UN and Israel Join in Rejecting UN Budget Over Funding Jew-Hating Conference
The US and Israel joined forces on Thursday against 167 other nations by rejecting the end-of-year $3.231 billion UN budget for 2021.
“Today this body is poised to adopt a budget that reflects such an accommodation that extends a shameful legacy of hate, anti-Semitism, and anti-Israel bias,” US Ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, said, according to Fox News. “The United States rejects this effort and called for this vote to make clear that we stand by our principles, stand up for what is right, and never accept consensus for consensus’ sake.”
Craft specified that the US objected to funding a 20th-anniversary event for the 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. Both the US and Israel walked out of the Durban Conference because of the anti-Semitic underpinnings of the Durban resolution equating Zionism with racism by describing Palestinians as being “under foreign occupation.”
“Twenty years on, there remains nothing about the Durban Declaration to celebrate or to endorse,” Craft said. “It is poisoned by anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias. It encourages restrictions on the freedom of expression. It exists to divide and discriminate and runs contrary to the laudable goal of combating racism and racial discrimination.” Shockingly, copies of the viciously anti-Semitic propaganda book, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were sold on the grounds of the conference.The statement of withdrawal of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the Durban conference of supporting “the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust” and accusing Israel of Apartheid.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said that the Durban conference “will become another meeting demonizing the Jewish state — it will be used once again to slander us and to launch false accusations of racism against Jewish self-determination.”
“Today we must all speak out against commemorating the disgrace that was the Durban Conference,” Erdan said. “Israel opposes any measure aimed at allocating a budget for this purpose — we all know that such funds will not be used to support human rights but to spread even more anti-Semitism and hate towards Israel.”
“It is part of a wider anti-Israel bias at the UN,” said Erdan. “I will not stand by when such lies and incitement against Israel and the Jewish people are freely given a platform.”
Craft also cited the UN’s opposition to the Trump administration reinstating sanctions against Iran for violating the 2015 Obama-brokered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 and Joe Biden has voiced his intent to reinstate the deal.
“As I stated in September when the Trump administration announced the restoration of sanctions on Iran, the U.S. doesn’t need a cheering section to validate its moral compass,” Craft said.
“We don’t find comfort based on the number of nations voting with us, particularly when the majority have found themselves in an uncomfortable position of underwriting terrorism, chaos, and conflict. We refuse to be members of that club,” she said.
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