MeToo, unless you’re a Jew

The United Nations was supposedly founded on the “noble principles” of peace, justice and human rights, yet its agencies frequently demonstrate an anti-Israel, antisemitic bias that undermines these ideals. A case in point is UN Women, the UN agency tasked with advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment around the globe.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal terror attacks on Israel in October, UN Women published reports highlighting the suffering of women in Gaza. Shockingly, they failed to even mention the hundreds of Israeli women who were raped, kidnapped, burned or murdered by Hamas terrorists.
As far as UN Women is concerned, Israeli women’s lives and traumas are meaningless. The agency legitimized Hamas by euphemistically calling its massacre an “attack.” A number of UN Women reports focused exclusively on Gazan women while deliberately ignoring Israeli women. They, like many in the media and academia, have turned a blind eye to Hamas’ war crimes, refusing to demand the return of captive Israeli women or very basic Red Cross access. This flies in the face of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which defines such violence against women as a war crime. Yet UN Women remains silent.
The group has proven to be just another anti-Israel, antisemitic, woke, leftist agency, promoting propaganda over facts. Like many on the extreme left, it has utterly failed in its mission to advocate for all women by systematically excluding and disregarding Jewish women. All people of conscience should be outraged at this moral failure.
UN Women must correct its biased stance, acknowledge the suffering of Israeli women, and hold Hamas terrorists responsible for their barbarism if the agency wants to be considered even remotely trustworthy and credible. Its motto appears to be MeToo, Unless You’re a Jew. To it, some women’s lives matter more than others. Imagine if the word Jew was exchanged for Black, Hispanic, transgender or any other group. The outcry would be deafening.

UN Women, along with its likeminded brethren at many institutions of “higher learning” and other agencies, must be restructured and reinvented, with new governance, in order to address this systemic anti-Israel, anti-Jewish bias. If these groups truly want to be considered moral authorities on human rights and free speech, there must be a global reckoning. More to the point, as long as they continue to deliberately ignore Jewish persecution and suffering while promoting known terrorist groups like Hamas, they have no credibility. Justice demands reform now; if not, funding to these institutions should be immediately withdrawn at every level, from the government to private endowments.
The silence from so-called human rights groups and women’s groups on this issue is unconscionable. Where are all the feminist groups that demand that “All women should be believed”? Though we consistently hear the voice of condemnation of violence against women in all other contexts, Jewish women are once again “silenced twice” — first by Hamas terrorists and then by those entrusted with protecting and standing with them. The “sting of the double standard,” as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put it, underscores that at its core, anti-Israel bias is antisemitism in progressive disguise. Make no mistake: These hateful groups have awakened the sleeping lion.

Ari Brown represents the 20th Assembly District, which includes the villages and hamlets of Cedarhurst, East Rockaway, Hewlett, Inwood, Island Park, Lawrence, Oceanside and Woodmere, along with the Long Beach barrier island.