Category Archives: United Nations

The Permission Slip Macklemore Got in 2014

Posted on by
Reply

In May 2014, Macklemore walked onto a Seattle stage wearing a large prosthetic nose, dark wig, beard and black suit. Then he performed “Thrift Shop,” a song about being cheap.

Macklemore in Jewface in 2014, singing about being cheap

It would be difficult to construct a more recognizable antisemitic spectacle: the exaggerated Jewish nose, the beard, the dark clothes, all while singing about bargain hunting. Actor Seth Rogen mocked Macklemore’s explanation that it was merely a random disguise: if someone were instructed to assemble an antisemitic Jewish costume, Rogen wrote, “they’d have that exact shopping list.”

As criticism mounted, Macklemore apologized. He acknowledged that the outfit could be understood as a Jewish caricature but maintained that no Jewish stereotype had crossed his mind.

Yeah, right. That should have been a simple moment for the Anti-Defamation League to clearly denounce the spectacle.

Instead, the ADL chose absolution.

“We take him at his word that he did not have any ill intent,” then-ADL director Abraham Foxman said, “and unreservedly accept his apology.” And then Macklemore gave the ADL a promotional shout-out. “Through this situation I’ve got hip to some incredible groups like the ADL,” he wrote, encouraging people to check out their “great work.”

The country’s best-known antisemitism organization publicly and “unreservedly” accepted his apology and also his advertisement. It is unclear whether there was a quid-pro-quo and whether the ADL was trying to promote its antisemitism study it released the week before.

As they say in text-land: “WTF?”

Twelve Years Later

It is now 2026, and antisemitism is raging through American public life. Much of it no longer arrives wearing a fake nose and beard. It travels under political banners, frequently through rhetoric about Zionists and Israel.

And Macklemore is back on a concert stage.

Opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, he told tens of thousands of people why he had joined the tour: so that he could stand in stadiums and say, “Free Palestine.” He accused Israel of genocide, performed “Hind’s Hall” against a backdrop of footage from pro-Palestinian campus encampments and turned part of the concert into a political demonstration.

This time, the ADL wasn’t offering absolution.

“They came for a concert, not performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism’ from his opener, Macklemore,” the organization declared. It pointed to what it describes as his record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.

When Macklemore was subsequently removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s tour, head of ADL Jonathan Greenblatt applauded the decision, saying that “for years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes and demonized Israel and Israelis.”

What a difference twelve years makes.

The Permission Slip

The problem in 2014 wasn’t only that the ADL accepted an apology. It was that it seemingly confused forgiving the man with minimizing the act.

America’s leading antisemitism organization effectively told the public that Macklemore’s updated and revised intentions settled the matter. A concocted and forced apology after multiple attempts to satisfy the offended, became another chip on the accused – I’m sorry you were offended, not I’m sorry that I have done something terrible that offended you.

Jews are the subject. Always. The antisemite is a victim of Jewish sensitivity.

The ADL granted a permission slip of sorts to this vulgarity and inanity. Permission for American culture to treat an astonishingly recognizable Jewish caricature as something that could be quickly explained away if the right person said he hadn’t meant it.

Now, the ADL that once took Macklemore at his word is no longer particularly interested in his assurances about what he means. It considers impact. The false charge of “genocide” against Israel in Israel’s defensive war is a common pretext to attack Jews today. Macklemore’s appeal to thousands wasn’t a call for peace but incitement to pogrom.

But that was precisely the lesson the ADL could have taught in 2014.

There is an important role for forgiveness in fighting hatred. People must be allowed to recognize mistakes, apologize and change. That is what the Ten Days of Repentance we are in right now is about.

But forgiveness without the party internalizing the matter coupled with contrition is meaningless. It is actually much worse. It is a wink with a get-out-of-jail card. Carry on with spreading antisemitism; we’ll only call it out when the situation becomes intolerable.

Neither October 7, 2023 nor October 8 appeared magically. First One Through has been writing about this phenomenon nearly every day since those same days in May 2014, when it wrote about the UN’s Richard Falk stating that Israel’s “criminal intention [toward Palestinians] is genocidal.”

Does that word have a familiar ring to it? The UN has been using it constantly for well over a decade; before the wars of 2014, 2021 or 2023.

Antisemitism is now systemic. It has been fed into the bloodstream of western education, the arts, jihadi education and the United Nations. And for far too long, it was given a permission slip by the very organizations tasked with confronting it.

