{"id":225951,"date":"2026-07-28T11:05:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/225951\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T11:05:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:05:23","slug":"the-blood-libel-returns-israel-genocide-and-the-united-nations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/225951\/","title":{"rendered":"The blood libel returns: Israel, genocide, and the United Nations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Titled The Matzah of Zion and penned by one of the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad\u2019s<\/a> most loyal lieutenants, Mustafa Tlass, the book revisited the 1840 Damascus blood libel affair<\/a> in which local Jews were accused of having murdered a Capuchin friar and his Muslim servant, using the priest\u2019s blood to prepare the unleavened bread which Jews consume during the annual Passover holiday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tlass\u2019s endorsement of the libel was yet another outing for a patently false allegation first leveled at Jews centuries earlier, when a 12-year-old boy named William was found dead outside the English city of Norwich, a myth that has persisted ever since.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Jew can kill you and take your blood in order to make his Zionist bread,\u201d Tlass wrote. Elsewhere in the text, he asserted that what happened in 1840 has been repeated many times in the 20th century when \u201cthe Zionists committed collective crimes in Palestine and in Lebanon that stirred the conscience of the noble ones throughout the world and were denounced by world opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SyrianSyrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass\u2019s \u2018The Matzah of Zion,\u2019 which revisits the 1840 Damascus blood libel affair, was used to attack Israel in the UN Human Rights Council. That blood libel is being revived. (credit: LOUAI BESHARA\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The fact that the blood libel was voiced in the halls of the United Nations, an organization created in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, failed to move the UN bureaucracy. It took five months for the president of the Human Rights Commission to distance himself from Shaalan\u2019s remarks, and only then due to the relentless efforts of the US delegate, Ambassador Morris Abram.<\/p>\n

A case built on distortion<\/p>\n

Thirty-five years later, that same UN body \u2013 now rebranded as the Human Rights Council \u2013 has issued its own blood libel, charging Israel with committing macabre, outrageous, and outlandish crimes against Palestinian children, and aiming to stir \u201cthe conscience of the noble ones throughout the world\u201d in much the same manner as Mustafa Tlass did.<\/p>\n

On June 23, the Council published a report assembled by its so-called Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. The press release accompanying the report left no doubt as to its thrust, declaring that \u201cIsrael continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children\u201d in the headline.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cdeliberately\u201d is key here. According to the 1949 Genocide Convention<\/a>, intentionality needs to be demonstrated for atrocities against a particular group to qualify as genocide. This report \u2013 the eighth to be released by the Commission, which was formed in 2021 and is headed and staffed by anti-Zionist ideologues with an annual budget of over $4 million \u2013 manifestly fails to prove that.<\/p>\n

For example, it cites a statement by former IDF spokesperson R-Adm. Daniel Hagari, claiming Israel was now focused on causing \u201cmaximum damage\u201d to Hamas\u2019 military capabilities. The report concludes that these remarks, together with Israeli operations, indicate \u201cde facto blanket permission\u201d to target civilian locations across Gaza.<\/p>\n

Even if one takes Hagari\u2019s statement at face value, this is a grossly illogical interpretation, since he was clearly talking about defeating Hamas as a military organization, and not the civilian population in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Yet tellingly, the report makes no mention of a subsequent statement from the IDF pointing out Hagari had not advocated for \u201cmaximum damage\u201d in either Hebrew or English, instead explaining that \u201conce the objective became to destroy Hamas\u2019 military capabilities altogether, the IDF made a strategic shift from focusing on exactly which Hamas targets to hit, to striking as many Hamas military targets as possible, with the aim of dismantling all of Hamas\u2019s military capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hagari\u2019s words, it added, \u201chad been selectively misinterpreted and misquoted to suggest that the IDF is focused on causing maximum damage to Gaza as a whole. This is blatantly false.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even more fundamentally, analysis or explanation of Hamas\u2019s war-fighting methods is invisible in the report, giving the lie to the Commission\u2019s claim of being \u201cindependent.\u201d While it is true that Gaza was devastated in the war triggered by the October 7, 2023, mass atrocities, the lion\u2019s share of responsibility for that lies with Hamas. To admit to this truth, or to even acknowledge it in a footnote, would amount to a step too far for the Commission.<\/p>\n

This ideological distortion runs throughout the report. It quotes an unnamed doctor who claims Israeli soldiers were \u201cdeliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice,\u201d yet provides neither the doctor\u2019s identity nor the date of the visit and cites no source.<\/p>\n

It ignores reports that Hamas prevented civilians from following Israeli evacuation warnings, treats isolated misconduct by Israeli soldiers as evidence of a national policy of dehumanization, and presents sweeping conclusions \u2013 including that Israel sought \u201cto destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group in Gaza\u201d \u2013 as fact.<\/p>\n

Institutionalizing anti-Zionism<\/p>\n

What is driving this endless stream of genocide accusations from within the UN is not a commitment to the truth, but a noxious anti-Zionist stance that dates back at least to the Soviet-backed General Assembly resolution of November 1975 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.<\/p>\n

The Commission is only one of several individuals and bodies carrying the UN\u2019s imprimatur that are dedicated to discriminating against Israel specifically.<\/p>\n

\"UNUN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese frequently incorporates the basest antisemitic tropes. (credit: Pier Marco Tacca\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

To mention only a few of these, there is the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, created on the same day the General Assembly deemed Zionism to be racism; there is the fixed \u201cItem 7\u201d on the Human Rights Council\u2019s agenda dedicated to alleged Israeli violations alone; and there is the sprawling network of special representatives and special rapporteurs.<\/p>\n

This latter group includes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, who is the subject of US sanctions and whose incendiary rhetoric frequently incorporates the basest antisemitic tropes; and Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General\u2019s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, who attempted to shout down Israel\u2019s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, during a recent hearing on a separate UN report that placed Israel on a blacklist of armed forces who abuse children.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the ranks of the UN\u2019s anti-Zionists may well be strengthened with the recent appointment of Pau P\u00e9rez-Sales as Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.<\/p>\n

A psychiatrist and a Spanish citizen, P\u00e9rez-Sales published at least two academic papers during the Gaza war that relegated the October 7 massacre to the sidelines while pushing allegations of \u201cgenocide\u201d and other crimes, including systematic sexual abuse. Given his fixation with Israel, P\u00e9rez-Sales will be both a natural partner for Albanese and her potential replacement once her mandate comes up for renewal in May 2028.<\/p>\n

A deadly theme first embraced by English peasants in medieval times has successfully traveled to the banks of the East River in New York City centuries later.<\/p>\n

Blood libels, freed from the pesky truth, confirmed on October 7 that Israel\u2019s enemies seek to inflict \u201cmaximum damage\u201d in their bid to eliminate the Jewish state, lie at the heart of the UN\u2019s strategy to weaken and ultimately punish the State of Israel. Mustafa Tlass would no doubt be satisfied.\u25a0<\/p>\n

Ben Cohen is the Director of Rapid Response at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Titled The Matzah of Zion and penned by one of the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad\u2019s most loyal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,15034,27882,37,12623,1243,64527],"class_list":["post-225951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-antizionism","tag-blood-libel","tag-israel","tag-jerusalem-report","tag-united-nations","tag-us-human-rights-commission"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116997280822654432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}