The US should investigate the United Nations Human Rights Council for antisemitism, according to Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center).
In a letter sent on Sunday to US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, the human-rights group said the UNHRC is an “inherently antisemitic organization, obsessively engaged in spreading blood libels, false allegations and delegitimizing the Jewish state by reviving the banner of ‘Zionism is racism.’”
In the letter, Shurat HaDin said the US should label the council as a hate group.
Established by Congress in 2004, the Office to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism is officially in charge of monitoring, reporting and fighting hatred of Jews overseas. According to Shurat HaDin, this is the first time it has been called upon to investigate a United Nations agency.
The UNHRC, led by some of the world’s most notorious human-rights violator regimes, has long been known for its obsession with Israel. Permanent “Item #7” on the council’s agenda requires the UN body to discuss alleged Israeli human-rights violations at every session. No other state in the world – including Russia, Syria and Afghanistan – has earned this “status.”
In an alarming escalation of its anti-Israeli activity, the UNHRC recently appointed a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on matters relating to Israel.
The COI was established solely to investigate Israel and condemn it as a human-rights violator and war criminal. The notorious COI, according to Shurat HaDin’s letter, takes UNHRC hostility to an extreme. Its mandate was based on a controversial resolution that no democratic country supported, and it stretches far from the latest armed conflict in Gaza that it was supposedly meant to investigate, the letter said. The UNHRC has one clear mission: “delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state by labeling it as an ‘apartheid state,’” it said.
“The UNHRC is deeply infected with antisemitism and should be regarded as one of the largest perpetrators of Jew hatred internationally,” Shurat HaDin argues in its letter to Lipstadt.
“The UNHRC is deeply infected with antisemitism and should be regarded as one of the largest perpetrators of Jew hatred internationally.”
Shurat HaDin
“The UNHRC is deeply infected with antisemitism and should be regarded as one of the largest perpetrators of Jew-hatred internationally,” Shurat HaDin wrote. “The agency’s obsession with Israel [and] the themes and motives that guide the UNHRC and its actions portray numerous indications of antisemitism according to the internationally accepted IHRA definition.”
Examples of antisemitism
The letter cited examples of antisemitism displayed by the council, including “the demonizing of Israel, blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, denying Israel the right to exist, applying double standards towards Israel by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nations,” among other things.
Shurat HaDin asked Lipstadt to open a permanent investigation of the UNHRC to monitor its actions and “determine the cause of its extremist policies and irrational targeting of the one Jewish state.”
“The UNHRC has become a focal point of spreading hatred and blood libels against the Jewish state, and its actions cast a shadow on the safety and the well-being of the Jewish people around the entire world,” Shurat HaDin president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said after sending the letter to Lipstadt.
“The US State Department has the mandate to investigate and report on this extremist agency,” she said.
“When it looks like antisemitism and when it sounds like antisemitism, it is antisemitism and should be urgently dealt with as such,” Darshan-Leitner said. “We are calling on Special Envoy Lipstadt to utilize her office to monitor and combat the extremist UNHRC.”