaust, the Soviets and their anti-Western allies had ensured that the UN was banned from condemning anti-Semitism by name.
[Photo: Ad Meskens / WikiCommons ]