Antonio Guterres, Alas

Antonio Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the most antisemitic organizations in the world. But Guterres has in his own addresses before Jewish audiences expressed what seemed to be sympathy for, and solidarity with, the Jewish people. However, upon his return to Turtle Bay, he lapses, or more exactly relapses, into quite a different, disturbing, much more unpleasant mode, one distinctly hostile toward Israel. “How António Guterres betrayed the Jews,” by Ben Cohen, JNS, June 14, 2024:

Back in February, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a speech at the Ohel Jakob synagogue in Munich in which he struck most of the right notes.

Guterres acknowledged what Israel’s most diehard adversaries never will—that the Jewish people are indigenous to the historic Land of Israel. “I was in Masada,” he said. “And I lived the feeling of the Jewish people about the expulsion of the Roman Empire in the first century and how the Jewish community has spread in the Roman Empire but, since the beginning, became in the different areas of the empire, victims of different forms of segregation, discrimination and persecution.”

Antisemitism, Guterres also observed, “was not born with the Nazis and did not die with the Nazis.” Referring to his native Portugal, which expelled its Jewish population at the beginning of the 16th century, the U.N. chief bemoaned this “criminal” and “stupid” act for causing suffering to Jews and impoverishing the country culturally and economically. And, he continued, “antisemitism is unfortunately spreading today. It has had, I would say, a clear acceleration since the horrific attacks of Hamas on the seventh of October, but it was already a central concern for us in the last decades. We have seen how it was multiplying both online and offline with all kinds of manifestations, desecration of cemeteries, personal attacks on people, vicious actions online, and worst, an attempt to rewrite history.”

The “attempt to rewrite history” alludes to the Holocaust deniers and Holocaust minimizers, whose most famous exemplar in the world today is none other than the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, with whom Guterres has always been on friendly terms.

All of this is in keeping with Guterres’s previous comments on the issue, including his determination in 2017 that the “denial of Israel’s right to exist is antisemitism,” which is an enormously significant statement for the head of the world’s most thoroughly and consistently anti-Israel body. Additionally, during the coronavirus pandemic, Guterres spoke out more than once against the antisemitic memes that spread like wildfire in the “covidiocy” camp of anti-vaxxers and allied conspiracy theorists.

Yet there is one aspect of this issue on which he has remained silent. And that is the antisemitism that stains the organization he leads….

Then you have the U.N. Human Rights Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to vilifying Israel, and which periodically pushes out ugly, unsubstantiated attacks on Israel through the guise of “independent experts.” One such report was released just last week by a team of three commissioners, one of whom, Miloon Kothari, famously accused the “Jewish Lobby” of controlling social media (if only, eh?).

In an environment like this one, it’s hardly surprising that Israel now finds itself on a blacklist with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen as states whose militaries systemically abuse children. Yet what is noteworthy here is that this list is provided by Guterres’ own office, which produces the annual “Children in Armed Conflict” report….

Because if Guterres really did believe in the points he made during his Munich speech, then he would not have assented to Israel’s inclusion on the blacklist. If he really appreciated the centrality of Israel as an anchor of security for Jews the world over, if he really grasped the mass trauma provoked by Oct. 7 for Israelis and Jews around the world alike, if he really knew in every fiber of his being that the Jewish people have only this one country that is currently facing a campaign of deadly violence orchestrated by Iran and its regional proxies, then Israel would not be sharing space with militaries whose sole raison d’être is the murder, torture and wholesale destruction of innocent civilians….

Now he has lent his imprimatur to one of the worst antisemitic blood libels to emerge from the halls of the United Nations—and there have been many….

Cohen is referring to the charge that in Gaza Israel has committed “war crimes.”

Guterres spoke feelingly in Munich this February about the Jewish people and their claim to the Land of Israel. He has been to Masada. He knows the Jews’ millennial connection to that land. He said in 2017 that “denial of Israel’s right to exist is antisemitism.” He knows the long history of the persecution and murder of the Jews. He bemoaned the expulsion of Jews from his own country, Portugal, in 1497. He deplored how the Jews have been the “victims of different forms of segregation, discrimination and persecution.” He recognized that the murderous antisemitism of the Nazis did not die with Germany’s defeat in World War II. He noted that antisemitism has surged since October 7, but he said “it was already a central concern for us in the last decades. We have seen how it was multiplying both online and offline with all kinds of manifestations, desecration of cemeteries, personal attacks on people, vicious actions online, and worst, an attempt to rewrite history.” His words were most welcome.

But after that speech in Munich, what has come from Guterres’ office at the UN? He has placed Israel in the same rogues’ gallery as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen as “states whose militaries systemically abuse children.” And when an “independent commission of inquiry” appointed by the UN concluded in June that “the crimes against humanity of extermination; murder; gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys; forcible transfer; and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment were committed” by Israel, Guterres accepted this grotesque finding without the slightest demurral.

Antonio Guterres has never recognized the role of the UN itself in spreading antisemitism, starting with the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution and continuing with endless resolutions condemning the Jewish state, whose putative misdeeds have become a UN obsession, right up to the organization’s “independent committee” accusing Israel of war crimes. He apparently sees nothing to complain about in the endless series of anti-Israel and antisemitic remarks made by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who keeps insisting that the Jewish state is committing “genocide” in Gaza. The real Guterres is not the one who spoke at the synagogue in Munich, but the one who condones the most grotesque anti-Israel resolutions that the General Assembly, and the UN Security Council, and the UN Human Rights Council, can come up with. So Israel will have to wait until his term runs out in 2026, and hope that his replacement will not be more of the same.