New UN "expert" on UN's new Israel-bashing "inquiry" says anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.

Doudou Diène has just been appointed as a member of the UN's newest anti-Israel "inquiry" which was commissioned in July to condemn Israel's exercise of the right of self-defense in Gaza. Diene's anti-Israel bias is well known to the UN - undoubtedly one of the reasons he was selected by the President of the UN Human Rights Council, (who is himself a Muslim from a member state of the Islamic bloc of states, Baudelaire Ndong Ella from Gabon). Back in 2008, Diene was the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. Diene produced a report in which he claimed anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism. In fact, he said, anti-Zionism is a trumped-up charge intended to subvert criticism of Israel. To the UN, the supposed right of self-determination is all about Palestinians. Anti-Zionism is, of course, the self-determination of the Jewish people:

"The Special Rapporteur has observed that the systematic equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has the effect of making it more difficult to combat anti-Semitism. The equation of a political ideology, Zionism, with a form of racism reinforces the essentialist and reductive vision characteristic of a deep current of anti-Semitism denying the political and ideological diversity of the Jewish people and manifesting itself also in relation to Zionism. In its most political form, this identification leads to the characterization as anti-Semitic of any criticism of the State of Israel, in particular the different facets of its occupation of the Palestinian territories as defined by the United Nations. This tendency to construe opposition to a political ideology and the political actions of a State as racism targeted at a whole people is not only a denial of the democratic legitimacy of political criticism but also blurs the analysis and understanding of anti-Semitism, in particular any objective assessment of the anti-Semitism entering into anti-Zionism and criticism of the State of Israel."