I have an older friend, a Russian immigrant, who grew up in a Jewish family that was unobservant almost to the point of atheism, but keenly aware of their Jewishness, mostly due to the anti-Semitism permeating everything around them. As a very young child, my friend learned that Jews were a tiny, insignificant, completely unnecessary bunch of misfits that could be credited with absolutely nothing of value for humankind, while being directly responsible for countless unspecified troubles they had caused.



Television was unavailable in the region where my friend's family lived at the time, but the walls of their tiny apartment were lined with bookshelves densely packed with volumes collected by at least two generations. My friend became a ravenous reader. When he was eight years old, a distant relative who had converted to Christianity gave him a Bible. Recalling his unsupervised attempts to navigate it, he told me how surprised he was to discover that it was all about Jews.



If our civilization still exists 2,000 years from today, Jews will be still around even then, and, obviously, where there are Jews, there are child prodigies. If such a Jewish child prodigy with a knack for ancient history reads about our times, she is bound to experience the same surprise, because today, just as in Biblical times, it is still all about Jews.



Probably no collection of historic evidence makes the exceptional importance of Jews to humankind as obvious as the annals of the United Nations.



Compare, for example, two ancient nations, China and Israel. About a quarter of the world's population are Chinese. China is occupying Tibet and is waiting for an opportunity to gobble up Taiwan. Its systematic, daily human rights violations have by far surpassed the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined, which is quite an extraordinary achievement. It is the only country in the world that routinely executes thousands of convicts every year in order to harvest their organs for sale.



Jews, on the other hand, barely amount to one quarter of one percent of the world's population. The number of Jews in Israel is just about one one-thousandth of all people on earth. For more than half of its long history, Israel was banished from its homeland. In the last 2,000 years, it never committed or even contemplated an act of aggression. It never occupied even a square inch of foreign land illegally. Whatever territory it has gained by force was won in defensive wars, which, according to international law, makes the defender legally entitled to keep it - unless the winner is Israel, of course. Abiding by its special status according to this rule, Israel has voluntarily ceded most of its gained territories to its enemies, hoping to assuage their hostility; as we know, that didn't work. Needless to say, Israel has never attempted to force its enemies to compensate it for the terrible losses inflicted on its people by the ongoing Arab aggression.



Nevertheless, UN resolutions depict Israel as the source of all evil on earth, while China looks as innocent of any digression and as disinterested in world domination as the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon rain forest.



China is not the only member of the UN granted blanket immunity from any criticism. Several days ago, the Saudi Arabian police killed four men they said were responsible for the murder of Paul Johnson. Unlike President Bush, I have no close personal ties with the Saudi rulers, so I hope you find my doubts understandable. To the best of my knowledge, the word of the Saudi government is the only indication of the dead men's involvement in the beheading of the American hostage. The Saudis themselves offered at least two different versions of the events that had led to the shootout. So, let me suggest the possibility that by killing four randomly selected people, the Saudis have closed a potentially embarrassing case and demonstrated what unbelievably terrific allies they are in our war on terror. That's how you kill two birds with four bullets.



Having said that, I am sure the victims weren't really picked randomly. Why lose such a brilliant opportunity to eliminate someone who is capable of causing damage, for example, by disclosing ties between the royal family and terrorists? After all, there must be a reason why the FBI has never been allowed to freely interrogate those arrested for the Khobar Towers explosion eight years ago, or, for that matter, any other terrorist suspect in Saudi custody.



In any case, the killing of the four clearly qualifies as extra-judicial. But have you heard anyone refer to it as such? Of course not. The term "extra-judicial" is used exclusively to describe Israel's execution of known (in stark contrast to the Saudi case) terrorists. Evidently, in the eyes of the United Nations and the vast majority of its members, killers of Jews deserve special leniency.



Neither Saudi Arabia, nor other Muslim countries, nor Cuba, nor North Korea, nor most of the other habitual human rights abusers, have been seriously, consistently criticized for their violations. It's perfectly understandable: how can a country violate something that does not exist within its jurisdiction? It's harder to understand why countries like that, that don't even have words in their vocabularies for the concept of human rights, have been sitting on the UN human rights commission. It is obvious that the UN policy is not designed to promote human rights where they are most brazenly oppressed. Instead, it is used to harass those few countries that protect the rights of their citizens without waiting for the UN to show them the way. Luckily, I am a citizen of one of those countries, so I don't need to worry about the UN-sponsored perversions of my rights. There is a problem, however: recently, the UN decided to address the problem of anti-Semitism. It's all about Jews, remember?



