By Rami Chris Robbins, JNS
The hands of U.N. delegates applauded thunderously throughout history for the likes of Palestinian Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Ugandan President Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
Alone against most of the world, yet wrapped tightly in truth and consequence. That was how it may have felt for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he watched nearly half of all U.N. General Assembly delegates leave the hall on Sept. 26 when he started to speak.
It was a vile act meant to shun and isolate Israel. The timing was just right, intending to inflict the maximum insult. The staged walkout by the representatives of nearly 100 U.N. member nations was the largest boycott of a speaker in the history of the world body—and by a large margin.
Yet as the Israeli delegation cheered their prime minister amid the polite smattering of applause among the remaining delegates, who really was humiliated? As usual, the disgrace and dishonor of the events fall on the United Nations.
The hands of U.N. delegates have applauded thunderously throughout history for the likes of Palestinian Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Ugandan President Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. It is therefore better to relish the sound of silence or a half-empty hall. Partial isolation in the United Nations is a prize, not a humiliation.
In fact, U.N. member nations have never staged a walkout on any actual genocidal country or its leader. Last week’s walkout was, therefore, yet another case of “No Jews, No News!” One standard applies to everyone else, and another to the world’s only Jewish state.
The largest actual genocide since the Holocaust was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. No U.N. delegates walked out then. In fact, the United Nations welcomed one of arch-murderer Pol Pot’s ministers, who spoke before the General Assembly and the Security Council.
Nearly 2 million Cambodians perished in that actual genocide.
Earlier, in 1971, Pakistani Muslim forces slaughtered 1.5 million Bengali Hindus. Yet Pakistani speakers were welcomed at the United Nations without protest or walkouts, at least four times as Pakistani massacres escalated.
The Nigerian mass death, mostly by forced starvation, of its nearly 1.5 million Christian and ethnic Igbo/Biafran minority between 1967 and 1970, and the anti-Christian pogroms in 1966, similarly pulled no heartstrings at the United Nations. The international body had dodged the issue for years. They barely even discussed the Muslim pogrom of innocent Christians.
More recently, from 1983 until 2005, were there protests or walkouts in the United Nations associated with Sudan’s genocide as its Muslim-majority government slaughtered 500,000 Christian Dinka and Nuer minorities? Not really.
The only walkout was, in fact, when Sichan Siv, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, walked out in protest during a meeting. The Republican appointee called Sudan’s re-election in 2004 to the U.N. Human Rights Commission an “absurdity.”
In 1994, Rwandan Hutus spent roughly a hundred days annihilating 800,000 Tutsis and displacing another 2 million. Walkouts? Protests? None.
In one of the great ironies of the time, Rwanda held a rotating seat on the Security Council that year. It persuaded many of its fellow council members to remove the word “genocide” from U.N. documents. Nigeria, Djibouti, Oman, Pakistan and China voted in favor.
How about when the Muslim military (nearly 100% Muslim) slaughtered 150,000 Catholic Timorese minorities and displaced 400,000 more? That genocide lasted a quarter century. That should have allowed plenty of time to stage a walkout.
Silence from the United Nations.
Surely members of the United Nations walked out to protest Iraqi speakers while they were dropping poison gas on their Kurdish minority. More than 100,000 Kurds were murdered and 1 million were displaced between 1986 and 1989. While this genocide did receive a hollow Security Council resolution, there was not a single walkout.
The second-largest walkout in U.N. General Assembly history was in 2011, when a coalition of Western countries boycotted a speech from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Total participants: about 12.
The Jewish people are no strangers to public humiliation. It has been part of our national experience since the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. We are a people that dwell alone and are not reckoned among the nations, so says the Torah.
The meaning of this is not political isolation. It is the isolation of hypocrisy experienced by an Israel that cleaves to truth and consequence in a U.N. chamber filled mostly with fools and villains.
Even if our destiny is to dwell alone, as an unappreciated bulwark defending what’s left of Western civilization, sign me up. Popularity is overrated, especially in the U.N. General Assembly. Better to sit with the nerdy kids. Or all alone.