At the UN, Borders Are Inviolable, Except Israel’s

Posted on by
Reply

At the closing of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its president, Annalena Baerbock, offered a final defense of the international order.

At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.

Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.

Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023

If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.

Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.

Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.

The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.

The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.

Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023

The UN’s Jihadi Exception

Posted on by
1

Twenty-five years after September 11, the United Nations remembered the 2,977 people murdered in what it called the “heinous terrorist attacks” of September 11, 2001, “an assault on humanity itself.” It declared that “the fight against terrorism is a shared, unfinished task.”

But something rather important was missing.

Who were the terrorists? What did they believe? Why did they do it?

There was no al-Qaeda. No Osama bin Laden. No Islamist extremism. No jihadism. Nothing about an ideology whose most famous declaration called for jihad against “Jews and Crusaders.”

Perhaps the United Nations simply avoids attaching ideologies to terrorism. It does not.

After a white supremacist murdered 49 Muslims at two Christchurch mosques in 2019, the UN spoke explicitly about “anti-Muslim hatred,” “anti-Islamic sentiments” and Islamophobia. Secretary-General António Guterres described the Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre as the “worst antisemitic attack in the history of the United States.” Discussing the Halle synagogue attack and related violence, the UN warned about “antisemitic hatred,” “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and their “poisonous ideology.”

That is exactly what an institution confronting extremism should do. Terrorism is an act; ideology can explain its motivation.

Then consider Sri Lanka.

On Easter Sunday 2019, radical Islamist suicide bombers attacked churches and hotels, killing roughly 270 people. Sri Lanka subsequently told the UN that the terrorists had been “inspired and indoctrinated” by extremist organizations including ISIL/Daesh and had “specifically targeted churches.”

Yet on the seventh anniversary in 2026, the UN remembered the victims of the “Easter Sunday attacks.” Not terrorist attacks. Not ISIS-inspired terrorism. Not jihadism or Islamist extremism. Not anti-Christian hatred. The killers’ ideology had vanished.

That makes the 9/11 omission considerably harder to dismiss as an unfortunate choice of words. When Muslims are murdered by an anti-Muslim extremist, the ideology matters. When Jews are murdered by antisemites or neo-Nazis, the ideology matters. But when jihadists murder Americans or ISIS-inspired suicide bombers slaughter Christians at Easter, the UN retreats into the bloodless vocabulary of “terrorism” and “attacks.”

The problem is not that the UN says Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacy or neo-Nazism. The problem is its apparent inability to apply the same principle to jihadism.

That is no longer merely a question of consistency.

A 2024 study by the French think tank Fondapol catalogued 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks since 1979, killing nearly 250,000 people. Roughly 243,000 of those deaths occurred after 2001. Almost 89 percent of the dead were killed in Muslim-majority countries. The Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda accounted for more than four-fifths of the victims.

“Islamist attacks around the world are more numerous today than ever before.” – Fondapol study

Jihadist ideology is therefore hardly an extinct doctrine being dredged up to explain a 25-year-old atrocity. Al-Qaeda survives. ISIS and its affiliates survive. Jihadist organizations continue to recruit and kill around the world, with Muslims overwhelmingly among their victims.

Calling that ideology jihadist or Islamist extremism no more condemns Muslims generally than calling an ideology neo-Nazi condemns Germans. In fact, refusing to make that distinction does Muslims no favor. It obscures an extremist ideology that has slaughtered enormous numbers of Muslims themselves.

Nor are the extremists coy about what they believe. They publish it, preach it, recruit with it and murder in its name. It is the international institutions confronting them that increasingly seem afraid to repeat what the killers themselves say.

So the UN should answer a straightforward question: Why can it say “white supremacist” and “neo-Nazi,” but not “jihadist”?

Has fear of accusations of Islamophobia—or pressure from states and organizations determined to shield Islamist ideology from scrutiny—become so powerful that jihadist supremacy alone receives a linguistic sanctuary at the United Nations?

Whatever the explanation, the consequence is dangerous. An ideology does not become less lethal because international institutions refuse to name it. It simply becomes harder to confront.

When terrorists can proclaim their ideology more plainly than the United Nations can describe it, sensitivity has crossed the line into surrender.

Related:

Pick Your Jihad; Choose Your Infidel (September 2014)

Correcting An UNRWA School

Posted on by
Reply

A school in Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp is reopening. The building is the same but UNRWA is no longer running it.

The school is now affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Education and the Jerusalem Municipality. Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King posted video of UNRWA signs being removed as the school prepared to open.

