Will President Obama speak out?

Claudia Rosett on the prevalence of antisemitism at the UN:

The other hub is the United Nations, which, despite its own sanctions on Iran and its own 1945 charter which aims to avert such horrors as another holocaust, continues to dignify Tehran and some of its fellow anti-Semitic despotic states with a slew of important UN posts, while treating Israel as a pariah state.

Though a democracy, Israel has never been allowed to hold one of the 10 rotating seats on a Security Council that in recent years has welcomed such tyrannies as Syria and Libya.

Currently, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is fueling the problem–publicly condemning Israel’s battle to stop the terrorist attacks by Hamas, touring Gaza and demanding a probe of Israeli actions, while offering no viable protection to Israelis.

Don’t hold your breath for a UN inquiry into weapons and training supplied to Hamas by the same Iranian regime whose nuclear bomb program the UN’s leaky sanctions have failed to stop.

Rosett quotes a former diplomat Pedro Sanjuan on his experiences at the UN. In an interview this is how he described the atmosphere:

FP: How about the anti-Semitism at the U.N.?

Sanjuan: Anti-Semitism at the United Nations was nothing short of appalling. There was evidence of it everywhere you looked. Because of my descent from a convert Jew in the 15th century in Spain, I was confronted right off with two serious accusations: not only was I an American spy but a Jew as well. It was like Minsk in the 14th century, but in New York, a city of several million Jews in the second half of the 20th century. Israel (like every other member state) had a certain number of positions in the Secretariat allotted to it. For years they were not filled. It was not permitted. When the positions finally began to be filled, it was with Palestinian residents of Israel.

See Jeane Kirkpatrick (.pdf) on how else this was manifested.

Right now, if President Obama wants to fight antisemitism he ought to be making it very clear that he disapproves of the way the Durban II conference is shaping up and declare that he will not send a representative to the conference unless the vicious antisemitism is stopped. Still, I suspect that President Obama sees the UN as a solution to problems, not an institution that makes things worse.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.