The UN’s ‘memories’ of antisemitic terrorism are painfully faulty

(RNS) — “Memories” is the title of an exhibition currently mounted in the entrance hall of the venerable United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Its 14 large panels, featuring photographs and stories of terror victims and their relatives, have greeted visitors to the U.N. building since Aug. 21, the U.N.’s “International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism,” and will be on display through Tuesday (Aug. 27).

The International Day, according to the U.N., “aims to pay tribute, honor, and remember all victims of terrorism regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion.” 

The current exhibit, the U.N. explains, “aims to raise awareness about the human stories that lie at the heart of each victim and survivor of terrorism, as well as the long-lasting impact each terrorist attack has on its surviving victims.”

The U.N. further notes that “(a)cts of terrorism propagating a wide range of hateful ideologies continue to injure, harm and kill thousands of innocent people each year,” and that the international body “has an important role in supporting Member States to implement the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy by standing in solidarity and providing support to victims of terrorism.”

That solidarity and support, however, seems somewhat selective.

While the exhibit rightfully includes tributes to victims of 9/11 and of terrorist attacks in Boston, Indonesia and Kenya, among other places, not one of the panels concerns or so much as mentions the toll of any of the scores of terrorist attacks on Israel or against Jews around the globe. 

The sole panel that seems to refer to the Middle East at all is dedicated to Maysoon Salama, a Palestinian woman who lost her son in the Christchurch, New Zealand, attack on two mosques perpetrated by a white supremacist. 

Friends and relatives of the Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group attend a rally calling for their release in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Israel and Jews, it shouldn’t have to be said, have been prime targets for hundreds of terrorist acts for many decades. Not even a year has passed since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israelis, the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

When Gilad Erdan, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the U.N., called attention to the omission of anti-Israel and antisemitic terror attacks in the display, a spokesperson for the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Office, Laurence Gerard, defended the lack of a mention of Oct. 7 by saying: “The exhibition was launched in 2022 with victims of prior terrorist attacks.”

Fair enough, one supposes, though updating it with Hamas’ murder of more than 1,000 people in Israel, the vast majority of them civilians, some 10 months ago, might have been something to consider.

But, even leaving that mass-massacre aside, what about the myriad earlier terror attacks on Israelis or Jews?

On the day the display went up, a reporter asked U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric about the omission of any attacks on Jews, suggesting that the 2012 terror attack in Bulgaria in which five Israelis had died, or the Amia bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994 in which 85 people had died and 300 more were injured, might have been good candidates for the display. Dujarric brushed off the line of questioning.

People hold photos of bombing victims in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024, during a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center that killed 85 people. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

The reporter could have added the murder and mutilation of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; the waves of plane hijackings culminating in the 1976 rescue at Entebbe; and the Palestinian bus bombing campaign in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, there was the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh and the 2019 Monsey, New York, stabbing spree. 

The U.N. was founded in the wake of World War II and the attempt by the Nazis and their friends to obliterate European Jewry. It played, moreover, a pivotal role in the establishment of Israel in 1948.

But today the U.N. has become a relentless critic of the Jewish state. Prodded by member states such as Iran, Cuba, Russia, China and Arab countries, the world body has condemned Israel on many occasions for actions taken in self-defense. Neither the U.N. Security Council, General Assembly nor its Human Rights Council has ever condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre; some member states and U.N. leaders have even tried to justify the gruesome attacks. 

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said about the Oct. 7 Hamas murder spree, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.” Neither, though, did the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., or any terrorist attack. The perpetrators of murdering innocents always claim a “cause.”

Martin Griffiths, until recently the U.N.’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, has contended that Hamas, which gleefully murdered men, women and children, “is not a terrorist group for us, as you know; it is a political movement.”

Some U.N. relief aid staffers are being investigated under suspicions that they directly participated in the Hamas attacks. 

It is hardly hyperbole to contend, as Erdan did, that “there is no place more corrupt and morally twisted than the U.N.”

The U.N. was created to unite the world’s nations in the cause of peace and security. Today, though, it seems that perhaps the cause in which it unites nations is something more disturbing and dark.

(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes widely in Jewish and general media and blogs at rabbishafran.com. He also serves as public affairs director for Agudath Israel of America. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)