Unmaking of the UNCliff May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. He is a veteran reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor for the New York Times and other publications. Cliff’s current column is “The unmaking of the United Nations” (at FDD, where it is posted with links). Cliff has kindly given us his permission to post his column on Power Line. He writes:
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres observed last month that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israelis “did not happen in a vacuum.” He’s not wrong.
But what he neglected to mention are the multiple ways the U.N. encouraged Hamas’s orgy of mass murder, rape, and child-stealing; the U.N.’s efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel; and its campaign to make Israel an international scapegoat, whipping boy, and pariah.
I’d trace this campaign back to 1975, when the Soviet Union led the U.N. General Assembly to adopt a resolution calling Zionism “a form of racism.”
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Daniel Patrick Moynihan rose to declare that “this is a lie” and to denounce that “the abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction,” and to state unequivocally that the United States “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”
Ambassador Moynihan understood that, prior to 1948, Zionism was the movement in support of self-determination for the Jewish people in part of their ancestral homeland which had been, for millennia, under the rule of foreign empires.
Since Israel’s declaration of independence, Zionism has meant supporting Israel’s right not to be annihilated. And let’s acknowledge the obvious: The disestablishment of Israel would require genocide.
In 1991, the U.N. underwent a moment of sanity: 111 nations voted to revoke the “Zionism is racism” resolution, with only 25 nations, “mostly Islamic and hard-line Communists,” as The New York Times reported, “voting against.”
That reflected “the shifting political currents of recent years, the Persian Gulf war in particular, which split the Arab and Islamic worlds, and the changes in the former Soviet bloc, fostered by the collapse of Communism.”
Before long, however, the Jew-haters were back. On September 22, 2001, the U.N. staged an “anti-racism” conference in Durban, South Africa that morphed into a festival of Jew-hatred.
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