U.S. Rebukes Veteran Arab Diplomat Over Remark to U.N. Security Council Comparing Gaza to 'Concentration Camp'

"A veteran Arab diplomat's remark comparing the Gaza Strip with a 'concentration camp' at a Security Council briefing drew a sharp rebuke from the US mission to the United Nations on Tuesday.

'Indecent and irresponsible remarks such as these are another example of the anti-Israel bias at the UN that has to end,' a spokesperson for the US mission to the UN told The Algemeiner following the speech at a Security Council meeting on 'the Middle East, including the Palestinian question' given by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and UN envoy to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

During his address, Brahimi - who spoke as a member 'The Elders,' a body of global influencers gathered under the auspices of former US President Jimmy Carter - sympathetically quoted a Palestinian woman in Gaza who told him, 'Israel has put us in a concentration camp.'...

'The Security Council has provided a platform to antisemitic comments and a malicious blood libel,' Danon declared in a statement. 'This one-sided obsession with Israel is beyond the pale. To accuse the Jewish state of using concentration camps is not only despicable, but it degrades the Security Council and the UN as a whole. We demand that the Security Council renounce Brahimi's statement immediately.'

Brahimi is no stranger to controversies arising from his comments about Israel or Jews more broadly. In 2009, he told the Algerian daily Liberte that 'the Jewish-Zionist lobby is controlling political life in the US and can pass any decision in Congress almost unanimously.' One year later, Israel's then-ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, accused Brahimi of 'prejudice, bigotry and antisemitism' after the Algerian described Israel and its policies as 'the great poison in the region.'..."