All 100 US Senators to UN: End ‘Unacceptable’ Anti-Israel Bias: United States Senate, Apr. 27, 2017 — All 100 U.S. senators signed a letter released Friday asking U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to address what the lawmakers call entrenched bias against Israel at the world body.
The World’s Most UN-Fair Organization: Dan Calic, Algemeiner, Apr. 2, 2017 — Have you ever wondered why the United Nations is so anti-Israel?
The Unacceptable Behavior of the German Foreign Minister: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 26, 2017— German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel displayed unprecedented chutzpa and insensitivity during his official visit to Israel
World War II ‘Avenger’ Reveals his Heroic Nazi-Killing Past: Isabel Vincent, New York Post, Apr. 9, 2017 — On the day the Nazis ambushed his guerrilla camp in the dark forests outside Vilna, Benjamin Levin could feel the gunshots whizzing past.
WATCH: Hillel Neuer Of UN Watch Rips Human Rights Abusers Condemning Israel: Israellycool, Mar. 22, 2017
Israel May Lose Europe in Jerusalem Sovereignty Battle at UNESCO: Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 27, 2017
UNRWA Won’t Be Changing School Textbooks and Curriculum: Jewish Press, Apr. 18, 2017
Netanyahu’s Bold Move Against Europe: Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 27, 2017
ALL 100 US SENATORS TO UN: END ‘UNACCEPTABLE’ ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS
Anne Gearan
Washington Post, Apr. 27, 2017
All 100 U.S. senators signed a letter released Friday asking U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to address what the lawmakers call entrenched bias against Israel at the world body. The unanimous message notes that the United States is the largest contributor to the United Nations but does not threaten the withholding of U.S. dues. Still, it uses strong language to insist that the United Nations rectify what the senators said is unequal treatment of Israel on human rights and other grounds.
“Through words and actions, we urge you to ensure that Israel is treated neither better nor worse than any other U.N. member in good standing,” the letter said…“As both the U.N.’s principal founding member and its largest contributor, the United States should insist on reform,” the letter read. “We are deeply committed to international leadership and to advancing respect for human rights. But continued targeting of Israel by the U.N. Human Rights Council and other U.N. entities is unacceptable.”
The senators asked Guterres, who assumed leadership of the world body in January, to seek such institutional changes as the removal of a standing agenda item for the U.N. Human Rights Commission sessions that has been used as a forum to denounce Israel. The senators also want a change to the rules for membership on the human rights panel to broaden participation beyond what U.S. officials have said is often a narrow and self-interested group of countries.
The unusual unanimity expands on the fierce denunciation of U.N. treatment of Israel mounted by Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, this year. The letter praises Haley for that effort, which she has said is intended to show that the United States will not “put up with” the bashing of its close ally. The United States has long been Israel’s chief defender at the United Nations, including regularly vetoing measures at the Security Council that were critical of Israel.
In December, the lame duck Obama administration chose to abstain on such a resolution, allowing it to pass. The measure addressed Jewish home building in the occupied West Bank, and the U.S. action was a sign of President Barack Obama’s deep frustration with what he saw as Israeli action that threatened an eventual peace deal. The Trump administration opposes the measure and has been highly critical of the previous administration’s action. It cannot be quickly reversed, however.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon thanked the senators Friday. “Once again, America has stood strongly by Israel, and stood up for truth and justice. It is time to finally put an end to the UN’s biased approach toward Israel,” Danon said through a spokesman.
The Senate letter reflects what the letter’s authors, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), said are encouraging signs that Guterres may be willing to change some U.N. procedures that Israel and the United States say amount to discrimination. Guterres yanked and disavowed a U.N. report last month likening Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid. His spokesman said the report had been published without Guterres’s permission. “If you continue to build on your recent action, we stand ready to work with you to eliminate the organization’s anti-Israel bias, and to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms,” the senators wrote.
On Sunday, Guterres told a pro-Israel audience that he cannot police all anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, but he said Israel should not be singled out for special scrutiny. “A modern form of anti-Semitism is the denial of the right of the state of Israel to exist,” the news service JTA quoted Guterres as saying at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress. “As secretary general of the United Nations, I can say that the state of Israel needs to be treated as any other state, with exactly the same rules.” “We’re glad every single senator decided to sign onto this letter,” Rubio spokesman Matt Wolking said. “That doesn’t happen often.”
The letter comes ahead of the first meeting between President Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who will visit the White House next week. “Since it is rare for all 100 senators to agree on an issue, this letter sends a powerful bipartisan message to the U.N. that its anti-Israel bias must end,” said Marshall Wittmann, spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
[Read the letter Senator’s letter here—Ed.]
