World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder said Monday that anti-Israel rhetoric at the United Nations had exceeded proportion and was extending into the realm of the absurd, adding that the Venezuelan ambassador’s recent remarks questioning Israel’s “final solution” for the Palestinians proved that the “conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is all too real.”
“Anti-Israel statements at the United Nations, within many of its bodies including the Security Council, are mounting to levels beyond proportion and are turning the international body into a theater of the absurd,” Lauder said. “Anyone denying that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism need only to hear the words coming out of the mouths of some of the highest representatives of countries that clearly hate Israel and everything that it stands for.”
“This sensitive phrase, ‘final solution,’ was used only once in recent history, by the Nazi murderers seeking to systematically destroy the Jewish people. Using it now against Israel can be seen as nothing other than a cynical hatred for Jews and a sick twist and denial of the horrors they were forced to endure only 70 years ago,” Lauder added. “Such comparisons are never acceptable and never appropriate.”
At an informal meeting of the UN Security Council on Friday regarding international protection for the Palestinian people, Venezuelan Ambassador Rafael Ramirez said: "Members of the UN Security Council should ask themselves: 'What does Israel plan to do with the Palestinians? Will they be disappeared? Does Israel seek probably to wage a final solution sort of solution as was perpetrated against the Jews?'”
Following criticism, including from the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Israel's ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, Ramirez apologized for his remarks. Lauder welcomed the apology, but said it was too little too late. “I urge Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to condemn this rhetoric and I urge the international community to intervene in every way possible in the diplomatic attack being waged against Israel and the Jewish people.”
