The brutality of the Palestinian terror group is just part of a one-two punch aimed at the Jewish State
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The Palestinian attacks on Israel on October 7 are one half of a two-headed beast. The other is the political, legal and economic onslaught that serves as a force multiplier.
The war to destroy the Jewish state and reject coexistence with Jews has long featured this division of labor. First comes the physical annihilation of Jews. Second comes the use of the United Nations to deny the Jewish state the right to defend itself and to enable repeats of step one until the goal is accomplished.
It is at the UN where international "law" and the principles of universal "human rights" are hijacked in the service of violence and antisemitism.
UN ENVOY FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE UNDER FIRE FOR NO-SHOW AT MEETING ON HAMAS' HOSTAGES HELD IN GAZA
On October 8 and 9, the barriers between Gaza and Israel were still open; Israel’s shoreline was still not secure; terrorists within Israel were still being confronted; and Israel was frantically attempting to rescue the hostages before they disappeared – all while under fire on multiple fronts. More than a thousand bodies were still being identified from their brutalized remains.
The depth of Hamas' depravity and Jew-hatred was still emerging: pelvises cracked apart in the course of gang rapes and executions, children tied to parents and burned alive; female body parts amputated and used as toys; gunshots lodged in male and female genitalia, children hunted and gunned down under their beds, heads severed with knives and shovels, human beings huddled in shelters blown apart by grenades. Video uploads from the killers who ecstatically recorded their atrocities.
And yet – starting here – UN actors lined up with one message to a vulnerable, shocked and shattered Jewish state: don’t fight back. This global behemoth and media powerhouse let loose a ferocious denial of Israel’s fundamental right of self-defense.
While the Jewish bodies were still smoldering, the head of a permanent UN anti-Israel "commission of inquiry," Navi Pillay, boasted she was the first to call "for the parties involved to cease all forms of violence" – a twisted pathological admonition to silence the lambs.
The Security Council, charged with the maintenance of international peace and security, met on October 8 – and said nothing.
Secretary-General António Guterres launched an immediate Hamas apology tour, claiming on October 9 that "this most recent violence does not come in a vacuum," finding fault with the Jewish victims, and reframing the unidirectional assault as but another notch in a "circle of bloodshed."
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to journalists on the sidelines of a summit on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, Monday, Feb. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Lujain Jo)
Faced with systematic Palestinian sexual atrocities, the UN’s women’s rights apparatus abandoned Jewish women and girls, questioning the veracity of painfully documented accounts.
Notwithstanding that October 7 was the worst atrocity suffered by the Jewish people since the Holocaust, none of the UN’s top bodies – the UN Security Council, General Assembly and Human Rights Council – has ever condemned Hamas for the October 7 attack – or for anything at all.
No UN actor has even acknowledged Israel’s UN Charter right of self-defense. On the contrary, the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution purporting to withhold it.
At bottom, the United Nations abuses the language of human rights, ceasefires, boycotts, sanctions, arms embargoes, and criminal justice, to push the antisemitic fantasy of ethnically cleansing Jews from their historic homeland.
Nobody at the UN has said the mass murder of Jews on October 7 was antisemitism. Even as Palestinian terrorists in Israel called home to brag about the number of Jews they were slaughtering.
Instead, the UN poured forth with a stream of blood libels: hospitals "targeted" by Israelis (when in fact hit by Palestinian rockets); humanitarian aid workers "targeted" (in reality hit in error after surrounding themselves with Hamas look-alikes); producing mass graves (of dead actually buried by Palestinians); "targeting" journalists (who were actively engaged in terror); "targeting" schools (occupied and operated by terrorists).
The UN unleashed a massive misinformation operation: Hamas statistics on casualties and conditions unflinchingly regurgitated, military casualties concealed; numbers of women and children killed routinely inflated; claims made of starvation that didn’t exist; UN aid delivery failures blamed on Israel.
Perversely, the UN has been a direct enabler of Hamas’s grotesque and illegal human shielding strategy by continually impeding civilian relocation to safety within and outside of Gaza.
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It gets worse. Employees of the UN Palestinian "refugee" agency (UNRWA) directly participated in October 7 atrocities. Many more have ties to Palestinian terror organizations. UNRWA facilities have been used as Hamas command and control centers and as weapons storage depots. UNRWA's Gaza headquarters powered a Hamas data center directly beneath it. UNRWA’s response has been to allow that "nine staff members may have been involved" in October 7 and to demand the donations keep coming.
The real circle of bloodshed has run for decades between the UN and those dedicated to Israel’s destruction. In October, the UN’s Pillay explained to Al Jazeera that Hamas was "actually forced to resort to armed struggle" in view of Israel’s "occupation" – said to begin in May 1948 upon the founding of the State of Israel. Conspiracy theories of controlling Jewish lobbies and evil racist Zionists have been part of Pillay’s UN calendar well before October 7. The UN’s top Israel "investigator," Francesca Albanese, repeatedly invokes the obscenity that Israelis emulate Nazis and that the Israeli Prime Minister channels Hitler.
At bottom, the United Nations abuses the language of human rights, ceasefires, boycotts, sanctions, arms embargoes, and criminal justice, to push the antisemitic fantasy of ethnically cleansing Jews from their historic homeland. This leaves us all with a very stark choice: Discredit and defund this instrument of death, or prepare for the gates of hell it is opening.
Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices. Follow her on X @AnneBayefsky.
