Peace, But Not for the Jews? [with Robert Spitzer]
The selection of Navi Pillay for the Nobel Peace Prize is appalling.
Potentially rivaling the inclusion of unreformed terrorist pioneer Yasser Arafat in receipt of the prize in 1994, the choice is not only arbitrary and undeserved but corrosive. It cheapens a foremost award for peacemaking and further reinforces a sense of abandonment by Jews facing a deluge of lethal antisemitism in the Middle East and around the world.
It is, quite plainly, a slap in the face of actual peacemakers – and a gift to Iran, its terrorist proxies and their emboldened propagandists.
It is an incentive to dangerously biased, shallow groupthink on deeply weighty issues of global security and the equal application of human rights. The selection immediately after the anniversary of Palestinians’ Oct. 7 atrocities – the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust – only underscores the callousness and disconnect of the Nobel decision.
Pillay, a former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, has epitomized U.N. bodies’ undeniable, systematic politicization and discrimination against Israel – ritually attacking the Middle East’s only democracy more than all other countries combined.
She professed impartiality in accepting U.N. positions in which she was to “investigate” issues on which she had an open record of strident, longstanding partisanship – tarring Israel as an “apartheid” state and singling it out for proposed economic warfare.
This included becoming chair of the Human Rights Council’s latest and uniquely open-ended “commission of inquiry” on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In that role – repeatedly signaling that Israel required accountability but that U.N. bureaucrats are above it – she shamelessly decried “personal attacks” against her two fellow commissioners. One of those was condemned for saying Jews control social media and that Israel alone should be stripped of U.N. membership. The other remarked that oft-beleaguered Jews throw around charges of antisemitism “like rice at a wedding.”
To no surprise but little scrutiny, Pillay’s “expert” commission embraced the outrageous libel of Israeli “genocide” pushed by her native South Africa – a government allied with tyrannical regimes worldwide and tainted by waves of xenophobic violence domestically. The commission also manufactured a myth of Israeli “gender-based” attacks, obscenely inverting Hamas’ mass sexual torture of Oct. 7.
Previously, Pillay championed the 2001 U.N. Durban conference on racism – which was derailed by antisemitic mobs and a declaration implying that Israel is racist, despite the U.S.-led rescinding a decade earlier of an infamous General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Iran’s president – a Holocaust-denier who repeatedly called to wipe Israel “off the map” – was keynote at a Durban follow-up conference Pillay oversaw.
More recently, Pillay sought to cast aspersions on major democracies’ condemnation of Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s especially unhinged “special rapporteur” on Palestinian rights – who has justified jihadist attacks, opposed a consensus definition of antisemitism and baselessly said that Nazis called Jewish Holocaust victims “Muslims.”
In Qatar, a pro-Islamist country that does not so much as recognize Israel, Albanese called the world’s only Jewish state “the common enemy” of humanity.
Pillay remained unrequited throughout.
Are these contributions to justice and coexistence or manifestations of a toxic echo chamber even among elites?
From U.N. bodies to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, it is again time to decide whether Jews too have a share in the peace all people deserve.
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Co-authored with Robert Spitzer, President of B’nai B’rith International. His blog can be found at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/robert-spitzer/
