In the last month, the UN's human rights bureaucracy has stepped up its crusade to convict Israel of the crime of genocide. dts News Agency Germany/Shutterstock See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google A smirk laid bare the United Nations’ unremitting hostility toward the state of Israel and its people.
Last week UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem sat stone-faced and silent as she reluctantly listened to wrenching testimony from Ilana Gritzewsky, a young Israeli woman abducted and viciously raped by Hamas during its Oct. 7 atrocities.
“Even now, the feeling of being violated and powerless still lingers,” Gritzewsky said, her voice breaking.
The Jordanian diplomat — whose mandate is to prevent “violence against women and girls” — let out an exasperated sigh in response.
Moments later, Gritzewsky pleaded with her: “Will you look at me?”
And Alsalem finally did so, a smirk playing on her lips.
Her chilling cruelty can be interpreted in only two ways.
Either she believes Gritzewsky was lying, in keeping with the rapporteur’s claim last November that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October.”
Or she believes that Gritzewsky and the other Israeli women subjected to grotesque sexual violence and mutilation by those Hamas terrorists got what they deserved.
Whatever the answer, Alsalem’s callous demeanor encapsulated the loathing with which UN appointees regard Israel, and their embrace of the wildest assertions made by Palestinian propagandists.
Because the problem isn’t Alsalem’s alone: It is institutional and structural.
And its impact is not limited to the UN, as the current surge of far-left anti-Zionists in US domestic politics demonstrates.
In the last month, the UN’s human rights bureaucracy has stepped up its crusade to convict Israel of the crime of genocide.
On June 16 Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, placed the Israel Defense Forces on a blacklist of armed forces that abuse children.
That list also includes the Russian Army and ISIS — but not Turkey, despite the horrors inflicted on the Kurds, including children, by its armed forces.
Tellingly, none of the other state armed forces on that list were ever compelled, as the IDF was after Oct. 7, to engage in a war sparked by a massacre of their own civilians.
But such nuances never trouble the UN when it comes to Israel.
Indeed, when Danny Danon, Israel’s UN ambassador, voiced his objection to Israel’s inclusion on the list, Frazier dispensed with diplomatic protocol and attempted to shout him down.
Then came the disgraceful June 23 report issued by the UN Human Rights Council’s “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The accompanying press release made the report’s purpose clear: It’s meant to accuse Israel of “genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.”
The word “deliberately” is important, because under the 1948 Genocide Convention, intent must be proven if atrocities targeting a particular group are to qualify as genocide.
Yet despite running to nearly 100 pages, this report manifestly fails to do that.
Its key omission — likely a purposeful one — is any examination of how Hamas fought the Gaza war.
After engaging in the Oct. 7 onslaught, the terrorist group turned Gaza’s civilian population into human shields.
Hamas terrorists didn’t wear uniforms, and buried themselves among civilians.
They prevented civilians from heeding Israeli advance warnings to seek shelter.
They used schools, hospitals and apartment buildings as terror bases.
None of these actions are even noted in the commission’s report, let alone criticized.
And while international law doesn’t prohibit military action in locations where civilians are present, the commission labeled every Israeli operation against Hamas as “genocidal” because civilians were in the vicinity.
As a result, its report drew breathtakingly extreme conclusions, depicting Israel as Nazi Germany reincarnated.
The report would have us believe that “the killing of and serious bodily and mental harm inflicted upon Palestinian children was part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group in Gaza.”
Nowhere does it consider that, had Hamas not invaded Israel with thousands of fighters, there would have been no war in the first place.
These UN blood libels are fueling the propaganda efforts of pro-Hamas activists around the world, including in the United States.
The Democratic Socialists of America candidates who swept Democratic Party primaries last month promote them relentlessly.
So does New York City’s DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
So do far-right influencers with footholds in the Republican Party, like Tucker Carlson.
All of them want to turn Israel and its alleged “genocide” in Gaza into a wedge issue for American voters — and the UN is supplying their weapons.
That’s one reason why America’s UN diplomats must continue pushing back.
The UN has created a sprawling infrastructure of committees, special commissions and special rapporteurs whose sole purpose is to portray Israel as the world’s supreme rogue state.
US taxpayers — the largest donors to the UN among all its member states — should not be subsidizing that insidious campaign.
Ben Cohen is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
