{"id":26853,"date":"2025-11-03T09:40:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T07:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=26853"},"modified":"2025-11-03T09:40:36","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T07:40:36","slug":"the-anti-zionist-racist-and-the-man-who-fought-the-uns-zionism-is-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/the-anti-zionist-racist-and-the-man-who-fought-the-uns-zionism-is-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"The anti-Zionist racist and the man who fought the UN\u2019s \u2018Zionism is racism\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

A half century ago, a courageous New York hero, a proud Democrat working for a Republican president, stood before the world and denounced the UN\u2019s poisonous hatred that Zionism is racism, so how can anyone of good conscience support a mayoral candidate who aligns with that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a patriotic New York liberal, led the West\u2019s fight against the UN\u2019s Zionism is racism resolution. Moynihan called this assault on Israel an assault on democracy and decency. Americans\u2019 near-unanimous disgust with that resolution marked the fall of the UN \u2014 its reputation never recovered.<\/p>\n

Today, New York is terrifyingly close to electing an America-bashing, police-defunding, snake-oil-peddling, socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose anti-Zionism became his political launching pad in college. Let\u2019s hope that our descendants in 2075 won\u2019t mark this Election Day, Nov. 4, as the 50th anniversary of the fall of New York.<\/p>\n

In 1975, Americans recognized that singling out one form of nationalism \u2014 Jewish nationalism, meaning Zionism \u2014 in the world forum of nationalisms, singled out Jews, which is antisemitic. Moynihan, America\u2019s UN ambassador, scoffed that Zionism isn\u2019t racist, which means biologically-based bigotry. Israel\u2019s conflict with Palestinians is national not racial, with dark-skinned Jews and light-skinned Palestinians. \u201cIndeed, the idea that Jews are a \u2018race\u2019 was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews,\u201d he emphasized.<\/p>\n

This kid from Hell\u2019s Kitchen who rose to become a Harvard professor and, after the UN, New York\u2019s four-term senator, worried. If the vocabulary of human rights was drained of its meaning and weaponized against Israel, it would undermine liberal democracy. \u201cIf we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries,\u201d he thundered, \u201cwe will not have words to replace them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israeli UN Ambassador Chaim Herzog, the father of current Israeli President Isaac Herzog, noted the sick coincidence. Nov. 10 was the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, he told the General Assembly. \u201cThis was the night of 10 Nov. 1938 when Hitler\u2019s Nazi stormtroopers launched a coordinated attack on the Jewish community in Germany,\u201d burning synagogues and holy books, heralding the Holocaust. Then, his knockout punch: \u201cHitler would have felt at home \u2026 listening to the proceedings\u2026during the debate on Zionism.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting question for New York voters, asking which mayoral candidate would make America\u2019s enemies feel more at home.<\/p>\n

Many Black activists feared the devaluing of the term racism too. \u201cSmearing the \u2018racist\u2019 label on Zionism is an insult to intelligence,\u201d wrote Vernon Jordan, the National Urban League president. \u201cBlack people, who recognize code words since we\u2019ve been victimized by code words\u2026 can easily smell out the fact that \u2018Zionism\u2019 in this context is a code word for antisemitism.\u201d Jordan wondered how the UN could say \u201cnational self-determination is for everyone except Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Yorkers beamed in 1946 when the UN\u2019s General Assembly, representing post-World War II optimism, voted to establish its permanent headquarters in the Big Apple. Now, they lost respect for this dishonest den dominated by dictators. The next day, more than 100,000 New Yorkers mobbed a noontime \u201crally against racism and antisemitism\u201d at the Brotherhood-in-Action plaza in Manhattan\u2019s Garment District \u2014 Jews and non-Jews, Blacks and whites, labor union organizers and Wall Street types, priests and nuns, ministers and pastors.<\/p>\n

Bayard Rustin, the labor leader and civil rights activist who helped his friend Martin Luther King Jr. organize the 1963 \u201cI Have a Dream,\u201d March on Washington, kept warning about the \u201cincalculable damage\u201d done to the fight against racism, when the word becomes a political weapon not a moral standard. Rooting anti-Zionism in the ugly intersection between traditional antisemitism and the Arab desire to eradicate Israel, Rustin quoted King, who said: \u201cwhen people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n

