Yehuda Blum, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, warned here last night that the phenomenon of open anti-Semitism at the United Nations has reached “alarming proportions” and charged that it “must be ascribed to a large degree to the shocking complacency displayed in this regard in recent years” by most members of the UN.
Blum, who spoke at the Park East Synagogue here, where he received the Human Dignity Award of the synagogue’s Men’s Club, said that “the absence of reaction to the numerous anti-Semitic outbursts at the United Nations has been construed by many an anti-Semite, as indifference amounting at best to acquiescence.”
CRITICAL OF EUROPEAN SILENCE
Without mentioning their names, Blum was especially critical of the “silence” of the European countries at the UN. He stated: “In particular, it is difficult to refrain from giving expression to a sense of profound dismay at the studious silence observed at the United Nations by those representatives whose countries in the 1930’s and 1940’s were directly involved in the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Nazi-Fascist era.
“It is also somewhat difficult to comprehend the silence of those representatives whose countries, during that period either directly experienced or otherwise witnessed the pernicious effects of such anti-Semitic behavior and who surely must know the terrible dangers to the very fabric of civilized society inherent in a permissive attitude towards such manifestations of racism and religious intolerance.”
CONSEQUENCES OF ANTI-SEMITIC RHETORIC
Blum charged that the escalation of anti-Semitic rhetoric at the UN in recent years, is largely responsible “for the recrudescence of anti-Semitism worldwide and for the numerous acts of anti-Jewish violence resulting therefrom in recent years.”
“Indeed,” the Israeli Ambassador continued, “through the barrage of ‘anti-Israel’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ resolutions adopted at the UN in recent years — culminating in the obscene proposition contained in the infamous General Assembly resolution of November 10, 1975, that Zionism was a form of racism — the UN, to its lasting shame, has been converted into one of the foremost contemporary forums of international anti-Semitism.
“The endless broadsides of hate and vituperation launched against Israel and the Jewish people from platforms of the UN, or under its aegis, have found their echo and their mainstay in the official pronouncements of governments and in distortions of the media in many countries.”
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