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The United Nations has found the greatest violator of women’s rights in the world—and it’s Israel for “violating the rights of Palestinian women.” That view is expressed in a report released by the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the UN’s top women’s rights body, and was detailed in an article on the website of Fox News written by Professor Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Bayefsky notes in her article that CSW ends its annual meeting on Friday by condemning only one of the 193 UN member states for violating women’s...

Thank you, and thank you, everybody, for being here. Let me thank you, Ambassador Winid, and the Polish Mission to the United Nations for organizing this important event and for bringing together such a diverse group of speakers to grapple with a question that we cannot ask too often: Why have we failed in preventing genocide? And, how can we do better? The exhibit that opens today in conjunction with this event, of art made in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, is testament to why this is such a resonant issue for Poland and for all countries. And we...

President Obama has turned to Congress to save him from staggering political isolation on the global stage. It is an isolation that is the inverse of the promise of a passionate and reciprocal multilateral embrace that carried him into office. Asking Republicans to rescue him from a foreign policy catastrophe entirely of his own making is not a neat political trick. It dramatically cheapens the office of commander-in-chief. Contrary to the President’s devious portrayal, therefore, the coming vote is so much more than a response to “this attack” or “the massacre” in Syria. The President had the audacity to ask...

The Obama administration got a new “shellacking” this morning, this one entirely voluntary. In the name of improving America’s image abroad, it sent three top officials from the State Department to Geneva’s U.N. Human Rights Council to be questioned about America’s human rights record by the likes of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. This was the first so-called “universal periodic review” of human rights in the U.S. by the Council, which the Obama administration decided to join in 2009. The move represents a striking departure from prior American foreign policy, which has been to ratify selected human rights treaties after...

The United Nations detained an outspoken critic and booted her from its New York headquarters in what the woman, a human rights watchdog, is calling an effort to silence her opposition to the world body. Anne Bayefsky claims that as retaliation for giving a two-minute impromptu speech defending Israel, her 25-year career of monitoring the U.N. is now in jeopardy — likely to be placed in the hands of a committee chaired by the genocidal regime in Sudan. Bayefsky gets special access to U.N. meetings in her capacity as the director of a non-governmental organization, the Institute on Human Rights...

President Barack Obama last Monday met for the first time with leaders of selected Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American president in the history of the state of Israel. US President Barack Obama. Photo: AP [file] This was the very first meeting with Jewish community's leaders. Earlier requests for an audience with major Jewish organizations had reportedly been ignored. Six months after taking office the president...

Two excellent articles by Anne Bayefsky  [highlights are mine] http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTAxYmQyNTBkY2NjNjJiMDBlZTgwMjA3MTJhOWI5ZTc= A Talk-Is-Cheap Foreign PolicyObama doesn’t get it.  Democrats are right to feel upset about President Bush’s appeasement accusation. It is their Achilles’ heel in this election and they know it. The foreign-policy mantra of the Obama campaign amounts to this: Talk is cheap. Over the next five months we will see the many tentacles of such a strategy emerge and the comeback “that’s political” — as Obama has objected — will be treated with the disdain it deserves. Determining how to deal with the enemies of freedom and democracy is as...

Amnesty’s Absurdity The United States needs to reclaim the language of international human rights. Amnesty International’s deliberate use of the word “gulag” to describe U.S. actions at Guantanamo should not have been a surprise. As has been widely reported, Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty, used the description in the foreword to the organization’s 2005 annual report. According to Khan, “The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times….” It is only the latest in a multi-year slide by the organization away from universal human-rights standards toward a politicized and anti-American agenda. The change became...

On Monday, the United Nations marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp with a day-long special session of the U.N. General Assembly, followed by the opening of an exhibition. Throughout the event, the words "never again" were repeated many times. But what exactly did they mean to U.N. members and officials? Here is the cynical response: They meant that the secretary-general has been seriously weakened by the Oil-for-Food scandal and ongoing congressional and criminal investigations, as well as the sexual abuse of refugees in the Congo by U.N. peacekeepers and the mishandling of sexual-harassment charges...

Do the Palestinian run the U.N.? There is a curious omission in the 129-page report on United Nations reform recently produced by a 16-person panel "of eminent and experienced people" at the request of Secretary General Kofi Annan. The U.N.'s own website, under "Main Bodies," lists the General Assembly, the Security Council, and directly below, the "Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." But nowhere does the reform report mention this committee. The omission goes to the heart of what's really ailing the U.N. For the past four decades the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine...

