As the war in Gaza rages on, it seems as if the antisemites of the world have been raging right along with it. From the talking heads on CNN who propagate false videos of fake atrocities, to politicians clamoring for the protection of a terrorist group, it seems everyone’s ganging up on Israel for daring to defend itself and its people. Who knew self defense was such a no-no. Apparently if you’re a Jew, you’re just supposed to sit there and take every ounce of abuse hurled at you.
I can’t believe how wrong our world has gotten. It’s amazing that in less than 100 years since the Holocaust, we’re repeating it, step for step. (We’re even back to arguing about Eugenics!) Antisemitism has become as rampant as it was in the 1930s. It’s commonplace, it’s the daily norm, and it’s wrapped up in so much politically correct leftist nonsense that sometimes it can even be hard to recognize for what it really is. But rest assured, antisemitism is still antisemitism, no matter how hard someone may try to disguise it. And it’s still wrong. I’m not even Jewish myself, but you don’t have to be Jewish to care about antisemitism, because it affects all of us, of every race, creed, color, nationality and faith.

A few weeks ago, my friend Joey sent me a wonderful mp3 of a speech given by Professor Anne Bayefsky, a human rights activist, Director of Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, a Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in New York. She’s also an expert on the United Nations. This particular speech was given at the request of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission of Australia. It contains remarkable, mind-opening, earth shattering, eye watering information about the true intent, purpose, and history of the United Nations that I feel every American, every citizen of the world, absolutely has to hear.
The oration itself is available here, but since not everyone has the time to listen to a nearly two-hour long speech, I want to condense the most important information here for your convenience. But honestly, if you have the time, please consider listening to the speech. Professor Bayefsky is a remarkable speaker with some very important things to say. If you click on the link above, simply click on “To hear the 2008 oration, please click here.” Then you can download the mp3 file and listen to it at your convenience. Trust me, it’s well worth it. Or if you would prefer to read the speech in its entirety, you can download it in pdf format here.

If you’d like to see my condensed list of the most important facts from Professor Bayefsky’s speech, please click “More” to continue reading this entry.

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“Lethal Politics: Anti-Semitism as Human Rights”
Selections from a 2008 Oration by Professor Anne Bayefsky
Available Here

Since the late 1940’s until it was abolished in 2006, the lead UN human rights body was the Human Rights Commission. Over its lifetime it passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country on earth. It adopted nothing, ever, on serial abusers such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe.
    In 2006 the Commission was replaced by the Human Rights Council. In its short life the Council has directed 60% of its decisions condemning specific states at Israel alone. And nothing at all on the 187 of the UN’s other 191 members.

    The Council has had eight regular sessions which cover human rights in all countries – and four special sessions devoted only to human rights violations by Israel.
The Council – as the Commission before it – has a limited agenda of less than a dozen subjects. One is reserved only for condemning Israel. And one is called “human rights issues of concern” for all other countries.

    The Commission and the Council have created only one UN human rights investigator with a job description which has no term limit – the investigator on Israel. The few other country investigators must be renewed frequently – or not. In the past 15 months, the Council has refused to renew or continue investigations on four states with some of the worst records on the planet – Belarus, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran and Uzbekistan.
    The mandate of the Council investigator on Israel denies any possibility of finding human rights violations by any actor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but Israel. Its only purpose is to “investigate Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.”

    The UN has only one standing human rights committee which has no generic theme, like civil and political rights or children’s rights. The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting Human Rights is now in its 40th year of operation.

    In 1975 the UN created a committee to implement is notorious Zionism is racism resolution. The resolution was rescinded in 1991. But the Committee on Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People continues to sponsor events worldwide and year round.

    There is only one whole UN secretariat Division devoted to a single group of people – The UN Division for Palestinian Rights. Created in 1977 it has a full-time staff of 16, while the number of UN staff for the entire Asia and Pacific Division is 22.

    There is one refugee agency for Palestinian refugees. And one refugee agency assisting 26 million in the rest of the world.

    The UN General Assembly has six subsidiary bodies which focus only on Palestinians. And none focusing on any other people anywhere.

    There is only one UN online service dedicated to the claims of a single people – the enormous United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. It transmits reports, resolutions, speeches, publications and press releases on a daily basis around the world.

    Member states of the UN are divided into five regional groups – key vehicles for negotiating resolutions, obtaining important positions, and sharing information. Only one UN member is not permitted to become a full member of any regional group – Israel.

    There have been ten emergency sessions of the UN General Assembly in its history – six have been about Israel – and the last and tenth one is effectively in permanent session having been “reconvened” fifteen times since 1987. A million dead in Rwanda and two million dead over two decades in Sudan never prompted one emergency session.

    In 2007 the UN General Assembly – as is routine – adopted 20 resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations, while adopting just a single resolution each on only six other countries. And nothing, for instance, on the egregious violation of th emost basic civil and political rights of more than a billion Chinese.

    The only condemnation of a country-specific violation of women’s rights anywhere made by the Commission on the Status of Women is its annual resolution on Palestinian women. Nothing, for example, directed at Iran despite its practice of burying women naked to the waist and stoning them to death for alleged adultery.

    Taken together, the country subject to more human rights criticism across the UN system every year is Israel. Last year, it was condemned twice as often as Suden – where millions are displaced, hundreds of thousands are dead in Darfur, and unfettered genocide and rape are the daily norm.
    The meetings are webcast – the documents are translated into six languages – and the reports are accessible globally via the internet for free.
    In UN circles, it is called protecting human rights. In reality, it is discrimination – antisemitism – in which the Jewish state is subjected to different treatment and held to different standards than all other nations. Given its reach and impact, the UN is therefore the largest purveyor of antisemitism in the world today.

Unfortunately, even a Holocaust that killed millions of people wasn’t enough to teach us once and for all that antisemitism is dangerous, deadly, and horribly wrong. Prejudice of any kind is wrong. If you let it into your heart, if a society accepts it as its daily norm, that path will lead you to only one destination: hatred, misery, death, and destruction. We need to wake up to the reality of just how entrenched our world has become in antisemitism, before it’s too late and we repeat the mistakes that led us to world war. The United Nations must be stopped before the poison it spreads infects all of us. Those who have turned it into a mouthpiece of hatred must be removed from power before they turn what was supposed to be a beacon of hope into a weapon of prejudice, hatred, violence, and closed mindedness.

In the coming days I hope to add more from Professor Bayefsky’s speech. In the meantime, I have a little homework for you. Please, go rent and watch “Gentleman’s Agreement”, starring Gregory Peck. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can watch it now, through their wonderful instant viewing feature.) Even though the film was made in 1947, it’s just as relevant today as it was when it was first made. It gets right to the heart of antisemitism, right to its very beginning, when it’s nothing but the slightest of prejudices, the smallest of sideways glances, the mildest of hate-laden jokes. Watch it, study it, use it as a catalyst to examine your own heart, your own mind. Please, before we can rid the world of hatred, we have to expunge it from ourselves. This is just as good a time to start as any. So do it now, before it’s too late.