Pillay’s Pogrom: The U.N. Tells Palestinian Terrorists, “We Have Your Back”

The United Nations has just released a report that promotes the murder of Jews. The product of a UN “Commission of Inquiry,” created by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Navi Pillay, comes only days after the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The message from Pillay’s pogrom directly to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations: we have your back.

Navi Pillay was the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during both the 2008/9 and 2014 Gaza wars, and on both occasions, championed the blood libel and lethal lie that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, including children. UN rules require “independent experts” to be “impartial” and “objective.” Pillay was appointed as Chair of the “inquiry” in 2021 because she was neither. The same is true of the other two members of the “inquiry” – more accurately, inquisition – Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti.

Her latest report is a frightening testament to how today’s war against the Jews is conducted on two fronts, in the field and via the United Nations.

The UN resolution that created the inquisition about Israel resulted from the criminal masterminds at the UN Human Rights Council – undemocratic Islamic states in cahoots with China, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela. Not a single Western state voted in favor.¹ It has an extraordinary budget, an unprecedented mandate with no end date, and an unlimited scope back to “time immemorial,”² all in pursuit of criminalizing the Jewish state.

The inquisition’s methodology consists of calling for submissions and ignoring all the ones Pillay labeled “pro-Israel.”³ It produces two reports yearly, one to the Human Rights Council and the other to the General Assembly. The recently released report will be presented by Pillay in person to the General Assembly on October 24. It is an opportune time for a Hamas enabler to do damage control; to that end, nothing is sacred.

Throughout her report, the words “terrorism,” “terror,” and “terrorist” appear in quotation marks. Over and over, the report ridicules Israeli defensive operations. It describes Israeli forces as “targeting persons they defined as ‘terrorists.’”⁴ It speaks of “the Israeli Government’s justification of its conduct as a defense against ‘terrorism.’”⁵ It snidely remarks, “Israeli security forces claimed that at least 50 ‘terror’ attacks had been launched.”⁶

The quotation marks are defended on the grounds that the UN has no definition of terrorism. They fail to mention that the UN does not define terrorism precisely because Islamic states demand an exemption clause for killing Israeli Jews.⁷

After heralding the fact that “‘terrorism’ is not clearly defined,”⁸ these terror facilitators refuse to name a single Palestinian terror organization. They didn’t name any one of the terrorist organizations participating in the October 7^th slaughter – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They are all designated terror organizations by democratic states worldwide – but not by Pillay and the UN.

The inquisition is officially charged with looking for the “root causes” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They have decided the root cause is Israel – the Jewish victims themselves.

Their report is a sickening inversion of cause and effect. The manifesto claims that it is Israeli counter-terrorism efforts that incite Palestinian violence. In the report’s words:

“The increasing use of force in Israeli security forces operations…trigger protests, encourage greater armed resistance and lead to further attacks by Palestinian armed groups against Israelis.”⁹

“Armed resistance” is the vile UN glorification of killing Jews with suicide bombs, rockets, guns, knives, car rammings, rocks, arson, and IEDs. After October 7, the list has expanded to beheadings, rape, flesh-ripping grenades flung into groups of Jews huddled together in a hiding place, “cooking” human beings with incendiary weapons (in the words of one medical witness), murdering children in front of parents and parents in front of children – and filming the execution of these atrocities, putting them on social media, and sending them to family members.

Incitement of Antisemitism

Pillay’s reversal of cause and effect is also a cover-up for what incites “further attacks” by those “Palestinian armed groups:” Antisemitism; the systematic demonization of Jews; incessant Palestinian encouragement of terror; and the ghoulish Palestinian Authority’s “pay-to-slay” reward policy for killing Jews. Attacks are all part and parcel of the refusal of the Palestinians to accept Israel’s basic right to exist as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

The report goes so far as to claim that Israel has no right of self-defense against Palestinians, including against Hamas in Gaza. In its words, “Israel is unable to rely on Article 51” – the article of the UN Charter that acknowledges every state’s right of self-defense.¹⁰ For support, the inquisitors point to a non-legally binding, widely criticized proposition of a 2004 “advisory opinion” of the UN’s World Court (ICJ). The ICJ opined that the right of self-defense was limited to combating state actors and not terrorist threats. When the ICJ opinion was released, Hamas and Islamic Jihad immediately issued statements that read: “We salute the court’s decision” and “the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, welcomes the ICJ’s decision.”¹¹ The report reads like a Hamas-UN tag team at work.

A constant feature of the report is to belittle the threats Israel faces. The inquisitors characterize “stone-throwing” as “a general form of protest against the occupation”¹² and paint a picture of children lobbing pebbles at the ogre-sized Israeli war machine. “Stone-throwing does not normally pose an imminent threat to the lives of heavily armed and armored military forces.”¹³ Three-year-old Adele Biton, the Palmer family, including one-year-old Yonatan and Alexander Levlovich, all murdered by Palestinian stone throwers bombarding their cars, is another example of the inquisition’s message: Jewish lives don’t matter.

