Anti-Zionism is racism. There is no better place to deliver that message than Turtle Bay, where “Zionism” was first compared to racism in the 1970s. And there is no better messenger than Judea Pearl, who will deliver an address at a U.N. Holocaust memorial event this week.

Mr. Pearl lost a son to anti-Zionism. Islamist kidnappers made anti-Israel remarks as they cut the throat of his son, the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. “He was picked up for abduction because he was an American and a Jew, but he was murdered because of anti-Zionism,” Mr. Pearl told me last week.

“It is a mistake to say that this is a disguise for anti-Semitism,” Mr. Pearl said. “Anti-Zionism is a more dangerous form of racism than that, because it targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people.”

An Iranian Holocaust denier – the country’s president – threatens to wipe Israel off the map and vows to get the nuclear technology that would make it possible, but at the United Nations a map wiped off Israel long ago. As the American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said last week, it is but a symptom. Since 1981, the map was displayed annually at a General Assembly event, celebrated by Muslim and Arab countries and called harmless by others, including Secretary-General Annan.

“The issue is how is it possible this kind of behavior persists, of denying the existence a member state of the United Nations,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he hoped a letter he had sent to Mr. Annan on the subject would become a “pivot point to change this anti-Israel culture.”

The issue comprises at least three Turtle Bay committees with seven-digit budgets that are dedicated to stoking anti-Zionist sentiments. The issue is 20 redundant anti-Israel resolutions that pass annually with sizable majorities at the General Assembly. The issue is a knee-jerk willingness at Turtle Bay to believe anything bad about Israel.

Anti-Zionism has harmed U.N. bodies at least as much as the human rights leadership of Libya, Cuba, and Syria has discredited the Human Rights Commission. The International Court of Justice, for one, became forever tainted as a serious judiciary organ when it agreed to weigh a predetermined guilty verdict about Israel’s defensive barrier.

The General Assembly declared 2005 the Year of the Desert. Famine and poverty-ridden countries in Africa and Asia benefit from technologies created in Israel’s Negev, where, with scientific and technological ingenuity, the desert miraculously became a productive region of wealth creation.

At Turtle Bay, however, Arab diplomats threatened to vote down a resolution because Israel proposed to insert a paragraph hailing an international desert conference in Beer Sheba. Although it is within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the Negev capital is “disputed territory,” the Arabs said. In a “compromise,” a balancing paragraph alleging Israeli destruction of natural Arab resources was awkwardly slapped on.

Most African and Asian countries joined the attack on Israel. Some Europeans, too, eagerly jumped in, while other Europeans religiously observed their abstaining tradition. As a result, the desert resolution was turned into a petty Middle Eastern dispute.

The Palestinian Arab U.N. observer, Riad Mansour, told me recently that what is most important now is not the past, but that his people and their national institutions have now accepted the solution of two states living side by side in peace. Israel already exists, he said, and now is the time to finally create Palestine.

At Turtle Bay, however, the right of Jews to have their own state is challenged daily, rendering almost impossible any attempt to reverse deeply ingrained sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world, and beyond, that Israel is colonialist, racist, and alien to the region.

Naming the Israeli ambassador as deputy president of the General Assembly last year was a fine symbolic act. More important, the assembly was able to unite, 60 years after the fact, behind a resolution condemning the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people. But beyond cosmetics there still is no easier way to unify the United Nations and its related organs than to undermine Israel’s existence by condemning anything from its defense against terrorism to its aid to international efforts on deserts.

For its polite diplomats, Turtle Bay’s Israel problem is a marginal issue, but as long as it stays anti-Zionist, the United Nations will never become the world’s moral compass it claims to be. It will remain merely racist.