Don't get me wrong. I hate anti-Semitism as much as the next Jew. But I know three things if I know anything at all.



First, as surely as death will exist as long as there is life, anti-Semitism will survive on this planet until the day it becomes judenrein. If World War II didn't eliminate it, we have no choice but to conclude that this plague is incurable, and only a truly final solution of the Jewish problem may cleanse humankind of it. As usual, a few Jews are bound to fall through the cracks and survive, but impatient historians, without waiting for them to become extinct, will offer incontrovertible evidence that Jews have never existed, that they were a myth, and, therefore, the genocide was a myth as well. I'm curious, though, whom they will begin to exterminate next. Someone is definitely in for a nasty surprise.



Second, the simplest, most efficient way for the UN to make a substantial dent in anti-Semitism would be to call in all its people - both the staff and foreign representatives, seal all the exits and set the building on fire. Alternatively, Kofi Annan could contact his friends in the Arab world and ask them to slam the next hijacked airliner into the UN headquarters in New York City. I know it sounds cruel and cynical, but not as cruel and cynical as the UN, which, as a universally recognized international body, is in a unique position to effectively discredit and discourage anti-Semitism. Instead, it has been the leading force promoting it, and so, without the UN, Jews could've breathed a bit easier.



Third, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why the UN, famous for its anti-Israeli policy, decided to address the problem of anti-Semitism it helped create. It is pursuing the same two goals as the recent European conference devoted to the same eternal topic. The short-term goal is to be able to respond to accusations of anti-Semitism, "You must be kidding! Haven't we strongly denounced it at our recent conference?" The long-term goal is to redefine anti-Semitism in such a way that it won't include anti-Zionism. That will help them present the destruction of Israel and the new Holocaust that will inevitably accompany it as positive developments.



Not so long ago, plenty of people in the United States refused to consider themselves racists; they had nothing against "niggers" as long as those "niggers" knew their place. Today, most people have nothing against Jews; they hate Zionists instead, because Zionism, according to the UN, is racism, and racism is as bad as Nazism, and Nazis must be exterminated. So, don't be surprised if the UN creates a committee to monitor the progress of anti-Semitism (or anti-anti-Semitism) in the world and, following its own example with human rights, assigns Syrians, Iranians and Ukrainians to run it.



By the way, contrary to what you may have heard, in the Soviet Union, where my immigrant friend was born, there was no anti-Semitism whatsoever. In pleasant unison with the UN stance on universal human rights, its constitution declared all Soviet citizens perfectly equal regardless of their ethnicity, religion, sex, and other petty distinctions that still existed between individuals, despite all the efforts of the Communist Party and Soviet Government. Actually, the Soviet Union went one step further than the UN: its criminal code specifically recognized anti-Semitism as a crime punishable by a labor camp term. Nice, isn't it? Makes you wonder why Jews kept running from the Soviet Union instead of desperately trying to get in. Here's a story that may give you a hint.



When my friend was eight days old, his father, over vigorous objections of his mother and both grandmothers, but with somewhat uncertain support of the only surviving grandfather (the other one was killed in the Great Patriotic War), without inviting anyone, even close relatives and friends, brought home an elderly man in a wrinkled black suit. That man, amidst the general discomfort of all present, performed an abbreviated rite of circumcision (a bris), accepted a meager payment and was escorted to a taxi cab waiting outside. Despite all the conspiratorial precautions, a neighbor reported the incident to the authorities. As a result, my friend met his father again a couple of years after he began perusing the Russian Orthodox Bible, because his father had spent the ten years following the bris on the wrong side of the Ural Mountains cutting trees in the taiga, where the Communist Party had decided to build yet another happy city of the future. His crime? You see, anti-Semitism wasn't the only unusual article in the Soviet criminal code. Zionism was also a crime in the good old USSR. My friend's father was found guilty of Zionism for doing something Jewish, probably for the very first time in his whole life.



Soviet Muslims, who circumcised their sons openly, could do so unmolested.



It's nice to know what serves the UN as a source of its justice and wisdom.