U.N.: Anti-Semitism Is Act of Intolerance
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
UNITED NATIONS – Despite opposition from Arabs and Muslims, the United Nations General Assembly yesterday included anti-Semitism for the first time in its list of acts of intolerance.
The annual resolution in the General Assembly’s Human Rights organ, known as the Third Committee, has in the past shied away from detailing types of religious intolerance, such as anti-Semitism, for fear of consensus breaking resistance from a strong voting bloc that includes Arab and Muslim states.
Yesterday, however, the assembly said it “Recognizes with deep concern the overall rise in instances of intolerance and violence directed against members of many religious communities in various parts of the world, including cases motivated by Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and Christianophobia.”
Last year, Israel pressured the European Union to add a reference to anti-Semitism in the annual resolution, but Ireland, which carried the E.U.’s rotating presidency at the time, declined, offering instead to initiate a separate resolution on anti-Semitism. Ireland later abandoned that initiative under strong pressure.
This year, however, the E.U., under the leadership of Germany and the Netherlands, decided to confront the issue head on. The Arab group and the Organization of Islamic States tried to amend the text several times, at tempting at one point to change the “anti-Semitism” reference into “Judeo-phobia.”
All such amendments were voted down, with one dramatic vote that featured an unprecedented breakaway by the recently liberated Iraq from its traditional Arab allies. In the end, the resolution passed unanimously with the support of 177 states. Even Iran, which at first opposed that resolution, rushed to change its vote for fear of remaining outside the consensus.
“This vote proves that if they want, the Europeans can win at the U.N. on Jewish-related issues, including on Israel,” the director for U.N. affairs for the Jewish organization Bnai Brith, Amy Goldstein, told The New York Sun.
The vote was seen as an important victory for Israel, which braces itself this week for a barrage of several traditional anti-Israeli resolutions that the General Assembly passes each year, before November 29. That was the date that in 1947 the U.N. voted to partition mandatory Palestine into two states, and which now is designated annually for U.N. solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Israel’s ambassador, Dan Gillerman, called the Islamic states’ attempt to remove the reference to anti-Semitism from yesterday’s resolution “repulsive.” Their use of the pretext of “universality,” he added, was “especially striking given that it is made by the very same states that routinely use U.N. for a to single out one state, Israel, for reprimand.”