Sign of UNRWA run school in Shu’afat, Jerusalem

The change ends an educational arrangement dating back more than sixty years.

UNRWA established the Shuafat refugee camp in 1965, when Jordan controlled “East Jerusalem.” UNRWA’s educational policy, dating to 1952, has been to use the curriculum of the “host countries,” allowing refugee children to take local examinations and continue into local schools and universities.

So UNRWA worked with Jordan at that time.

There was nothing internationally settled about Jordan’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Jordan seized eastern Jerusalem in 1948 and annexed the West Bank – including East Jerusalem in 1950. Even Britain, one of only two countries (along with Pakistan) which recognized Jordan’s illegal annexation of the West Bank, specifically withheld recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over Jerusalem. It only recognized Jordan’s de facto authority there.

Yet Jordan administered East Jerusalem, so UNRWA worked with Jordan there.

Then came 1967.

Israel captured East Jerusalem and became the government actually administering Shuafat, much like Jordan had previously. But UNRWA did not treat Israel the same way as the de facto administrating authority.

The Jordanian curriculum continued for years. After the Palestinian Authority was established, UNRWA increasingly coordinated its West Bank education program with it and ultimately used the Palestinian Authority curriculum.

That is difficult to square with the simple explanation that UNRWA follows the curriculum of its host country. The Palestinian Authority did not govern Jerusalem; Israel did. Yet UNRWA chose the PA curriculum for schools there.

The contrast is particularly striking today. Israel has nine foreign embassies located in Jerusalem, with Nauru announced as the tenth. Jordan never enjoyed anything approaching that level of international recognition of its rule over Jerusalem. Yet UNRWA had been willing to work with the authority actually administering the city when that authority was Jordan.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

But the problem at Shuafat went beyond which government UNRWA chose to recognize educationally. It was what children at this particular school were saying they learned.

UNRWA says its curriculum framework must reflect UN principles of neutrality, human rights, tolerance, equality and non-discrimination.

Footage recorded at an UNRWA school in Shuafat in 2022 and published by Ynet in 2024 showed something very different.

Students said that stabbing and running over Jews brought Palestinians honor. One said he was prepared to carry out a suicide attack. Another said they were taught that Jews were terrorists. Another said they were taught that Jews were deceitful and evil and that he would stab and run them over.

The videos offer a horrifying vision of what is taught at UN schools.

Israel eventually acted.

In May 2025, Israeli authorities closed six UNRWA schools in eastern Jerusalem, including three in Shuafat. UNRWA protested that hundreds of Palestinian children were being deprived of education. Israel said alternative schooling would be provided through the Jerusalem education system.

Now that alternative is becoming tangible.

A former UNRWA school in Shuafat is reopening under the Israeli Ministry of Education and Jerusalem Municipality.

The choice was never between UNRWA and no education. What can change is the system educating them and the content of that education.

The UNRWA sign coming down in the Shuafat school is symbolic. What the children learn when they walk back through those doors will determine whether the real change happened inside.

One UN Agency for Every Nation in Waiting

Posted on by
1

If you want to understand an institution, don’t begin with its speeches. Begin with its organization chart.

Permanent agencies, permanent committees, permanent staff, permanent budgets, and permanent mandates reveal what an institution considers exceptional.

The United Nations generally operates through universal institutions. Refugees fall under the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Racism is addressed through broad human rights mechanisms. Humanitarian crises are handled through agencies with global mandates.

Except in one case.

The Palestinian cause has an institutional architecture unlike any other.

Palestinian refugees have their own dedicated refugee agency, UNRWA. Every other refugee population in the world falls under UNHCR.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

The General Assembly maintains the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, supported by the Division for Palestinian Rights within the UN Secretariat. Their mission is not to monitor or audit the Palestinian national movement, but to advance Palestinian rights, organize conferences, maintain documentation, and sustain international engagement.

The Human Rights Council appoints a permanent Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, dedicated exclusively to that issue. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs maintains a permanent office for the occupied Palestinian territory. The Human Rights Council also has Agenda Item 7, the only standing country-specific agenda item focused on a single member state.

That is the institutional asymmetry.

Institutions produce what they were built to produce. Permanent offices generate permanent reports. Permanent committees convene permanent meetings. Permanent mandates create permanent attention. The result shapes which stories are told, which voices are amplified, and which narratives become part of the world’s diplomatic conversation.