In a stomach-churning defense of Hamas terrorists and their methods, the report slams Israel for worrying about Hamas’s so-called “Great March of Return.” This March is depicted as innocent First Amendment enthusiasts rather than part of a diabolical plan to breach the security fence and conduct mass murder. Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, put it this way on April 6, 2018: “We will take down the border [with Israel], and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”¹⁴

The Great March was a coordinated effort¹⁵ organized by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other Gaza-based terrorist organizations – the same organizations whose members participated in the October 7 massacres. They organized mass gatherings of tens of thousands in multiple strategic locations¹⁶ along the fence separating Gaza from Israel, planted IEDs¹⁷ to open holes in the wall, and instructed participants to bring knives and guns to take advantage of any opportunity to murder and kidnap Israelis.¹⁸

In short, the “Great March of Return” was the first concerted effort of Gazan terror groups to invade Israel and slaughter Israelis. But not to Pillay and her UN crew. Her report blasts Israel – not Hamas’s activities on the Gaza-Israel divide – because “The Commission affirms the right of the Palestinian people to protest against the occupation.”¹⁹

The horrible spectacle of this UN body greenlighting terror is also on display in its devotion of an entire section to “recurring escalations of hostilities in Gaza.” According to the inquisitors, the fault of Hamas’ “violence…including during the 2018 Great March of Return protests along the perimeter fence” is Israel’s. Specifically, the blame lies with “the larger context of the Israeli occupation…such as systematic discrimination, coercive environment, settlement expansion.”²⁰

There hasn’t been an Israeli settlement in Gaza in almost twenty years. Forcing Israelis into bomb shelters repeatedly week after week, month after month, and year after year – to survive rocket attacks – is what ordinary people call coercive. As for systematic discrimination, twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab – with more rights and freedoms than any Arab state. The only Jews in Gaza are those hostages who have been torn apart from their families and friends and are being used and abused in unspeakable terms.

As for systematic discrimination and root causes, Pillay’s report refuses to utter a word: antisemitism.

The Hamas governing Charter is brazenly dedicated to exterminating Jews and the Jewish state. The continuous flow of venomous Jew-hatred from Palestinian terrorists and Holocaust-denying leaders is all in the public domain. It was also in the inquisition’s inbox because it was included in submissions.

So why is there no mention of antisemitism in Pillay’s report or the urgent press release she issued less than 48 hours after the attempted genocide? Pillay explained her perspective to the UN press corps last October. She was confronted with the fact that since their appointment, fellow inquisition member Kothari had told a webinar that Jews control social media;²¹ member Sidoti had told the UN itself that Jews throw around “antisemitism” like rice at a wedding;²² and she had defended them both. Responding to concerns about the obvious antisemitism, she said: “This is always raised as a diversion.”²³

The report is a litany of falsehoods dressed up as “law.” It cites “evidence” of casualties from the Palestinian-controlled “Palestinian Ministry of Health” as if it was independent and reliable.²⁴ So terrorists are civilians because they say so. It systematically ignores the actual context, in one instance condemning Israeli forces for having “damaged civilian objects such as roads”²⁵ – without mentioning that the Israeli troops had neutralized 11 land mines planted by terrorists under those roads.²⁶ The report is littered with wild defamatory accusations accompanied by footnotes that say “interview on file” and “documents on file” – unnamed, unverifiable, and unaccountable sources.

But the fundamental obscenity of the report, which mirrors the filth of the inquisition’s immediate reaction to the mass murder of Jews by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, is the parallel these human rights frauds make between Israel and internationally-recognized terror organizations. The charade appears even-handed, mouthing the “cycle of conflict,” and feigning an address to “all parties.” Pillay’s report says:

“The Commission considers that Israeli authorities and Palestinian armed groups have failed to take effective precautionary measures to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible.”²⁷

The depth of depravity evinced in this sentence is shocking.

On October 7, Palestinian terrorists entered a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri. A first responder recounts what he saw. There were two parents and two children, about 6 or 7, a boy and a girl. The family was around a dining room table, children on one side, parents on the other. They had been tied up, each with their hands behind their backs. The terrorists appear to have sampled the food prepared for the holiday. All four had signs of torture. The father had one of his eyes gouged out. Each family member had a bullet hole in the back of their head.²⁸ Navi Pillay characterizes the problem with Palestinian “armed groups” as failing to take precautionary measures to avoid civilian casualties.

Israel seeks to avoid civilian casualties. Palestinian terrorists seek to cause them. Israel faces an existential threat, and Palestinian terrorists gleefully agree. The UN “Commission of Inquiry” spins genocidal mass murderers as reasonable people and Israel’s moral equal.

Pillay’s report ends by denouncing Israel’s pre-October 7 attempts to deter attacks from Gaza as illegal. More than 1,400 Jews dead and 4,629 injured rips the humanitarian façade off this UN “inquiry” and its despicable narrative that Israel concocted an imaginary threat as part of a nefarious plot of Jewish domination²⁹ and repression.³⁰

The report blasts the image of the wanton Israeli child-killer worldwide. Numbers are recited. When children are hurt, the banal, truncated context provided is “during law enforcement operations and associated clashes.”³¹ What’s missing? Palestinians under the age of 18 do carry out terror attacks. Palestinian children are indoctrinated in Jew-hatred – incited to murder Jews by official schools,³² media, summer camps,³³ monetary rewards,³⁴ and their parents. Palestinian children are used as child soldiers.³⁵ Particularly girls³⁶ are recruited by terror organizations to carry out terror activities, which deprives them of their protected status under international humanitarian law.³⁷ All crimes on the part of Palestinians. All irrelevant to a UN inquisition fixated on demonizing Israelis.

