Prof. Anne Bayefsky, president of the Human Rights Voices NGO and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva Wednesday about the United Nations responses to the Hamas massacre of over 1,400 Israelis on October 7 and the subsequent war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.
Prof. Bayefsky, whose Human Rights Voices organization monitors the UN, called the UN's response to the October 7 attacks, the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust, "simply obscene."
"I did a review of what happened in the first two-three days from the United Nations because I knew what was going to happen. And even at the time that the full details were emerging, the bodies were still largely unidentified, and even the numbers were very much unknown, Israel was still trying to secure the barrier with Gaza, facing a three-front war potentially, the United Nations was gearing up to excuse and deny even the facts," Bayefsky said.
"You heard from UN actors that they questioned the atrocities and you heard from the Secretary-General as early as October the 9th - I think it's important to put his reaction in context - two days after it began ... he talked about a 'vicious circle of bloodshed.' He analogized Hamas to Israel. They began to talk across the board at the United Nations in terms of things like 'appealing to both sides to adhere to international humanitarian law. This was nothing short of an obscenity from the beginning," she explained.
Prof. Bayefsky condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for his statement that the Hamas massacre "did not happen in a vacuum," a remark which has been widely seen as justifying the atrocities which were committed on October 7.
"The reality is that the United Nations apparatus has been appropriated by Israel's enemies to destroy the Jewish State for the last 75 years," she said. "Two days after the horror of October the 7th, the Pakistani ambassador, on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, said at the Human Rights Council, the UN's highest human rights body, that this was a 75-year occupation (meaning that Israel's existence is an occupation).
"Only a few days ago, last week, the highest-ranking human rights officer at UN headquarters, a man named Craig Mokhiber, who has since 'retired,' said that the solution is a one-state solution. It's clear that this is an attack on the very existence of a Jewish State," she said. "He appropriated the language of human rights and he perverted it, and he said there should be equality between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in a single state. So what does that mean? It means there should be 56 Islamic states, there should be 21 Arab states, and there should be zero Jewish states, in the name of 'equal rights.'"
"There are other things to know about the reaction of the United Nations," she added. "A woman by the name of Navi Pillay, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the current head of this commission of inquiry dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel and the perversion of international law, so-called. She has twice in the last month spoken about the legitimacy of armed struggle against the State of Israel. What is that? It's enabling terrorism."
Bayefsky said that the war against the State of Israel's right to exist "was always a two-front war: on the ground, in the field, and at the United Nations."
She explained that the UN "to this day has no definition of terrorism" because Muslim states have sought to ensure that the killing of Jews is never defined as terrorism.
"The UN has never condemned Hamas by name, never," she noted. "No major UN spokesperson, to this day, has said categorically: Israel, as a full equal member of the United Nations, has the UN charter right to inherent self-defense, none of them."
In the last few weeks, several UN officials have questioned or even denied outright that Israel has the right to self-defense against Hamas on the basis that Article 51 of the UN charter allegedly only allows the right to self-defense against other states.
In recent years, Israeli officials have claimed that while the UN was still inherently anti-Israel, the Jewish State's standing at the organization was improving. The fact that only 14 nations voted with Israel in a General Assembly resolution which called on Israel to stop retaliating against Hamas and neither the Security Council nor the General Assembly has been able to condemn the Hamas massacre at all would seem to disprove this, and Prof. Bayefsky agrees.
"At the United Nations, nothing is getting better, it's getting worse," she said. "October the 7th was quintessential antisemitism. And yet, no UN actor has called it antisemitism. There is this fiction that antisemitism, ok, it happens on college campuses as a result of the war, but it's not the killing of Jews in Israel in the here and now. They don't understand what antisemitism is, they're endeavoring to divide Israelis from Jews outside of Israel."
"Why is it getting worse? Because they've commandeered international law. They pervert it, invert it, misrepresent it, talk about proportionality without understanding that one side targets civilians and the other side seeks to avoid targeting civilians. Hamas not only targets Jewish civilians, they put their own civilians in harm's way to avoid harm to themselves.
"So we have two very different actors here. It should be patently obvious. And yet, you have these artificial UN so-called appeals to both sides to adhere to international law. One side, it's very raison d'etre, it's purpose, is to violate international law, is to target civilians. So what are these appeals?" she asked.
When asked where this anti-Israel bias at the UN comes from, Bayefsky declared that "it's simply antisemitism. It's always been antisemitism."
"Since 1947-48, it's been a single-handed effort to eradicate the Jewish State. And the question is, really for Israelis and for Americans and for others, to what extent are we going to continue to allow the UN to be the leverage, the political hammer to destroy the State of Israel and the Jewish State? I worry, honestly, that the United States is making a very dangerous calculation. The UN General Assembly adopted an incredible resolution, an emergency special session. Everybody is there. And what do they do? They don't condemn Hamas and they don't say Israel has the right of self-defense. And what happened to that resolution? The Germans abstained, the French voted for it with Iran."
"The UN has become a terror enabler," she declared, saying that the US "is trying to figure out, just how much are we going to allow Israel to try to win this war? At what point are we going to say, 'well the UN Security Council made me do it,' as President Obama did at the end of his term in office? I worry that without a very considerable unified, or if not unified, a vast majority of Americans need to stand up and to reject the obscene moral equivalence and the use of the United Nations to somehow carry on with its 75-year war to destroy the State of Israel."
Bayefsky dismissed the attitude expressed by Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who famously declared "Um-Shmum" in dismissal of the UN's constant condemnations of Israel as meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
"It's been a terrible mistake for decades. I still get "Um-Shmum," I still get, 'well, ok, but you know how much of it is really antisemitism. There's a larger war, there's a context.' That's the UN game. 'There's a context.' The context is the effort, not even the effort, the actual killing of Jews in the here and now, the refusal to recognize what antisemitism looks like. And antisemitism is the global effort by people like Navi Pillay and the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to put atrocities against Jews, the effort to have a one-state solution - which i genocide against the Jewish people - and to put it into some kind of fake 'context,' to deny the reality of what we see on the ground, to lie about what international law entails.
"For us to somehow diminish the extraordinary ramifications and ability of the UN to pervert our moral compass, is a terrible mistake. And all you have to do is look at the Germans abstaining on a UN resolution which didn't say Israel has a right of self-defense or condemn Hamas and the French voting for Iran, and the United States now playing around at the Security Council to see how far they can push it to try to impose a so-called 'humanitarian pause.'
"Where's the humanity in pausing for one second the effort to release every single hostage," she asked.
Despite the antisemitism at the UN, Prof. Bayefsky said that she is not ready to "give up" on Western nations who have abstained or voted in favor of recent anti-Israel resolutions that failed to condemn Hamas, including the UK, Germany, France, and Canada.
"The center of the ability of Israel to fight back is happening in Washington and New York. The Americans have to make it very crystal clear to this government that the UN has no moral compass, that it doesn't speak for the majority of Americans, that it is an obscenity for it to be paid for largely by Americans, and that we have to hold out against this global progrom, which is what it is. It's on the ground, and it's at the United Nations," Prof. Bayefsky concluded.