Since October 7, Palestinian voices have benefited from this enduring institutional infrastructure, while Israeli victims have had fewer dedicated mechanisms through which their experiences are consistently presented.

This institutional framework for the vilification of Israel was built over decades, setting the stage for antisemitism to permeate societies thousands of miles from the Middle East and those with no Jews even living there.

It is time for a fundamental change.

The United Nations is home to MANY peoples who aspire to statehood.

Kurds. Somalilanders. Sahrawis in Western Sahara. Tibetans. Kosovars. Taiwanese. Independence movements persist in Catalonia, Scotland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and elsewhere.

Flags of Somaliland hang in streets of Jerusalem, June 2026 (created by First One Through)

If the United Nations truly believes in the universal principle of self-determination, it should apply that principle universally.

Abolish the maze of Palestinian-specific institutions and replace them with a single body: The United Nations Agency for Nations in Waiting (UNNW).

Its mission would be straightforward: evaluate every national movement using the same transparent standards: effective governance, respect for human rights, peaceful conduct, democratic legitimacy, protection of minorities, and economic viability.

The Stateless Arabs from Palestine would remain part of the process – but alongside Kurds, Somalilanders, Tibetans, Sahrawis, Taiwanese, Kosovars, and every other people seeking recognition.

One standard. One agency. No exceptions.

Such a reform would move the UN away from political favoritism and toward institutional fairness. It would reward good governance instead of diplomatic influence and demonstrate that universal principles truly are universal.

If the United Nations wishes to champion nations in waiting, it should do so for all of them – not just one, and stem the tide of antisemitism at the same time.

When Words Erase a People

Posted on by
Reply

The United Nations is right about one thing.

Words matter.

This week, the UN will commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica under the theme “From Words to Violence.“ The lesson is that language is never merely language. The words societies choose shape how they understand people, history, and ultimately what actions become acceptable.

That lesson should not stop with Srebrenica.

Over the past month, another campaign of words has accelerated – not directly aimed at the destruction of lives, but at the erasure of history.

A month ago, I wrote about the battle over Solomon’s Pools. At the time, the concern was that one of Judaism’s great archaeological treasures was being detached from the people who built it.

Today, the campaign has moved far beyond stewardship.

The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, now repeatedly describes Solomon’s Pools as “Palestinian archaeological and heritage sites,” “Palestinian cultural heritage,” and “an integral part of the Palestinian people’s national identity.” It accuses Israel of attempting to erase the site’s Palestinian identity while announcing plans to seek UNESCO protection for that very narrative.

This is historical revisionism.

For more than two thousand years, Solomon’s Pools have been recognized as part of the ancient water system that supplied Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Yet the new narrative increasingly erases that Jewish history while attempting to replace it with a Palestinian Arab one.

That is how historical erasure begins, with words.

It continues with cultural appropriation – taking another civilization’s achievements and presenting them as one’s own. A site built to sustain Jewish Jerusalem is no longer described as part of Jewish civilization, but as an expression of “Palestinian national identity.”

Solomon’s Pools is not an isolated example.

Over the years, Palestinian rhetoric has increasingly described biblical figures and ancient Jewish sites through a Palestinian national lens.

Individually these statements may appear rhetorical. Collectively they reveal a sustained and malicious effort to replace one people’s historical memory with another’s national story.

When a people’s documented history is systematically erased, it reveals a bigotry directed not only against living Jews but against Jewish civilization itself. It reflects national chauvinism, elevating one national identity by absorbing the achievements of another.

And it does this with particular purpose: to strip Jews of their indigeneity in their holy land, to recast them as interlopers and “European settler colonizers” which is deeply infused with a righteous sense of xenophobia.

That is why UNESCO’s role matters.

An organization created to preserve humanity’s cultural heritage should never become an instrument of historical revisionism. If it legitimizes narratives that obscure the well-documented Jewish origins of sites like Solomon’s Pools, it is no longer merely protecting monuments. It is helping redefine what future generations believe those monuments represent.

Turkish media TRT lies to the world that Solomon’s Pools are a 6,000 year-old Canaanite site, as Palestinian Arabs have attempted to recast themselves as ancient Canaanites to pre-date the Jewish forefather Abraham

The danger is larger than a single archaeological site. Words are attempting to erase Jewish history and heritage throughout the Jewish homeland.

The United Nations is correct: words can lead to terrible consequences.

