Rami Chris Robbinsis a writer who focuses on Middle East issues and foreign policy.
Roughly half of all UN delegates walked out of the UN General Assembly chamber on Friday to shun and isolate Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started to speak.
While this act was designed to humiliate Israel, the disgrace and dishonor fall on the UN. Israel and its delegation were wrapped tightly in truth and consequence. The shame rests with those who left the chamber. Here are the facts:
UN member nations have never before staged a walkout on actual genocidal mass murderers. Friday was therefore yet another case of “No Jews, No News!” One standard applies to everyone else. Another for the world’s only Jewish State.
The largest actual genocide since the Holocaust was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodian between 1975 and 1979. No UN delegates walked out then. In fact, the UN welcomed one of arch-murderer Pol Pot’s ministers. He spoke before both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.
Nearly 2 million Cambodians perished in that actual genocide.
Earlier, in 1971, Pakistani Muslim forces slaughtered 1.5 million Bengali Hindus. Yet Pakistani speakers were welcomed at the UN without protest or walkouts at least four times as Pakistani massacres escalated.
The Nigerian mass death – mostly by forced starvation – of its nearly 1.5 million Christian and ethnic Igbo/Biafrans minority between 1967 and 1970, and anti-Christian pogroms in 1966 similarly pulled no UN heartstrings.
The UN dodged the issue for years. They barely even discussed the Muslim pogrom of innocent Christians.
More recently, from 1983 until 2005, were there protests or walkouts in the UN that were associated with Sudan’s genocide? Its Muslim-majority government slaughtered 500,000 Christian Dinka and Nuer minorities. There were no walkouts then, either.
The only walkout was, in fact, when U.S. Ambassador Sichan Siv walked out in protest from an UN meeting. The Republican appointee called Sudan’s re-election in 2004 to the UN Human Rights Commission an “absurdity.”
In 1994, Rwandan Hutus spent roughly 100 days annihilating 800,000 Tutsis and displaced another 2 million. Walkouts? Protests? None.
In one of the great ironies of the time, Rwanda held a rotating seat on the Security Council that year. It persuaded many of its fellow Security Council members to remove the word “genocide” from UN documents. Nigeria, Djibouti, Oman, and Pakistan, and China voted in favor.
How about when the Muslim military (nearly 100% Muslim) slaughtered 150,000 Catholic Timorese minorities and displaced 400,000 more? That genocide lasted a quarter century. That should have allowed plenty of time to stage a walkout.
Silence from the UN.
Surely the UN would walk out to protest Iraqi speakers while they were dropping poison gas on their Kurdish minority. Over 100,000 Kurds were murdered and 1 million displaced between 1986 and 1989. This genocide did rate a hollow Security Council resolution, but not a single walkout.
The second-largest walkout in UN General Assembly history was in 2011, when a coalition of Western countries boycotted a speech from Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Total participants: about 12.
The Jewish people are no stranger to public humiliation. It has been part of our national experience since the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE. We are a people that dwells alone and is not reckoned among the nations, so says the Torah.
The meaning of this is not political isolation. It is the isolation experienced by an Israel that cleaves to truth and consequence in a UN chamber filled mostly with fools and villains.
When the hands of UN delegates applaud thunderously through history for Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Idi Amin, and Robert Mugabe, it is better to relish the sound of silence.
In this, our topsy-turvy, morally inverted world, partial isolation in the UN is a prize, not a humiliation.
Even if our destiny is to dwell alone, as an unappreciated bulwark defending what’s left of Western Civilization, sign me up. Popularity is overrated, especially in the UN General Assembly. Better to sit with the nerdy kids. Or all alone.
