November 9-10 is the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass -- when Adolph Hitler launched his campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He almost succeeded.
And now there’s news that a UN group with an anti-Semitic agenda plans to meet in New York City next year, the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The UN Human Rights Council, as a Daily News editorial points out, intends to “stick it in America’s eye.”
The so-called Human Rights Council is composed of many nations with a notorious record of suppressing human rights within their own borders. The hypocrisy of them monitoring the world for human rights abuses is clear. From the time of the first meeting of this group in Durban, South Africa, it has abused the truth and carried on a ceaseless campaign against the United States, Israel and Jewish people.
Thus, these bloodhounds, who say they’re on the side of human rights, have failed from the beginning to hunt down the abusers of human rights in nations like Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Iran and Uzbekistan. Nor has this group criticized China, North Korea, Libya, Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia for their well-known violations of human rights. Israel, the sole democracy in this group of nations, has, in the tradition of a democracy, rooted out human rights failures in its own country. It isn’t perfect but, like the United States, Israel has a tradition of stamping out abuses through its democratic institutions.
I spoke to Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate who has told story of the Holocaust in his writings. “If they want to stage Durban III, it should not be here,” he said. “Most of them are anti-Semitic. They betray the people in their own lands. Their message is abhorrent to civilized people.”
About a year ago, in Geneva, at a meeting of this council, the leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called Israel “totally racist.”
As he began his speech, delegates from at least 30 countries walked out. He had charged that Jewish migrants from Europe and the United States had been to the Middle East after World War II “to establish a racist government in the occupied Palestine.”
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The British ambassador, Peter Gooderham, said “such inflammatory rhetoric has no place whatsoever in a United Nations conference addressing the whole issue of racism.”
The New York Daily News declares editorially that President Obama “must lead a full-throated boycott and make sure all understand that no friend of Durban III can be a friend of ours.”
It’s a good idea.
New Yorkers can well identify with a plan to isolate the hate mongers or keep them from subjecting us to their vile abuse.
There’s no UN law or regulation that requires us to listen to these characters. We should be deaf to their rhetoric. We can love democracy but not heed those who would destroy it.