And these words and actions have a particularly dangerous strain of antisemitism. It does not involve attacking Jews physically, which Palestinian Arabs have done repeatedly at scale. It is an insidious attempt to get the world to endorse a narrative that Jews are foreigners in the land to frame a future without the Jewish State. This is the destruction and genocide that emerges from language.

When international institutions lend their authority to that process, they cease to be guardians of history and become participants in its erasure.

Why Doesn’t Anyone Call for a State of Boko Haram?

Posted on by
1

For more than fifteen years, Boko Haram has waged one of the world’s deadliest terrorist insurgencies. Since 2009, the group has been responsible for the deaths of more than 35,000 people, with some estimates placing the toll significantly higher when indirect deaths from the conflict are included. It has massacred civilians in villages, churches, mosques, schools, and marketplaces. It has bombed public places, murdered those who refused to submit to its rule, and driven millions from their homes across Nigeria and neighboring countries.

Kidnapping has been one of its defining tactics. The 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok drew worldwide attention, but it was only one of thousands of kidnappings. Women and girls have been forced into marriage and been raped. Boys have been recruited as child soldiers. Entire communities have lived for years under the constant threat of murder, abduction, and terror.

Boko Haram rejects the legitimacy of Nigeria, a United Nations-member state. It seeks to replace it with its own extremist Islamist regime.

Yet almost no one argues that Boko Haram deserves its own country. No demonstrations demand that its leaders be rewarded with sovereignty. No governments argue that decades of massacres, hostage-taking, and terrorism should culminate in international legitimacy.

And then there is Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Dozens of other Palestinian terrorist groups. And the Palestinian Authority that pays for terrorist acts they commit.

The Bibas family taken hostages and murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023

As Israelis buried over 1,000 people brutally killed by Hamas, anti-Israel activists took to Times Square and college campuses to express their glee. As Hamas supporters in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen joined the fight against Israel, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia recognized the State of Palestine.

There are now 157 countries that recognize Palestine. That look at the war between Israel and Palestine as one between two sovereign states, one which invaded another, raped and burned people alive, and took 251 hostages. These nations didn’t pause to question whether Palestine has a right to exist, but got three more countries to join in their sadistic effort.

Perhaps it is time for the 36 countries which do not recognize Palestine to put a resolution before the UN to recognize Boko Haram as the legitimate government of Nigeria, or at least a breakaway state in the northeastern corner which they control.

Boko Haram in Nigeria

UNRWA Is Not What You Think It Is

Posted on by
1

Most people think UNRWA exists to care for Palestinian refugees until a Palestinian state is created.

Not so.

If that were its purpose, its schools, healthcare, and social services would have gradually been transferred to the Palestinian Authority as Palestinian self-government expanded these past many years, especially in the “West Bank” / East of the 1949 Armistice Lines.

UNRWA’s mission would shrink as Palestinian institutions grew stronger. Instead, UNRWA has remained a permanent parallel system that continues to grow every year.

Unlike every other refugee agency in the world, UNRWA passes refugee status across generations, creating an ever-growing population of registered refugees. That population’s political claim is not to a future Palestinian state, but to a claimed so-called “right of return” to towns in Israel.

That distinction is critical.

A “two-state solution” is based on two peoples exercising self-determination in two states. A mass movement of millions of Arabs who never lived in Israel into Israel would produce 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 states for Jews. Further, stripping Israel of its right to determine who gets to enter its country means it doesn’t have basic sovereignty.

While UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claims that “UNRWA is a stabilizing force” it is precisely the opposite. As he urges the world to fund the immoral project, he lies that the agency is the force for “countering the hopelessness that can fuel insecurity.”

UNRWA has fed the lie that – and demands that it will continue to exist until – 6 million Arabs will move into Israel. Such mission is precisely opposite the goal of an Arab and Jewish state living in coexistence.

At its core, UNRWA is a political organization that negates Israel’s sovereignty, cloaked as a humanitarian organization. If the goal is truly a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, then UNRWA must be closed permanently as well as the discussion of a so-called “right of return” .

A Pact for the Future of Religious Heritage

Posted on by
Reply

The United Nations has a Pact for the Future. It looks ahead to artificial intelligence, digital governance, climate change, sustainable development, financing, debt and even discussions of global taxation. The underlying premise is that humanity faces challenges unlike those of previous generations and that international cooperation must evolve accordingly.

Yet there is one omission that is difficult to ignore. While the international community has developed increasingly sophisticated frameworks to protect biodiversity, endangered languages, cultural artifacts and World Heritage Sites, it has produced no comparable vision for preserving one of humanity’s oldest living inheritances: its religions.

