In 1945, the United Nations rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, creating a new world body to ensure the horrors of the Nazis would never be repeated. Yesterday, the UN came full circle, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas used that platform to spout vile Holocaust distortion.
Abbas was speaking at a special UN event in New York, for the first time commemorating the 75th anniversary of the so-called "Nakba Day," Arabic for "catastrophe." It's the term that Palestinians use to describe Israel's founding and the failure of five Arab armies to annihilate the nascent Jewish state, the day after its establishment in 1948.
Clearly, the United Nations thought it did not have enough days or agencies devoted to the Palestinians, so it decided to create a new "commemoration." The sole purpose of this? Falsifying history to provide an umpteenth platform for the Palestinians to attack and vilify Israel.
During the high-level event at the UN yesterday, which was boycotted by more than 40 principled democracies, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Ukraine, Abbas made an hour-long hate-filled speech, replete with relentless lies and unhinged antisemitism, in which he sickeningly compared Israel to the Nazis, saying "they lie and lie, just like [Joseph] Goebbels," the notorious Nazi chief propagandist.
This should surprise no one. After all, Abbas has a PhD in Holocaust denial and distortion from the Soviet Union, and only last year, speaking in Germany alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, accused Israel of perpetrating "50 Holocausts" against the Palestinians. Scholtz slammed him, saying that "any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable."
In a statement ahead of yesterday's event, the UN said it aimed to "highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people's plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights."
If the UN was so concerned with "recognizing the reality of history," it would have recalled that in 1947, the local Jewish leadership voted in favor of the UN Partition Plan for the creation of two states, whereas the Arabs rejected it and launched a merciless war of annihilation against the Jewish State the day after its establishment.
Also buried in the UN commemoration of the "Nakba," is the fact that some 800,000 Jews were forced to flee from Arab countries in the wake of Israel's establishment in 1948, yet are still to receive redress for this great injustice.
Today, the only "catastrophe" is that 75 years later, whereas Israel has made peace with most of her immediate Arab neighbors—and those beyond with the Abraham Accords—the Palestinian leadership is still seeking the Jewish state's annihilation. And it's all under the cover of the United Nations.
Instead of celebrating 75 years of Israel's independence and rebirth, in which the UN played such an instrumental role, it abominably chose to hold an event calling the creation of its sole Jewish member state "a catastrophe," doing so merely days after Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group rained down almost 1,500 rockets on Israel.
This is, of course, not the first time that the United Nations has welcomed a Holocaust denier, having done so previously with former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and more recently, with the current Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
Although many nations showed principled leadership and refused to dignify this Nakba Day hate-fest with their attendance, the room at the UN was still full, and included participation from some European nations, such as France, Spain, and Luxembourg, as well as senior UN officials, including UN Under-Secretary Rosemary DiCarlo and UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini.
Most sickeningly, Abbas' Holocaust distorting speech, rooted in historical revisionism and dripping with Jew hatred, was greeted with applause and cheers of "free, free Palestine" and "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free." These are common slogans used by pro-Palestinian groups and terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as rallying cries calling for Israel's destruction.
Speaking in January this year, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that we must "stand against those who deny, distort, relativize, revise" the Holocaust. Except perhaps at the UN, where you get rewarded with a podium and a standing ovation.
Arsen Ostrovsky is a human rights attorney and CEO of The International Legal Forum. You can follow him on Twitter at: @Ostrov_A.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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