Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons in the JC – The West joins the UN’s anti-Israel hate fest:

There is something almost reassuring about the United Nations General Assembly. However much the world changes, however many wars rage and dictatorships rise and fall, you can be sure that sooner or later, everybody will start hating on Israel.

At this year’s gathering in New York, the hatred came sooner rather than later. What was different, however, was the identity of some of the people doing the hating. During the Cold War, the most lurid denunciations of the Jewish state came from Arab autocrats, Soviet satellites and assorted Third World dictatorships. Western democracies might have criticised Israeli governments – sometimes severely – but they generally retained some sense of proportion.

No longer. This week, the rhetoric of Israeli wickedness was found firmly in the Western mainstream. Take António Guterres. In his final address to the General Assembly as UN Secretary-General, he rightly described the Hamas atrocities of October 7 as “abhorrent”.

But then came the qualification. “What followed,” he said, “was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”

Really? As Jon Snow famously remarked in Game of Thrones: “What did father use to say? everything before the word ‘but’ is horse s**t”.

Let’s look at the facts. Guterres has occupied the post since January 2017. His tenure therefore encompasses the Tigray war in Ethiopia, one of the most appalling and under-reported catastrophes of our age, but one of which the UN should really be aware. Estimates of its death toll vary enormously, but as many as 600,000 people are thought to have died through violence, starvation and lack of medical care.

His tenure also encompasses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths since February 2022 – while stressing that the true figure is considerably higher – alongside astronomical military casualties. And I don’t even need to mention Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar. These wars may not have commanded the headlines, but they should certainly have commanded the attention of the UN. Guess not….

Then there was Emmanuel Macron. The French president became so carried away while berating Israel that he found himself claiming that “Hamas has never operated in the West Bank.” I’m not joking; he actually said it. Incredible, no?

As any world leader – especially one who is so vocal about “Palestine” – should understand, Hamas has operated there for decades. Its cells have been repeatedly uncovered; the Palestinian Authority arrests Hamas members. Even Le Monde, hardly a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu, described Macron’s assertion as a “factual mistake” and said the position was “indefensible”.

Indeed, a French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father-of-six, was shot dead on the West Bank just two days before Macron’s speech, by a Hamas gunman.

There was something revealing about Macron’s error. Israel’s critics increasingly appear so certain of the moral architecture of this conflict – powerful Israel, powerless Palestinians, Israel guilty and the Palestinians victims – that facts simply dissolve.

The UN is, and has been for decades, part of the problem rather than part of the solution on the Israel/Palestine issue – particularly as regards UNRWA, which has since Israel’s formation perpetuated the refugee status of Palestinians long after every other refugee crisis from last century has been settled and become part of history. By taking over the running of Gaza (where UNRWA schools teach Jew-hatred with funding from the west) it allows Hamas to concentrate on building tunnels and stocking arms in its pursuit of Israel’s destruction and the killing of Jews.

Yesterday we had the unedifying sight of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese recycling the old “antisemitic isn’t just against Jews” canard, and saying that Jews in Nazi death camps “were called Muslims”. I didn’t include Hillel Neuer’s response – hadn’t seen it – but it’s worth repoducing now:

Take note: Francesca Albanese in this interview is not explaining antisemitism; she is completely rewriting its meaning, and in the process distorting the history of the Holocaust. Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice.

First, Antisemitism was not coined to describe hatred of “Semitic peoples,” or of Middle Easterners whom Europeans regarded as foreign. When Wilhelm Marr introduced the term in 1879, he meant hostility to Jews, expressed it in the racial language of his time. “Semitic” denotes a family of languages. It does not make antisemitism a general category of prejudice that can be reassigned to other peoples.

Second, the Nazis likewise targeted Jews as Jews. They did not begin, as Albanese suggests, with a broad campaign against “the non-white, the impure, the non-Christian” that later happened to “crystallize” into hatred of Jews. Her account takes a campaign of extermination directed at Jews and makes its victims sound interchangeable.

Third, Albanese’s claim about Jews being called “Muslims” as they were taken to the gas chambers is especially grotesque. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, explained that Muselmann was camp slang for “the irreversibly exhausted, worn-out prisoner, close to death.” It described a prisoner’s condition. It did not mean the Nazis regarded Jews as Muslims, or sent them to the gas chambers under that identity.

Indeed, Albanese’s theory cannot explain why Hitler welcomed and collaborated with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The two met in Berlin in 1941, and the Nazi regime financed the Mufti’s antisemitic broadcasts to Muslim audiences. The SS enlisted the Mufti to help recruit Bosnian Muslims into its Handschar division. Addressing the division’s imams, he called Nazi Germany their ally and identified “World Jewry” as a common enemy. That is the historical record Albanese’s theory cannot accommodate: Nazi leaders recruited Muslims to their cause while pursuing the extermination of Jews….

What’s happened since October 7th is the spread of hatred of Israel (Israelophobia, as Simons has it) and the concomitant astonishing rise in antisemitism, from the Middle East across the West: Europe and America. The UN remains the mouthpiece for all that.