Anti-Semitism monitor needed within UN agencies

Speaking at UN High Level Forum on Anti-Semitism, at United Nations headquarters in New York, Mark Weitzman, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Chief Representative to the UN (NY) exhorted the world body “to immediately appoint a special representative on anti-Semitism with the authority to investigate and act on appearances of anti-Semitism in all circles of the UN.”

Weitzman also urged the United Nations “to immediately adopt the ‘Working Definition of Anti-Semitism,’ which included examples related to attacks on the Jewish state, that was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

“This is a necessary first step for the UN to take if it is finally to become part of the solution, instead of a leading contemporary cause of history’s oldest hate... The Wiesenthal Center also urges that all funding should be immediately halted for programs validating and promoting anti-Semitism and that officials in such undertakings should be removed.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the leading Jewish Human Rights organization which has NGO status at the UN and UNESCO added, “to have any lasting impact, today’s UN event must be followed up with strong, unequivocal leadership from the top of the UN, starting with the secretary general and the president of the General Assembly. The canards demonizing Israel as barbaric Nazis and an apartheid state are too often heard in the halls of the United Nations, spreading and validating anti-Semitism globally. Without leadership from the top, without real consequences for those who use the UN as a platform of hate and dangerous double standards against the Jewish state, there is little hope that world’s chief body to safeguard human rights will change anytime soon,” Rabbi Cooper concluded.