Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ANTISEMITISM 51
only four such resolutions. Six of the ten emergency sessions summoned by
the UN General Assembly were aimed at Israel. The 56 Muslim nations in
the UN normally vote as a bloc against Israel. Delegates expressing opprobrious
antisemitic or anti-Zionist opinions were never called to order, nor
did they seek to delete or soften their invectives in the UN’s public record,
although many of those verbal assaults constitute incitement or hate speech.
Nor was President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda reproved for a speech to the
General Assembly in 1975 that was laced with allusions to the notorious
forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and his call for “the
extinction of Israel.” A new term has had to be added to our vocabulary:
“politicide.” Such facts and statistics reveal a deep prejudice against Jews
and the State of Israel, which remained undiminished until the repeal of the
1975 resolution repeal in 1991. Yet the repeal’s significance is easily overemphasized,
because in those 16 years, antisemitism and its twin, anti-Zionism,
seeped in to permeate much of the UN structure, and the General
Assembly remained an antisemitic bastion legitimizing antisemitism from
its rostrum at least until 2004. 37
An auspicious development was a 1992 Report of the Secretary-General
to the Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection
of Minorities, which makes repeated reference to antisemitism as a
form of racism and calls Holocaust denial “a new form of antisemitism.”
The follow-up 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna did add
genocide to its list of infractions, yet, because of destructive amendments,
there was no mention of antisemitism as dangerous and a source of violence.
The situation was salvaged in some measure by the NGO forum in
attendance, which issued a statement designating antisemitism as danger
and evil that must be effectively condemned and combated. In the same
year, the General Assembly established the position of the high commissioner
for human rights; a later holder of the office declared human rights to
be “universal, indivisible, interrelated and interdependent.” 38
The 2001 UN Durban Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was in many respects a debacle.
Despite the furious antisemitic rhetoric and the boycott by the United States
and Israel, however, the proceedings were not nearly so bleak as casual
37. See the report of the International Legal Conference on Anti-Semitism, and
Anti-Zionism and the United Nations, in Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, 17
(1987): 9-147.
38. Stephen J. Roth, “The Legal Fight against Anti-Semitism—Survey of
Developments in 1993 and 1994,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, 25 (1995):
352; Mary Robinson, A Voice for Peace, ed. Kevin Boyle (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 9.