Echoing pronouncements by American and Israeli government officials, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called for the disbandment of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Israel.
The Conference of Presidents issued a statement on July 29, blasting the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments made by commission member Miloon Kothari during a recent interview.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, it wrote that “since the U.N. General Assembly admitted Israel as a member state, there have been numerous attempts to deprive it of this membership. In view of the recent comments made by Kothari, as well as previous incendiary remarks made by other commission members, Navi Pillay and Christopher Dominic Sidoti, we call on the Secretary-General to end this shameful farce and help disband the harmful COI.”
In a recent podcast interview with the anti-Israel website Mondoweiss, Kothari questioned Israel’s membership in the United Nations and accused the “Jewish Lobby” of controlling social media.
“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” said Kothari, who questioned why Israel is a member of the United Nations at all, accusing the Jewish state of being in violation of U.N. resolutions and international law.
The Conference of Presidents joined the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Right Council Michèle Taylor and the U.S. Special Envoy on Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt, along with officials from the United Kingdom, Canada and Israel in denouncing Kothari’s comments.
The conference said Kothari “invoked dangerous anti-Semitic tropes … where he singled out Israel and questioned its legitimacy while also spreading the age-old hateful canard that Jews conspire to control the media.”
The Conference of Presidents wrote to Guterres that it has “repeatedly warned about anti-Israel bias infecting the U.N. body, most recently in a letter on February 7, 2022, urging the Secretary-General to ensure that the COI does not present reports that will unfairly criticize Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.”