We have become remarkably good at preserving the products of civilization. Archaeologists restore temples after earthquakes. UNESCO protects historic churches, synagogues and mosques. Museums conserve ancient manuscripts while linguists race to document disappearing languages before the last native speakers die. We understand instinctively that once these treasures are lost, they cannot truly be recreated. Yet we devote far less attention to the living communities that gave those monuments meaning. A restored monastery is no substitute for the monks who once prayed there. An ancient synagogue is just beautiful stone if the Jewish community that sustained it for centuries has vanished. Preserving the architecture while allowing the faith itself to disappear is to save the shell while losing the civilization.

This is no longer a hypothetical concern. In only a generation, ISIS nearly exterminated the Yazidis while devastating ancient Christian communities whose roots stretched back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. The Taliban’s return to power accelerated the disappearance of Afghanistan’s Hindu and Sikh communities and forced Christians even deeper underground. Across parts of Africa, jihadist movements have burned churches, murdered clergy and displaced entire Christian villages. Indigenous and tribal religions continue to fade through modernization, migration and demographic collapse, while Jewish communities that had flourished across much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for two millennia have largely disappeared. These are different stories unfolding on different continents, but together they reveal the same pattern: humanity’s religious diversity is steadily shrinking.

There were once an estimated 250,000 Jews in Morocco. They are have almost all left since 1948

Recent years have demonstrated how fragile minority religious and ethnic groups can be. Christians have seen ancient churches destroyed or emptied by war. Pilgrimages have been disrupted by conflict in multiple regions. Jews continue to be barred from praying openly at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism.

The legal foundations for religious liberty already exist. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to change one’s religion. Yet millions still live where that freedom exists only on paper. Apostasy remains punishable under law or through the application of religious law in several countries, while blasphemy laws continue to imprison people or expose them to severe punishment simply for changing or expressing their beliefs. At the same time, digital surveillance, online incitement and transnational extremist movements have created entirely new forms of religious persecution that the architects of the postwar human rights system could scarcely have imagined.

Radical Islamists call for killing converts from Islam

Perhaps the world needs a Pact for the Future of Religious Heritage – one that treats living religious communities with the same urgency that we reserve for endangered species, disappearing languages and historic monuments. Such a framework would protect sacred sites, preserve endangered faith traditions, defend freedom of conscience, encourage the repeal of laws criminalizing apostasy and blasphemy, establish rapid international responses to religious persecution, and affirm that followers of every religion should be able to freely, safely and openly worship at their sacred sites and undertake traditional pilgrimages.

Civilizations are remembered not only for the monuments they leave behind, but for the beliefs that inspired them and the communities that kept those beliefs alive. Humanity has learned to preserve forests, wildlife, manuscripts and archaeological treasures. The next step is to preserve something even older and even more fragile: the living faiths that have shaped civilizations for thousands of years.

The UN Secretary-General’s Favorite Headline

Posted on by
Reply

The United Nations Secretary-General issued a statement yesterday condemning Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut.

That was expected.

What was remarkable was his explanation.

Guterres wrote that the strikes occurred “despite the ceasefire” and at a moment when the United States and Iran were expected to reach an agreement that would “pave the way to a peaceful resolution of this conflict.” He then added that “this conflict is having a devastating impact on the world’s economy.”

The statement raises an obvious question: what do his comments have to do with Israel and Hezbollah?

The negotiations were between the United States and Iran. Israel was not a participant. Israel did not negotiate the terms. Israel did not sign the agreement. American officials themselves stated that Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon was not a condition of the deal.

Yet Guterres presented Israel’s actions as though they were undermining an agreement to which Israel was never a party.

The logic becomes even stranger when he turns to the economy.

The conflict affecting global markets is not the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The economic concern revolves around the American war with Iran which threatens energy supplies and disrupts shipping routes. Markets do not react because Hezbollah fires rockets into northern Israel or because Israel strikes Hezbollah positions in Beirut.

But in the Secretary-General’s telling, Israel is the root cause.

A Hezbollah-Israel clash suddenly becomes a threat to the world economy. A U.S.-Iran negotiation suddenly becomes Israel’s responsibility. An agreement Israel never joined suddenly becomes grounds to condemn Israel.

This is absurd.

But it is a continuation of the farce that is the United Nations.

The UN Secretary General is so obsessed with vilifying Israel and getting the world to join in, that he manufactures reasons that are devoid of any logic.