U.N.: A front for anti-Semitism
The only democracy in the Mideast is routinely scolded. Not so China, Zimbabwe, Iran ...

By Larry Kane
March 7, 2006
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Original Source: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/14034557.htm

When I was in elementary school, it was popular to pass around a little blue canister and offer a few pennies to a new organization: the United Nations. We were told the U.N. would be an oasis of hope in a world torn by war and hatred. We were duped.
In its long and spotted history, the United Nations has been a forum of hypocrisy. It has shown selective concern for contemporary genocide - but only when its member states decide who will benefit the most economically from the latest horror. The U.N. does business when business is good at the top. The oil-for-food scandal in Iraq comes to mind, and that investigation isn't over yet.
The U.N. does some good work with its children's fund and tardy-but-fairly-effective disaster relief. But all the Angelina Jolie photo-ops can't erase the U.N.'s role in encouraging what it is supposed to be fighting - raw prejudice.
When it comes to fighting bigotry, you see, the U.N. becomes quite selective. Muslim states get very sensitive treatment, while countries with genocidal civil wars, including those in Africa, are treated with tokenism and murderous neglect.
In that context, a debate is now raging in the Jewish world. People of the Jewish faith have never been comfortable with the U.N. Would you be if such an institution took 58 years to hold its first forum on anti-Semitism? Founded with its famed Universal Declaration of Human Rights a year after the Holocaust was exposed, the U.N. has become a bastion of partisan hatred, and nowhere has its disingenuous policy on the hatred been more transparent than in its treatment of Israel and Jews.
As of this writing, the World Jewish Congress has launched a major campaign to bring the U.N. back to its roots. The congress was, in 1936, the first major organization to warn of the impending massacre of the Jews in the expanding world of Adolf Hitler. That warning fell on deaf ears.
In today's campaign, the organization is demanding that the U.N. make a firm resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Efforts to seek such a resolution have been rejected for 60 years.
Twenty months ago, the speech of scholar Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute highlighted the opening of the only U.N. conference on anti-Semitism. Her words are a clarion call to sensible people in the world: At the United Nations, the language of human rights is hijacked to demonize the Jewish target. More than one quarter of the resolutions condemning a state's human-rights violations... have been directed at Israel. But there has never been a single resolution about the decades-long repression of the civil and political rights of 1.3 billion people in China, or the million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism, which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, U.N. bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human-rights violations by Israel. But not one on an Iranian criminal justice system, which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning and cross-amputation of right hand and left foot. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human-rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state.
Bayefsky's speech made clear that the U.N.'s simple failure to condemn anti-Semitism, as it has condemned other avenues of hate, is disgraceful. Yet time after time, efforts to get a resolution passed rejecting hatred against Jews has failed, blocked by many member states.
Israel has its problems, but it remains the only real democracy in the Middle East. No wonder Jews are frustrated at the U.N. Ignorant haters around the world are encouraged to hate even deeper, spurred by the inaction of an organization supposedly devoted to human rights. As long as the U.N. ignores its responsibility to condemn all forms of hatred, it will be, in the eyes of millions, the United Nothing.

Larry Kane is a longtime Philadelphia journalist.