The report’s pathological treatment of the Jewish state is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by what it calls the “Gender impact.” Allegedly, Israel discriminates against Palestinian women and girls because patriarchy leaves them unable to murder and maim Israelis themselves. So when Israelis dare to return fire, they “burden” Palestinian females who are left to care for Palestinian males and their offspring.

Read it for yourself:

“Fewer women and girls are killed and injured by Israeli security forces than men and boys. This should be seen within the social context in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, where women and girls participate less frequently in the public domain. These gender dynamics result in a disproportionate burden on women who have had to become caregivers to injured family members and primary breadwinners when men are killed, injured or detained, underscoring the context of intersecting forms of discrimination and violence against Palestinian women and girls.”³⁸

Beyond the twisted gibberish, the lie is easily exposed. Seventy percent of Palestinian terrorists arrested are single; only 15% have children; unemployment levels make it far more likely that the killers were unemployed; and the families of terrorists receive monthly allowances from the Palestinian Authority for doing the killing.³⁹ The information was available to the inquisitors from submissions. But it didn’t fit their scheme for demonizing Jews.

The report even blames Israel for sexual violence by Palestinian men against Palestinian women. Apparently, they hadn’t read the submission providing them with an official Palestinian Authority broadcast in which the Mufti of Gaza explained to Palestinian men how to beat their wives.⁴⁰ Instead, referring to what the inquisitors call Israeli “attacks” on Gaza, the report says:

“The impact of displacement, death and injuries of family members has been particularly dire for women, as it has been compounded by gendered dimensions of the economic hardship and increased risks of sexual and gender-based violence.”⁴¹

After the current war began and prior to the presentation of their report to the General Assembly, the inquisitors scrambled to stay on message and market their fact-finding acumen by weighing in with two press releases. Here are some women’s rights issues that Pillay, the self-styled women’s rights advocate, omitted in her frenzy to analogize Israel to Hamas. Her inquiry ignores evidence of Palestinian terrorists who use rape as a weapon of war, who post videos of the actual rape and murder of Jewish women, who distribute explicit photos of the horror inflicted on bloodied Jewish women and girls, who ripped open a pregnant woman’s womb and stabbed the unborn baby while still attached to its mother. Emergency workers had to consider cutting the umbilical cord and burying the fetus and mother separately. They decided to use one body bag because, in the words of the traumatized first responder: “We are not the evil people to separate the infant from the mother.”

Pillay’s inquisition reacted to news of Palestinian atrocities by attempting to rewrite the facts and defend the fictions. They rushed out a press release on October 10, a mere 48 hours after the massacre of Israelis. Hundreds of Jewish bodies were uncounted and unidentified. Israel was still under attack on multiple fronts. And yet the inquisition press statement claimed that:

• what had occurred was an “explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza” – not an invasion of a UN member state and slaughter of its civilians,

• “the parties” should “cease all forms of violence,” – meaning Israel needed to stop fighting back immediately, and

• the slaughter of Jews was the fault of the victims because “the root cause of the conflict” is Israel’s “illegal occupation.”

The UN onslaught didn’t stop there. At the very same time that Israeli civilians were being targeted, beheaded, raped, maimed, tortured, blown apart, burned alive, and gunned down, and the old, the sick, babies, and children were being bound and dragged to Gaza, Navi Pillay was collecting “evidence” of Israeli war crimes. After suggesting Israel could have “targeted civilians,” she said:

“The Commission has been collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes committed by all sides since 7 October 2023.”⁴²

It was precisely what Hamas and every Palestinian terrorist wanted to hear. Navi Pillay and her UN inquisition had their back.

Palestinian terrorists and their UN counterparts have already made their next move, namely, giving Pillay and her inquisition the lead in mounting a criminal-type investigation of the current war. Less than two weeks after an attempted genocide of grotesque proportions for the Jewish people – and for the civilized world, Pillay purports to define the need (to suit Hamas) and the solution. She has assigned herself the job of investigating “crimes committed by any armed actors, including both State and non-State actors, since 7 October 2023.”⁴³ It is the UN’s idea of an even-handed approach to crimes committed by both the anti-beheaders and the pro-beheaders. Naturally, the endeavor will require more resources and a larger budget. Without Congressional action, the United States will deplorably remain as the “inquiry’s” largest financier.

The bottom line: the UN plans to control the narrative and deliver indictments of Israelis by the International Criminal Court. How? By purporting to assume an authoritative investigative role in the current war. It is a despicable desecration of the dead and a barbaric assault on the tormented living. For which the Jewish people has one answer: Am Yisrael Chai – despite the United Nations.

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