UN Uses Sharpie To Snub Israel During Holocaust Remembrance Event
To just about anyone who follows international news, the United Nations is very clearly no friend of Israel. This latest stunt only adds to that belief.
The incident occurred during the Jan. 28 UN Holocaust Remembrance Day. As part of the tribute event to victims of the Holocaust, “high-end food and beverages” were served by “the Austrian and Norwegian missions to the UN,” Hot Air reported.
However, there was a problem with one of the wines being served. The label on the bottles had been defaced with a marker, according to the Washington Free Beacon. The name of the Golan Heights Winery, located in Israel, was blacked out from view.
Left, original Israeli wine bottle. Right, “Golan Heights” blanked out on bottle served at UN #Holocaust event sponsored by #Austria & #Norway. Encouraging Jew-hatred today is how UN marks Jew-hatred of yesterday pic.twitter.com/Ahzyp1ntPL
— Anne Bayefsky (@AnneBayefsky) January 30, 2019
The censorship of the winery name did not go unnoticed. And the action has been publicly called out.
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, had something to say about the incident, according to the Free Beacon. Members of her group were in attendance at the event.
“The incident reveals the duplicity of U.N. Holocaust events that use and abuse the memory of Jewish dead decades ago to erase the reality of Jews under attack today. And to erase the truth that — thanks to Israel — Jewish children are saved by a Golan that is used for creativity, commerce and beauty, instead of deadly modern anti-Semitism,” she said.
She had a lot more to say about just how offensive the act was, too.
According to the Free Beacon, one part of the event was to honor Ruth Maier, a woman who was born in Austria to a Jewish family shortly after World War I. She fled to Norway after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, but when Germany conquered Norway, her safety was gone. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 22, but diaries she left behind have kept her name alive for generations.
She’s sometimes known as “the Norwegian Anne Frank.”
Bayefsky hit hard on that history.
“As part of the 2019 U.N. commemoration,” she said, according to the Free Beacon, “the U.N. Missions of Austria and Norway — the two countries responsible for the persecution and murder of Jewish child Ruth Maier in the Auschwitz concentration camp — sponsored an exhibition telling her story.
“Wine was served at the exhibit opening. The wine was produced by the award-winning ‘Golan Heights Winery,’ founded in 1983,” she continued.
“But in the minds of U.N. staff, or the U.N. missions of Austria and Norway — countries that routinely vote in favor of a panoply of anti-Israel U.N. resolutions — the identity of the wine was deemed offensive and the words ‘Golan Heights Winery’ were specifically blacked out with a marker on each bottle. The Golan Heights is a plateau that was used by Syria to kill the Jews living in the area below, and to attempt to annihilate Israel altogether, until Israel took control of it in self-defense during the 1967 war,” she said.
“More recently, Syrians have fled from the brutality of their own government to the Golan for treatment by Israeli doctors,” she added.
Although the Norwegian Permanent Mission to the U.N. and the Holocaust and U.N. Outreach Programme did not respond to requests from the Free Beacon for comment, the Austrian Mission did issue an official statement to them.
“This was a well-received event. Blotting out the geographical denomination was a clear mistake by an individual member of the mission for which we apologize,” it read.
It is bad enough that anyone would find such behavior as blotting out a winery name to be appropriate. But it is the epitome of outrageous that the name of a winery, located in Israel, was blotted out during, of all things, a Holocaust remembrance event.
Did it escape the notice of those responsible that the event memorialized the Jews who were “blotted out,” so blotting out an Israeli winery name might be particularly in bad taste?
This aside, of course, from the fact that the wine was selected by those in charge to be served, so it was beyond inappropriate to then hide the name of the winery.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was no stranger to blasting the organization, and the U.N.’s treatment of Israel was one area in which she attacked. As one example, when the United States opted to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, 128 U.N. member countries voted to “rebuke” the U.S. for it. Only nine did not.
In her tongue lashing she said, in part, that, “to its shame, the United Nations has long been a hostile place for the state of Israel. Both the current and the previous secretary-generals have objected to the U.N.’s disproportionate focus on Israel. It’s a wrong that undermines the credibility of this institution, and that in turn is harmful for the entire world.”
The name-blotting act was juvenile and offensive.
But based on history, it is likely not the last of the insults to be launched from the U.N. and some of its members or staffers against Israel.
CORRECTION: The original version of this article stated that Ruth Maier was born shortly after World War II. She was born shortly after World War I. We apologize for the error and have corrected it in the article.
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