At Commentary, Anne Bayefsky has a good piece on the antisemitism of the United Nations: The UN and the Jews. (Hat tip: The Viking.)

Just months after Durban, Vladimir Petrovsky, director-general of the UN office in Geneva, declared the conference “the most extensive and momentous expression of the global resolve to combat the scourge of racism and intolerance in all its forms and at all levels.” Commissioner Mary Robinson agreed, telling a subsequent UN human-rights gathering that the Durban conference’s International Youth Summit—a part of the NGO forum at which young Jews from all over the world were jeered, heckled, and threatened, before eventually walking out—had been “an inspiring event.”

In the two years since Durban, whose outrages were quickly overshadowed by the events of 9/11, anti-Semitism voiced under the auspices of the UN has taken a new and, arguably, even more dangerous turn. In every UN body, Arab and Muslim states have opposed any effort to give meaningful definition to the notion of terrorism, largely because of its obvious implications for the Palestinian “uprising.” The UN Counter Terrorism Committee, set up by the Security Council in the wake of 9/11, has yet to identify publicly a single terrorist organization or state sponsor of terrorism.

Worse still, organs of the UN have taken to glorifying terrorist violence against Israeli targets. In 2002, John Dugard, a special rapporteur for the Commission on Human Rights, could barely contain his admiration for the murderous enemies of the Jewish state: “The Palestinian response is equally tough: while suicide bombers have created terror in the Israeli heartland, militarized groups armed with rifles, mortars, and Kassam-2 rockets confront the IDF [Israeli army] with new determination, daring, and success.”