Anne Bayefsky speaks softly in strong syntax.

“Israel is the Rosa Parks of the United Nations system,” she said. “How else to explain the hate-fests that are held year after year, the second-class treatment, the resolutions targeting Israel for alleged human rights abuses but letting gross violators like China and Zimbabwe off the hook?” Ms. Bayefsky said. “The U.N. has become a vehicle for doing harm to democracy and human rights – and the Jews.”

Her deeply held beliefs notwithstanding, Ms. Bayefsky does not come across as a firebrand. She doesn’t wear lapel pins that shout slogans. No protest scarves drape her slender neck. She doesn’t hand out leaflets decrying those who don’t measure up to her exacting standards to qualify as exemplars of human rights.

Ms. Bayefsky comes across, in fact, like a brooding academic, a scholar who speaks with a pained expression when referring to anti-Semitism and other travesties that she discerns at the United Nations.

She is indeed a teacher and scholar by vocation. Currently a professor at Touro College Law Center in Huntington, Long Island, Ms. Bayefsky has taught previously at Columbia University in New York and York University in her native Canada. She is also a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

But low-key manner and all, few people in the private sector have been as vigilant and vocal about the treatment of Israel – and Jews – by global organizations such as the United Nations. Through her writings for prestigious publications and law reviews, her Web site, EyeOnTheUN.org, her speeches, and her presentations at conferences all over the world, Ms. Bayefsky has established a reputation for straight talk on anti-Semitism – an evil she fears is spreading, and not only in Islamic countries.

“At the same time, I try to live by the ancient maxim, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what good am I? And if not now, when?'” Ms. Bayefsky said. “For more than 25 years, I have done general human rights work especially mindful of the second part of this maxim.”

It is no surprise that her relentless activism hasn’t exactly endeared her to many diplomats and secretariat officials at the United Nations, where the Islamic lobby often controls the political climate. What is puzzling, and troubling to Ms. Bayefsky is that the community she belongs to – nongovernmental organizations – largely has harbored dyspeptic, at times even hostile, attitudes toward her.

The hostility toward her Jewishness was never more intense than at a U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa.

NGOs are often invited by the United Nations to attend international talk fests as part of an outreach program designed to persuade civil society that, contrary to criticism by people like Ms. Bayefsky, the global body indeed performs meritorious service. In August 2001, Ms. Bayefsky attended the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. She represented the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

“I didn’t suddenly remember I was a Jew at Durban – on the contrary,” Ms. Bayefsky said. “I was part of Canadian delegations to the U.N. General Assembly in the 1980s, and to the Commission on Human Rights from 1993 for five years – and as a result of the egregious double standards and overt anti-Semitism I witnessed masquerading as human rights protection, I helped the late U.S. Ambassador Morris Abram launch the Geneva-based U.N. Watch in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, I wrote a lengthy law review article on Israel and the U.N. human rights system. But since so few people read law review articles, I was not yet shunned by colleagues in the human rights movement. I have been a professor and author, not an employee of a Jewish organization.

“But the human rights movement has generally excluded Jews as Jews – by which I mean they have marginalized or ignored concerns about anti-Semitism, and have pretended that the treatment of the Jewish state is unrelated to anti-Semitism,” Ms. Bayefsky said. “The price of belonging to the human rights movement has meant – and still means – being prepared to sacrifice concern about Israel’s welfare in order to further the interests of the general good. And although many American NGOs are headed by Jews, they are often afraid to be directly perceived as caring about the welfare of Jews and the Jewish state.”

At an NGO panel during the Durban conference, Ms. Bayefsky told participants that human rights for all cannot be built on the backs of Jewish victims, whether they live in or outside of Israel.

The Durban session on anti-Semitism where Ms. Bayefsky spoke was disrupted by other NGO activists.

“You are killers! You are killers!” they shouted.

“Human rights NGOs have always thought that discriminatory treatment of Israel is the price to be paid for doing business at the U.N.,” Mr. Bayefsky said.

That global conference was a stark reminder, for Ms. Bayefsky, of the importance of the first part of that ancient maxim.

“Durban was dedicated to the demonization of Israel, and hijacked for the cause of anti-Semitism,” Ms. Bayefsky said. “And yet the world’s leading NGOs – Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights [now called Human Rights First] – believed that neutrality was the best approach. They decided to abstain on the final product that said Zionism equals racism. I was no longer perceived to be part of the mainstream of the human rights movement.”

When Ms. Bayefsky, a single mother of three girls, talks about human rights, the conversation inevitably turns to her parents, Evelyn and the late Aba Bayefsky of Toronto. Her father, who was with the Royal Canadian air force during World War II as a war artist, was among those who went into the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen just after it was liberated. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died there, including Anne Frank.

“My father, later awarded the Order of Canada, and whose art hangs in galleries around the world – including in Israel’s Yad Vashem – understood the human capacity for evil,” Ms. Bayefsky said. “But he was also a great humanist who cared about dignity and multiculturalism. He celebrated life. That influenced me in my formative years. For me, being a Jew means celebrating life while recognizing the reality of a constant struggle to defeat those who do not. What happens so often at the U.N. undermines that essential cause.”

She returned to her earlier reference to Rosa Parks, the black woman whose refusal to yield her seat to a white man and move to the back of a public bus, was a major catalyst of the civil rights movement.

“The U.N. should grind to a halt until Israel is allowed to move from the back of the bus,” Ms. Bayefsky said. “There’s so much talk about U.N. reform. But any meaningful reform of the U.N. system has to incorporate an end to the most egregious form of institutionalized racism. And I’ll be there watching and reporting, aiming to point democracies in healthier directions.”