THE WORLD’S MOST UN-FAIR ORGANIZATION
Dan Calic
Algemeiner, Apr. 2, 2017
Have you ever wondered why the United Nations is so anti-Israel? Did you know that the UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined? Take a look at the rest of the world.
The Syrian civil war has been raging since 2011, with close to 500,000 deaths. Hezbollah has built an arsenal of approximately 150,000 rockets in Southern Lebanon, which is a flagrant violation of UN resolution 1701. North Korea continues its rogue behavior, with provocative missile launches and grotesque human rights abuses. Iran launches missiles with “Israel must be wiped out” painted on them, and is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. And yet the UN is silent.
But the UN is not silent when it comes to Israel. Keep in mind that Israel is 8,000 square miles in size, roughly the size of New Jersey. Its population, including more than 1 million Arabs is just over 8,000,000. The Jewish population of Israel is approximately 6.5 million. Israel represents less than one tenth of one percent of the entire world.
So why does Israel and its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians garner so much attention from the UN? A closer look inside the make-up of the UN provides the answer. First, let’s examine the most anti-Israel body within the organization — the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). Since 2006, the HRC has passed no less than 60 resolutions against Israel. That’s a sustained average of almost one every other month for the past 10 years. In 2016 alone, the HRC passed 20 resolutions. Incredibly 10 of those were passed on a single day. Meanwhile, in 2016, a total of 4 resolutions were passed against countries in the rest of the world. This seems almost absurd, until you look more closely at the HRC.
There are 47 member nations that comprise the HRC. Keep in mind that its focus is “human rights.” Yet look at some of its members — China, Cuba, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Qatar, Burundi, Bangladesh, UAE, etc. Shouldn’t members be beacons of protecting human rights? Yet these countries are some of the worst offenders. The actual structure of the HRC is quite telling. The council divides the nations of the world into five regions: Africa (13 members); Asia (13) Latin America/Caribbean (8); Western Europe (7); and Eastern Europe (6). The US is part of the Western Europe region.
Now here’s where the rubber meets the road. Every nation where Muslims make up 50% or more of the general population is in one of two regions: the African or Asian region. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that when those two regions vote as a block, their 26 votes comprise an automatic majority of the HRC’s 47 members. The US is home to the United Nations, and puts up roughly 22% of the UN’s yearly budget. Yet on the HRC, the US doesn’t even have its own region — it’s buried as a member of the Western Europe region, which has only 7 member nations. It can be easily out voted by the Muslim dominated African and Asian regions.
Once you understand how the HRC is structured, it’s clear why they ignore many other obvious problematic areas, and devote so much attention to Israel. Israel is in the heart of the Middle East, and has been a thorn in the side of the Arab Muslim world since the moment it was reborn in 1948. The existence of a sovereign Jewish state on land that most of the Muslim world considers holy represents a huge obstacle to their goal of “liberating” all of Israel and turning it into Palestine.
And the problem isn’t limited to the HRC. The UN Department of Political Affairs has an entire division devoted to Palestinian affairs. No other people, or nation, enjoy such a distinction. Plus, there are other anti-Israel UN agencies. UNESCO, for example, is in the business of revising history by passing resolutions reclassifying Jewish holy sites, such as the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Temple Mount, as Muslims holy sites. This is in outright contradiction to documented historical fact.
There’s also the UNRWA, which is the only UN refugee agency created exclusively for one group of people: the Arab Palestinians. It runs schools in the Gaza Strip and in Judea and Samaria that openly teach students to commit jihad against Israel and the Jews. Then there’s the UN Security Council, which recently passed a resolution naming Israeli “settlements” as the main obstacle to peace. The resolution completely ignored Arab Palestinian terrorism.
The United Nations as an organization is charged with upholding dignity and security for all the nations of the world, big and small. Yet, is it acting with equal vigilance in enforcing these noble principles when it comes to Israel? The answer is a resounding no! One could make a strong case that the UN has a separate anti-Israel agenda from its overall mission, effectively making it the largest anti-Israel organization in the world (unofficially, of course).
However, now that Donald Trump is president and Nikki Haley is the US ambassador who sits on the Security Council, we are about to see Israel getting the support at the UN that it rightfully deserves. For example, a UN committee — ESCWA (Economic Social Commission of Western Asia) — recently released a report accusing Israel of practicing “apartheid.” After vigorous protest from the Trump administration and others, it has since been pulled from their website.
