Israel’s U.N. Envoy Rips Up Human Rights Council Report over ‘Obsessive Bias’

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan ripped up a report by the U.N. Human Rights Council during an address at the U.N. General Assembly, slamming the global rights body for its “obsessive anti-Israel bias.”

“It’s always open season on Israel at the Human Rights Council,” Erdan told the General Assembly in New York on Friday.

The UNHRC has issued 142 condemnations against U.N. member states altogether, of which 95 were leveled against Israel. As Erdan noted, the human rights agency had issued 35 condemnations against Syria and only 10 against Iran.

“The voices of the victims of the terrible crimes against humanity that we have already seen in the first decades of this century cannot be heard over the obsession of the so-called Human Rights Council with targeting Israel,” Erdan said.

“The suffering of the victims of humanity’s greatest crimes goes unnoticed. Shame on you, shame on you, shame on you!”

Erdan’s ripping of the UNHRC’s annual report mimicked former ambassador Chaim Herzog’s famous gesture ripping of the “Zionist-is-racism” resolution passed by the U.N. in 1975.

That resolution was eventually revoked in 1991.

“It was on this stage, at this very body, that the very right of the Jewish people, to have a national home, was itself declared to be racist. A decision that was justly overturned,” Erdan said.

“A decision that Israel’s ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog, tore up, before the United Nations,” he added.

“And this is exactly what should be done to this antisemitic, distorted, one-sided report. For just as that 1975 resolution, equating Zionism with racism was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body, so too, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied, once again, by this report, should have no place in anybody concerned with human rights, security or peace.

“Its only place in the dustbin of antisemitism, and that is exactly how we shall treat it,” he concluded, ripping the document into four pieces before stepping down from the podium.