The UN Commission on the Status of Women concluded its 60th annual session in New York by condemning only Israel – and no other nation in the world – as an abuser of women’s rights.

The UN Human Rights Council (CSW) concluded its month-long session in Geneva last week by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states.

“At New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descend on only one country,” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, wrote in a recent Fox News column.

“On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called ‘adultery,’ Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian,” Bayefsky noted. “Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the UN a harmless international salon or a bad joke?”

“The poison isn’t simply rhetorical,” she stressed, in an apparent reference to the worldwide anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.

“One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel – as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield.”

 

Is Europe ‘Petrified or Already Vanquished’?

The fact that the CSW event took place during the same week that Islamic State terrorists struck Brussels in simultaneous suicide bombings that claimed 34 innocent lives and wounded scores of others was striking. “Petrified or already vanquished, no European state voted against this onslaught of UN resolutions against Israel,” Bayefsky wrote. “Germany and the United Kingdom occasionally abstained, while France voted with Arab and Islamic states on all but one Council resolution.”

Indeed, Natan Sharansky, Jewish Agency for Israel chair, questioning what the future holds for Jews in Europe, told an audience at a Gatestone Institute event last week that an increasing number of countries are changing from “free societies” to “fear societies,” pointing to the phenomenon of “a minority who does not believe in the values of democracy confronting a majority who has given up on demanding those values.”

“Here we are just 70 years after World War II and Europeans believe that they can license this vitriol against the Jewish state – the only democracy on the front lines of an Islamist war against human decency – and the consequences can be contained to the Jews,” Bayefsky declared.

She also slammed the Obama administration, saying the US president “has been the Human Rights Council’s most important supporter…

“Memo to Americans who are mad as hell: It’s time to elicit a promise from our would-be leaders to refuse to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council or to legitimize the United Nations. ”

Last year, too, the CSW condemned Israel, faulting the Jewish state for the suffering of Palestinian women when, in fact, the blame should have been directed at the Palestinian Authority.

By: United with Israel Staff