Moreover, Trump has indicated that the US may consider taking punitive action against the UN and some of its internal agencies — in the form of reducing or eliminating financial support — due to it’s anti-Israel activities. There have even been discussions about the US withdrawing from the Human Rights Council. We are in the early stages of a long overdue new era. It’s about time someone “Trumpets” support for Israel.
THE UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR OF THE GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTER
Isi Leibler
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 26, 2017
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel displayed unprecedented chutzpa and insensitivity during his official visit to Israel to participate in ceremonies on Holocaust Remembrance Day when he scheduled meetings with organizations who accuse us of engaging in war crimes.
Principal among these is Breaking the Silence, which virtually all sectors of the Israeli political mainstream, including the opposition, have condemned – not because they oppose or campaign against the government but because they are a primarily foreign-sponsored fringe entity engaged in a global campaign directed toward foreign governments to depict the IDF as war criminals.
It is not a “left wing” group. It consists of vicious self-hating Jews. It keeps its “sources” – primarily anonymous – confidential. It does not investigate or verify its findings with the IDF, which examines and prosecutes all irregularities brought to its attention, but instead sends emissaries abroad to undermine Israel’s image. There has even been public debate in recent months about the merits of introducing Knesset legislation to curb its global smear campaigns.
For the foreign minister of Germany to meet with such elements, especially during this sensitive visit, illustrates the depths to which some German leaders have sunk. Gabriel is a leader of the German Social Democratic Party in the coalition and no doubt feels that his anti-Israeli posturing may attract Left-inclined voters who despise the Jewish state. It is probably no coincidence that during an election campaign, Gabriel referred to Israel in a Facebook post as an “apartheid regime for which there is no justification.”
He was disingenuous when he refused to cancel the meeting, regarding it as “totally normal” on the grounds that “you never get the full picture of any state in the world if you just meet with figures in government ministries,” and considered it his obligation to also hear alternative viewpoints.
Nobody questioned the foreign minister’s right to talk to all sections of the public including those deeply opposed to the government, such as the far Left and Arab representatives. But one must draw the line between a foreign minister meeting those with opposing viewpoints and a fringe organization like Breaking the Silence, which has been almost universally condemned as a subversive group whose principal aim is not to criticize the government but to actively engage in global dissemination of false depictions of the IDF, the world’s most moral army, as an army committing deliberate war crimes.
Gabriel says, “Imagine if the Israeli prime minister… came to Germany and wanted to meet people critical of the government and we said that is not possible. That would be unthinkable.” Really? The proper analogy is not with “people critical of the government” but rather those seeking to undermine the essence of the country’s security. How would Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel have reacted if on a state visit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arranged for a meeting with representatives of a group extolling the virtues of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang or a foreign-sponsored fringe group despised by Germans of all political persuasion for engaging in campaigns to depict her police and military forces as war criminals? Gabriel’s analogy is even weaker when one takes account of the fact that Israel is under siege and its very existence is challenged by some of its neighbors while Germany faces no such threat.
Gabriel was utterly unfazed by Netanyahu threatening to cancel his meeting, stating that failure to meet the prime minister would not be a “catastrophe” and “would not change his ties with Israel.” It was especially sickening for a German government representative purporting to be participating in a Holocaust memorial event to behave in this manner. He stands and places a wreath at Yad Vashem and two days later effectively embraces a subversive group seeking to demonize the IDF, whose mission is to ensure our security and protect us from future holocausts and from the barbarians who seek our destruction.
Netanyahu is to be applauded for his response. It is disappointing that Isaac Herzog did not speak up and display a united front. He too has previously condemned Breaking the Silence as a subversive anti-Israel organization. That at least would have sent a message to the world that Gabriel’s meeting with this group was considered inappropriate by all sections of the mainstream in Israel.
By refusing to meet Gabriel, Netanyahu made a public statement. We don’t expect special treatment, but today, in the week we commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are strong enough to tell you to stay away if you behave with such contempt, that would be considered unacceptable by any self-respecting state. Above all, we would expect more sensitive behavior from a German minister, especially one who regards himself as a potential future leader of his nation.
WORLD WAR II ‘AVENGER’ REVEALS
Isabel Vincent
New York Post, Apr. 9, 2017
On the day the Nazis ambushed his guerrilla camp in the dark forests outside Vilna, Benjamin Levin could feel the gunshots whizzing past. One of his comrades fell, and Levin grabbed him by the leg and dragged him from behind, looking for an escape. Blood-splattered, heart pounding, the Jewish resistance fighter ran straight into “a hurricane of bullets” and kept running until he could no longer hear them. He doesn’t know how he made it out alive, but offers one explanation: At just 14 years old, he was so short, the bullets went right over his head.
