An Interview with Anne Bayefsky on the UN

Earlier this week, I published a report about a speech that Anne Bayefsky gave in Toronto. Well, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has published an in-depth interview with Anne on the topic of the UN as the leading Global Purveyor of Anti-Semitism.

Here are some excerpts:

Bayefsky, who has since become a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, concluded by challenging the Secretary General and the UN to prove that they were serious about eradicating anti-Semitism: "Start putting a name to the terrorists that kill Jews because they are Jews. Start condemning human rights violators wherever they dwell, even if they live in Riyadh or Damascus. Stop condemning the Jewish people for fighting back against their killers; and the next time someone asks you or your colleagues to stand for a moment of silence to honor those who would destroy the State of Israel, say no."

Bayefsky explains: "When Israel targets terrorists the UN says that Israel is in violation of international law by committing an extra-judicial execution. On the contrary, the terrorists are illegal combatants and this is a war. They are not entitled to judicial process before being targeted. Still, Israel will try to arrest where it can. But in many cases arrest is not possible without the likelihood of many more casualties and unacceptable risks. The local authority, the Palestinian Authority, makes no effort whatsoever to arrest them.

In her lecture at the UN conference on anti-Semitism, Bayefsky said: "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 more than a million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia being kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, UN 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. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state."

"If the UN were truly concerned about human rights they would also decry the glorification of suicide bombers, or the calculated use of the civilian population by terrorists as human shields, or the refusal by Arab states to integrate long-standing Palestinian refugees into their societies and offer them the benefits of citizenship, which is directly inconsistent with policy for every other refugee around the world.

"Kofi Annan and his close associates fail to denounce terrorism against Israelis by naming the terrorists and those responsible for the terrorism. The way the United Nations deals with terrorism when Israelis are its victims is to issue general statements which say either that the two parties should cease all violence or that the Palestinian Authority should work harder to end the violence. They never say who is specifically responsible for the violence directed at Israelis.