Hend al-Muftah, Qatar’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, is bidding to become chair of the U.N. Forum on Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law. She has made anti-Semitic and bigoted remarks, a report released on Monday by the UN Watch nonprofit organization reveals.
The biennial event being from Nov. 24-25 is “an important forum for exchange, dialogue, mutual understanding and cooperation,” according to the world body.
UN Watch said that “mutual understanding, however, appears to be the last trait one would ascribe to Ambassador al-Muftah.”
She has “a long record of publishing racist and classically anti-Semitic tropes about Jews, bigoted attacks on gays, and spreading false information and conspiracy theories about Western societies and liberalism,” added the Geneva-based nonprofit.
In a letter sent on Monday to Ambassador Federico Villegas of Argentina, president of the United Nations Human Rights Council, UN Watch urged him to reject al-Muftah’s candidacy to chair the forum.
In its report, UN Watch documented al-Muftah’s numerous anti-Semitic remarks made online over more than a decade, including a Twitter post from 2012 in which she wrote, “The Jews focused their investments in industry and the media, and that is why they dominated, tyrannized and ruled the world.”
In separate Twitter posts, she wrote that “Jews are our enemies,” promoted anti-Israel conspiracy theories, called for the “expulsion of Jews from Palestine” and shared an anti-Semitic video in which a child talks about trampling on the corpses of Jews.
UN Watch said al-Muftah’s social-media posts “stand in complete contravention to the principles and values of the UN Forum which she seeks to lead and of the founding charter of the Human Rights Council.”