That day Rustin ended his speech by singing \u201cGo Down, Moses.\u201d As thousands of New Yorkers, shouted \u201cLet my people go,\u201d Blacks and Jews bonded together, united in fighting all haters.<\/p>\n

The fight Moynihan spearheaded so inspired Americans and especially New Yorkers \u2014 because the 1970s were so depressing. Americans were reeling from Watergate, Vietnam, inflation. Teetering on bankruptcy, New York was dirty, chaotic, and crime-ridden. Days before the UN\u2019s farce, on Oct. 30, the Daily News captured New Yorkers\u2019 frustration with President Gerald Ford\u2019s refusal to bail out the city, by running that epic headline: \u201cFORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, as the world targeted Israel \u2014 obviously trying to humiliate its closest ally, America, Moynihan resisted. Exposing the Soviet Communists, dictators like the Butcher of Uganda, Idi Amin, and the bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, championing this resolution, Moynihan didn\u2019t defend the \u201caccused\u201d \u2014 he blasted \u201cthe accusers.\u201d<\/p>\n

His State Department bosses then accused him of being \u201cundiplomatic.\u201d He took it as a compliment. Diplomats, he explained, charm when possible, but must know when to fight too, especially when national honor is at stake. Moynihan blamed whatever backlash he encountered on the new Western defeatism. He tried to fix whatever flaws America had, but he could distinguish between democracies like America and Israel \u2014 and their totalitarian enemies.<\/div>\n
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Americans craved such boldness. Polls showed most Americans approved Moynihan\u2019s move. All of America\u2019s 50 leading newspapers ran editorials condemning the UN, with 34 branding Resolution 3379 antisemitic.<\/div>\n
If Hollywood made a movie about Moynihan\u2019s moment, its tag line would be: When America was down\u2026 one man stood tall. \u201cAs a sort of ambassadorial fighting Irishman, Pat Moynihan has become an American pop hero,\u201d Time magazine gushed. Cabbies honked their approval, shouting \u201cattaboy Pat,\u201d as he walked around New York. Everyone at Carnegie Hall rose and cheered when Moynihan attended a concert there.<\/div>\n
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A decade later, President Ronald Reagan recalled that \u201cFew events have so offended the American people as the \u2018Zionism is racism\u2019 resolution.\u201d Reagan promised to keep leading a years-long bipartisan effort, trying to remove \u201cthis blot from the UN record.\u201d<\/div>\n
Six years later, in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the General Assembly rescinded the resolution. That year, Zohran Mamdani was born in a Uganda still recovering from the raving anti-Zionist and mass murderer, Idi Amin.<\/div>\n
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Nevertheless, this UN-sanctioned lie that Zionism is racism\u00a0became a gateway to hatred. It\u00a0<\/span>opened the floodgates, leading to waves of antisemitic anti-Zionism. Generations of young Westerners have been raised on a new anti-Jewish obsession. Today, unlike Medieval times, it\u2019s not \u201cthe Jew\u201d but \u201cthe Jewish state,\u201d Israel, that\u2019s blamed for so many problems \u2014 and found guilty of the worst crimes.<\/div>\n
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Exploiting the world\u2019s justifiable disgust with South African apartheid, Palestinian activists deemed Israel an \u201capartheid state.\u201d Watching academics reduce so many conflicts to \u201coppressed versus oppressors,\u201d Palestinians posed as the ultimate victims, forever innocent and oppressed by their perpetually-guilt Israeli oppressors. And as \u201csettler-colonialism\u201d became progressives\u2019 slur du-jour, Israel became a \u201csettler-colonial\u201d enterprise, denying Jews\u2019 3,500-year-old roots in the Land of Israel, and Zionism\u2019s rebellion against Ottoman Turkish and British colonialism.<\/div>\n
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The parallels today are unnerving as a new generation raised on this anti-American, illiberal, breast-beating, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing, anti-Zionism tries seizing power.<\/div>\n