Yesterday the House International Relations Committee revealed that money from the United Nations Oil for Food program, which was supposed to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, helped pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. This shouldn't come as a surprise. The U.N. has a problem with anti-Semitism: It doesn't know what it is. In order to figure it out, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and Unesco invited a group of experts to Barcelona last week. Their mission: to provide the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related...

The Principled PresidentBush has taken the heat in ways that American Jews can appreciate.By Anne BayefskyJews, as a group, tend to worry, and right up there on the current angst chart is the American election. Unfortunately, the visceral distress is justified. President George W. Bush's foreign-policy record is plain. He was the first American president to sideline Yasser Arafat and to state unequivocally that support for terrorism could no longer coexist with the status of peace partner and entitlement to American largess. In a speech on June 24, 2002, the president said: "Peace requires a new and different Palestinian...

Meet the unsavory types who’ll be grading us on the global test. President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry referred to the United Nations 17 times during their debate last Thursday on American foreign policy. Kerry's references outnumbered the president's more than 2 to 1. The senator's attitude? The U.N. is the centerpiece of any definition of America's strategic interests. Kerry put U.N. centrality this way: "You don't help yourself with other nations...when you refuse to deal at length with the United Nations." Speaking of Iraq, "at length" meant "We needed to go to the U.N. The president needed...

John Kerry's would-be foreign policy, articulated in a speech at Westminster College in Missouri on Friday, ought to ring alarm bells across America. He announced that the U.N. must "provide the necessary legitimacy" for the successful prosecution of the war against terrorism on the Iraqi frontlines and the ultimate transformation of Iraq. According to Kerry, the U.N. "is the key that opens the door." Let us therefore consider whether the U.N. record on terrorism is deserving of this central role. The U.N. has no definition of terrorism. For years, a working group of the General Assembly has been unable to...

Notwithstanding Kofi Annan's anxious disclaimers, U.N. special envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi's tendentious proclamation that Israel is "the great poison in the region" is no aberration. Assigning blame to Israel for the nonexistence of Arab democracy, the impoverishment of Arab populations, and the human-rights deficit throughout the Muslim world is standard U.N. policy. Indeed, in a subsequent interview, Brahimi affirmed his original incitement, saying "this is a fact — not opinion." The annual six-week ritual of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which ended on Friday, makes the point all too clearly. After more than a month of negotiations,...

It was not an event that any of the big newspapers saw fit to cover, but this past December, a draft United Nations resolution condemning anti-Semitism was quietly withdrawn by Ireland, its sponsor in the General Assembly. In a complicated exchange, Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen had promised the measure to his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom, but in the end Cowen refused to carry out his side of the bargain, pointing to a lack of consensus on the issue. (Several Arab and Muslim states had objections.) Thus went by the boards what would have been the first-ever General Assembly resolution...

(Editor's note: Ms. Bayefsky delivered this speech at the U.N. at a conference on Confronting Anti-Semitism: Education for Tolerance and Understanding, sponsored by the United Nations Department of Information, this morning.) I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you at this first U.N. conference on anti-Semitism, which is being convened six decades after the organization's creation. My thanks to the U.N. organizers and in particular Shashi Tharoor [the undersecretary-general for communications and public information] for their initiative and to the secretary-general for his willingness to engage. This meeting occurs at a point when the relationship between Jews and the United...

<p>I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you at this first U.N. conference on anti-Semitism, which is being convened six decades after the organization's creation.</p> <p>My thanks to the U.N. organizers and in particular Shashi Tharoor [the undersecretary-general for communications and public information] for their initiative and to the secretary-general for his willingness to engage. This meeting occurs at a point when the relationship between Jews and the United Nations is at an all-time low. The U.N. took root in the ashes of the Jewish people, and according to its charter was to flower on the strength of a commitment to tolerance and equality for all men and women and of nations large and small.</p>

Only three months after the UN Security Council told President George W. Bush to take his deck of cards and get out, it is hard to believe that the president now appears as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's lackey in the Middle East. For popular consumption, in America the road map is called the "US" road map, but its authorship is not American. It is a Quartet road map, the US being only one of four members, along with the UN, the European Union (EU), and Russia. In essence the road map was substantially written by UN players and the...

Had Enough? The U.N. handicaps Israel, along with the rest of us. By Anne Bayefsky The recent decision on Israel's security fence by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.'s legal arm, is a classic example of how the vilification of Jews does not end with Jews. United Nations mistreatment of the Jewish state takes many forms, from the refusal to admit Israel into the negotiating and electoral groups of many U.N. operations, to Israel's demonization by U.N. human-rights machinery applied to no other state. Though antithetical to the U.N.'s founding principle of the equality of nations large and...