Prof. Anne Bayefsky: US Amb. walked out before Israeli Amb. spoke on killing of US hostage

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Professor Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, spoke to Arutz Sheva – Israel National News about the UN Security Council’sfirst official meeting about the issue of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

“The UN Security Council held its first official meeting on the hostages 11 months late on September 4, 2024 and, as forecast, failed to adopt any condemnation of Hamas or to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. Six hostages brutalized over the course of 11 months, and summarily executed with a bullet to the back of the head, made no difference,” Professor Bafefsky said.

“The three-hour affair was a sickening reminder of the UN’s role since October 7th – to circle the wagons around Palestinian terrorists and promote the end of Israel,” she said, noting that “the first order of business at the meeting was to redirect the focus to Palestinians and away from the hostages. Israel had requested the meeting about the hostages and some members of the Security Council – the U.S., U.K. and France – deigned to put it on the agenda. Council member Algeria, representative of the Arab group, then asked for a meeting about Palestinians and the Council President, Samuel Žbogar from Slovenia, decided to combine the topics. Thus, what transpired was yet one more Security Council Israel-bashing meeting on one subject, entitled ‘The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question’, the same topic for meetings that took place on August 29, August 22, August 13, July 31…and so on.”

“The vicious attack on Israel then proceeded from all sides. Blood libels rained down,” she said. “Director of Operations and Advocacy for the UN’s so-called humanitarian affairs branch (OCHA), Edem Wosornu – with no proof provided – manufactured a deliberate mirror image of the atrocities actually perpetrated against Israelis. She referred to ‘torture & sexual violence of thousands of Palestinians taken into detention by Israeli forces.’ She also referred to ‘40,000 killed’ making zero effort to distinguish between combatants and civilians.”

Bayefsky noted that “Russia’s Deputy Representative, Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, said: ‘We note the very alarming reports of…the mass graves of dead Palestinians with traces of torture and the removal of internal organs.’ Nobody objected to this outrageous and lethal blood libel reminiscent of the Russian forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

She added, “Denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state was on the table. The Executive Director of the NGO B’Tselem, Yuli Novak, had been invited to promote the delegitimization of a UN member state. In her words: ‘Since Israel was founded, its guiding logic has been to promote Jewish supremacy over the entire territory under its control.’ She then proceeded to analogize Israelis to Nazis conducting crimes against humanity, in her words, an ‘apartheid regime’ running ‘a network of torture camps.'”

Prof. Bayefsky continued, “Security Council member Guyana said: ‘The situation in Palestine today did not begin on 7th October 2023. We must cast our minds back to 1948 because it was in that year that Israel first violently rejected the two-state solution.’ No point of order was raised. No one reminded the assembled, and the world listening in, that the UN partition plan into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, was accepted by Jews and violently rejected by Arabs.”

“Facts had nothing to do with it,” she said. “The UN Ambassador of Sierra Leone, Michael Imran Kanu, had no compunction railing about ‘the over 40,000 civilians who have been lost.’ Apparently, Kanu thinks no Palestinian terrorist has died or that none of them, including the perpetrators of October 7, are terrorists.”

She noted that even Israel’s allies behaved shamefully at the meeting. “The Israel blame-game was front and center – shamefully endorsed by liberal democracies. The British Ambassador, Barbara Woodward, had this repugnant announcement in the context of a hostage-briefing that Britain itself requested: ‘My foreign secretary took the decision to suspend certain UK arms export licenses to Israel earlier this week. This decision in no way undermines our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.’ Nobody guffawed at the absurdity of such a phony ‘commitment.’ The decision to embrace BDS came a mere 24 hours after news of the hostages’ execution. Ambassador Woodward also repeated totally unverified Hamas statistics that ‘over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed’ — in effect lamenting Hamas casualties.”

She continued, “The Swiss ambassador, Pascale Baeriswyl, assumed the unelected role of international law potentate. In a meeting originally intended to address the execution of Israeli hostages by Hamas, the Swiss UN Ambassador said: ‘We urge the Israeli authorities to bring to justice all perpetrators of violence against civilians.’ She never called on Palestinians to bring anybody to justice for anything.”

Prof. Bayefsky was especially critical of the American representative’s behavior during the meeting.

“US UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, couldn’t manage to stay for the statement of Israel’s UN Ambassador. She walked out before Ambassador Danny Danon painfully addressed the killing of an American-Israeli hostage and five others. Her absence – from a meeting the U.S. prompted – was the wrong signal at the wrong time. Maybe she slunk away after her own address because the deliverables from the meeting were zilch and staying to the end would have spotlighted American weakness and the fact that she left empty-handed,” she said.

“As for the possibility that the U.S. representative would at the very least object to the overt antisemitism during the proceedings, American Alternate Representative Robert Wood, took the trouble to make two further statements in response to the Russian remarks – just on other subjects,” she added.

Prof. Bayrfsky said that “Israel tried to use the opportunity to attract global attention to the plight of the hostages and the suffering of Israelis. A very poignant statement to the Security Council about the hostages and their families came from Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, CEO of Schneider Children’s Medical Center. Ambassador Danon gave further gut-wrenching details.”

“But from a UN point of view, the Security Council had never condemned Hamas before; why should it start with the cold-blooded execution of Jewish hostages by genocidal mass murderers?” she asked.

“Security Council President Žbogar began the meeting urging participants and speakers ‘to engage in this meeting with utmost respect and to observe appropriate standards of tone, wording, and content in their remarks.’ What he really demanded was respect, unless you’re attacking a Jew or the Jewish state,” Prof. Bayefsky concluded.