For several months before that 1941 attack, Levin and about two dozen others had been hiding in the Lithuanian woods, training and preparing attacks against the Nazis. They slept in makeshift bunkers carved from tangled scrub, drank green pond water that left a sandy film on their throats, and lived on a diet of bitter mushrooms and berries. “To this day, I don’t know how we survived,” says Levin, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on Passover Monday at a Westchester nursing home.
He is the last survivor of a group of Jewish vigilantes who called themselves the Avengers and vowed to kill as many Nazis as there were Jews who were exterminated. Like his commander, Abba Kovner, who famously exhorted Jews not to go “like sheep to the slaughter,” Levin fought back. His incredible story of heroism and wartime survival was documented by the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation and is being told for the first time in The Post. “This story is important because it breaks the stereotype of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust,” said Mitch Braff, the founding director of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which chronicles the wartime exploits of some 30,000 Jewish “partisans” who operated throughout the Third Reich. “They were responsible for thousands of acts of sabotage against the Nazis as they headed to the Eastern Front.”
Unlike the larger and more organized group of Jewish partisans founded by the Bielski clan in Poland, whose heroics were chronicled in the 2008 film “Defiance,” Levin’s group never comprised more than two dozen members. But they were a daring fighting force. During the war, Levin and his group destroyed 180 miles of railroad, blew up five bridges and destroyed 40 Nazi train cars. They took no prisoners, preferring to shoot enemies on the spot. They killed 212 enemy soldiers, according to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation.
With his diminutive stature, Levin was recruited as a scout and saboteur for the small group, consisting of Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries who had set up a clandestine base of operations in the Lithuanian forests in anticipation of the Nazi takeover of the country in July 1941. His older brother Shmuel, a fervent Zionist who was 18 when he joined the group, was one of its founders. Eventually, as hostilities escalated, his sister Bluma would also join.
Wiry and street smart, Levin could pass undetected among Lithuanian and Nazi soldiers to courier messages to different factions of the resistance, some of them working out of the Jewish ghetto in Vilna. Desperate Jews entrusted him with their valuables, which he exchanged on the black market for food and medicine. He also helped to blow up bridges, telephone poles and railroad tracks to slow the trains heading to death camps. The youngest member of the group, he learned to use his pistol from a fellow Avenger. Rozka Korczak was one of the few women leaders of the Jewish partisans, and its fiercest warrior. “At first, I saw this as a game,” said Levin in an interview with Shoah Foundation researchers. “I was reading a lot of books about conspiracy and the Russian underground. For me, it started out as a great adventure.”
And, while he says he can no longer remember how many Nazis he personally wounded or killed, Levin’s acts of sabotage were so numerous that more than 70 years after the end of World War II, Lithuania still has an outstanding warrant for his arrest. By his own account, Benjamin Levin grew up with “a wild streak.” He was smoking cigarettes by the time he was 8 and hanging out with a gang of young hoodlums on the streets, which caused no end of grief for his mother and father — prosperous Jewish merchants who operated a gourmet food store in the center of Vilna. Before the Nazi occupation, the city was an important hub of Jewish life, and home to more than 100 synagogues…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
WATCH: Hillel Neuer Of UN Watch Rips Human Rights Abusers Condemning Israel: Israellycool, Mar. 22, 2017
Israel May Lose Europe in Jerusalem Sovereignty Battle at UNESCO: Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 27, 2017—Israel fears Europe might abstain or support a resolution that would reject Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, which UNESCO’s executive board in Paris is likely to vote on at its meeting on Tuesday, diplomatic sources told The Jerusalem Post. Representatives from European nations and Arab states held consultations in Paris on Thursday to agree on a common text for Tuesday’s meeting.
UNRWA Won’t Be Changing School Textbooks and Curriculum: Jewish Press, Apr. 18, 2017—Following all the exposure of incitement and anti-Semitism in the UNRWA schools, there was pressure on UNWRA to clean up the books and the curriculum they’re teaching from all the anti-Semitism. Khaled Abu Toameh reports that it won’t be happening, “UNRWA says it has no intention to change textbooks and will continue to teach according to Palestinian Authority curriculum.”
Netanyahu’s Bold Move Against Europe: Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 27, 2017—On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted a new strategy for managing Israel’s diplomatic relations with the West. Long in the making and increasingly urgent, Israel’s new strategy is very simple. Foreign governments can either treat Israel in accordance with international diplomatic norms of behavior, or they can continue to discriminate against Israel.
