January 27 is the date designated by the United Nations (U.N.) to commemorate the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance.  On that date, in 1945, the Soviet Union’s Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the notorious death camp where more than a million Jews were murdered by the German Nazis.  When the Red Army soldiers entered the camp, they found about two thousand skeletal men on the verge of dying — from starvation, torture, and disease.  Prior to their arrival, nearly 70,000 camp inmates, almost all Jews, were marched in the snow, during the brutal Polish winter, to Germany.  SS Nazi murderers shot or beat to death anyone unable to walk.  There was no food or drink for the inmates, and thousands died on this death march — the Nazis’ primary intent.

Eighty years later, many U.N. member countries voted in justification of another cruel massacre of Jews — this time at the hands of Hamas Palestinian Islamists. 

There is a parallel, albeit less numerous in terms of scale and the victims count, between what Hamas perpetrated on October 7, 2023 and the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  Hamas terrorists, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group, along with ordinary Gazans, raped, murdered, and looted the Jews in southwestern Israel.  They then kidnapped hostages, mostly Jewish civilians, including babies and Holocaust survivors, and marched them to Gaza, subjecting them to cruelty and starvation — but instead of concentration camps, there were the tunnel dungeons of Gaza.

Murderous antisemitism typifies both the Nazi treatment of Jews and the treatment Israelis endured in Hamas’s dungeons.  Systematic use of antisemitic tropes and Jew-hatred are common features shared by Nazis and Palestinian Islamists.  The former is based on racial superiority and the characterization of Jews as subhuman, the latter on religious fanaticism, founded on the 7th-century Salafist understanding of the Quran and Hadiths.

Today, the United Nations is a major purveyor of the new form of antisemitism.  Under the guise of anti-Israelism, the U.N. uses demonization and double-standards when dealing with Israel in order to delegitimize the existence of the country.  Since Israel represents the collective Jew, it is clear that when Israel is accused of “genocide” in Gaza, Jews throughout the world are feeling the impact of such a blatant and libelous accusation.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, addressing the U.N. on this Remembrance Day, reminded the General Assembly crowd of the 1975 adoption of the antisemitic and racist resolution that equated Zionism with racism.  His late father, Chaim Herzog, then Israel’s eloquent ambassador to the U.N., demonstratively tore up the resolution from the podium in sheer disgust.  Isaac Herzog also noted that Hamas drew its inspiration from Nazis in planning and executing the October 7, 2023 massacre.

Herzog added, “It took 16 years for this assembly to revoke that shameful resolution, and today Israel finds itself again at a dangerous crossroads in the history of this institution.”  He noted that his maternal great-uncle and a Holocaust survivor, Hersch Lauterpacht, served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi criminals and helped establish the International Court of Justice (ICJ), later serving as a judge there.

Had Herzog’s great-uncle witnessed the appalling miscarriage of justice and hypocrisy of the current ICJ in equating the Hamas perpetrators of murder with Israeli leaders (Prime Minister Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant), who sought to apprehend or eliminate the killers and kidnappers of Israelis, he would have regretted the very existence of such a body.  Herzog charged that the U.N.’s International Criminal Court has blurred the distinction between “good and evil” and allowed “antisemitic genocidal doctrines to flourish uninterrupted creating a distorted symmetry between the victim and the murderous monster.”  The U.N. was created after World War Two and the Holocaust to prevent the kind of genocidal antisemitism that led to the latter.

Appearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for confirmation as President Trump’s ambassador to the U.N., U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) accused the U.N. of “antisemitic rot.”

Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, pointed out that she confronted antisemitism every day at the U.N.  Haley asserted in a Jerusalem Post op-ed that “Jew-haters try to hide it by saying that they only hate Israel. All it takes is 24 hours at the U.N. to realize that anti-Zionism is just a modern name for the ancient evil of antisemitism.”  How to explain why, of the nearly 200 countries represented at the U.N., tiny, democratic Israel is singled out with more than half of all condemnatory resolutions.  From 2015 through 2023, 154 resolutions were brought against Israel while 71 were against other countries, including murderous dictatorial regimes such as Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela.  Many such violators of human rights are members of the U.N. Human Rights Committee.

The U.N. staff is replete with antisemitic committees and individuals, including Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the “occupied Palestinian territories,” who has called for the expulsion of Israel from the U.N. and charged Israel with “genocide in Gaza.”  Periodically, the U.N. declares itself ready to combat antisemitism, but the body has done nothing to clean its own house, which Netanyahu called a “House of Darkness.”

Commemorating murdered Jews at the annual U.N. International Day of Holocaust Remembrance cannot cover up the hypocrisy and unrestrained antisemitism in that dark house, where a majority of undemocratic regimes, including the 57 that constitute the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, sit in judgment.  Let us hope Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee, will be confirmed and will deal effectively with this House of Darkness in the heart of New York.

Image: sanjitbakshi via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.