After an obligatory reference to comments he says he made that “condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel,” Guterres took it all back.
Guterres said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” pointing to “56 years of suffocating occupation” that the Palestinian people suffered. So “56 years of suffocating occupation” justifies beheading babies, raping women, murdering defenseless civilians, and then celebrating the bloody rampage?
Why yes, says Guterres. Yes, it does. Except when it doesn’t.
“The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” he added. “Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians — or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.”
What planet does this guy live on?
Sorry, Mr. Moral Pygmy. You can’t have it both ways. I’ve said several times when writing about this war that when politicians have tried to straddle the Hamas atrocities by practicing bothsidesism, they ignore the fact that this is an either/or question. Either you justify Hamas atrocities or you stand with Israel against the barbarians. There’s no “in-between.” There’s no middle ground. And politicians like Barack Obama and Guterres who attempt to split the moral difference end up being morally diminished.
The New York Sun editorial board tried to give voice to the rage and hurt inflicted on Israelis and Jews all over the world by those mealy-mouthed words.
The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual.
We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that. There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.
Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, responded to Guterres’s blood libel by fighting off tears while reading the names of the dead children murdered by Hamas in the October 7 attacks.
“Mr. Secretary-General, in what world do you live? Definitely, this is not our world.”
Later, Cohen said he would not meet with Guterres and that “there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased from the world!”
Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign.
“The U.N. is failing, and you, Mr. Secretary-General, have lost all morality and impartiality. Because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism, and I think that the secretary-general must resign,” he said. “Because from now on, every day that he is here in this building, unless he apologizes immediately, today, we called him to apologize, there’s no justification to the existence of this building. ”
Would Israel leave the UN over this? Cohen seemed to hint it was a possibility. As long as Guterres remains as secretary general of the UN, Mr. Erdan told reporters, “there is no justification for this building.” He added that Israel will have to reassess its relations with the UN.
If Biden was truly “standing with Israel,” he would also call for Guterres’s resignation. But Biden is a Moral Pygmy too, and there’s no chance of that happening.
