Is Globalism a Jewish Phenomenon?

[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]

Many of the antisemites who have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain since Oct. 7, 2023 claim that the Jews are leftist internationalists who want to subvert the nations of the world in order to solidify their hegemony. Antisemites ascribe efforts to break down the sovereignty of various nation-states, and subsume them into an international socialist megastate, to Jewish influence. They claim that this internationalist initiative arises from the Jews’ supposed embrace, or even invention, of international socialism and Communism.

This is supposedly a longstanding imperative, such that the international apparatus of the post-World War II global order, particularly the United Nations, is also regarded as a tool of the Jews. The UN, after all, played a key role in the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1947, when it proposed that Britain’s Mandate for Palestine be divided into two states, a Jewish state and yet another Arab Muslim state. The Arabs turned down this proposal, but Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, and became a member state of the United Nations just short of a year later, on May 11, 1949. And on a larger plane, the UN is alleged to be just the first step toward achieving the Jews’ internationalist goals.

Yet this claim is absurd. The United Nations, despite its role in the founding of the state of Israel, has been unremittingly hostile to that state for decades. That hostility crystallized into a formal imperative with the creation of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in June 2006. In the nine years from its inception to August 2015, the UNHRC passed sixty-two condemnations of Israel, and fifty-five for all the rest of the world combined.

In the same time period, despite the brutality of the mullahs’ rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the UNHRC singled Iran out for condemnation only five times. The notorious human rights abuser North Korea was condemned only eight times. Turkey, despite its ongoing suppression and low-level persecution of the nation’s indigenous Christians, leading to a drastic decline in their numbers, was never condemned at all. Bashar Assad’s Syria was treated more roughly, receiving seventeen condemnations.

Was Israel really over twelve times worse a human rights abuser than Iran, and nearly eight times worse than Communist North Korea? The idea was absurd. The condemnations of Israel generally came in the context of Israeli defensive actions after attacks from jihad groups. The UN did not, however, generally condemn the jihad attacks. And the pattern continued: in 2018, it condemned Israel twenty-one times; it didn’t condemn Hamas at all. From 2015 through 2022, the UN General Assembly passed 140 resolutions criticizing Israel and 68 regarding other countries. In 2022, the UN General Assembly passed fifteen resolutions criticizing Israel and thirteen on the entire rest of the world.

Even the administration of Barack Obama, which was not friendly to Israel, took notice of this glaring double standard. Years before the Biden regime conducted a similar betrayal, on December 16, 2016, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, took the then-unprecedented step of declining to veto a UN resolution calling for an end to the construction of Israeli “settlements” on land over which Israel exercised sovereignty. In the course of this betrayal, however, Power acknowledged the UN’s strong bias against the Jewish state:

As long as Israel has been a member of this institution, Israel has been treated differently from other nations at the United Nations. And not only in decades past—such as in the infamous resolution that the General Assembly adopted in 1975, with the support of the majority of Member States, officially determining that, ‘Zionism is a form of racism’—but also in 2016, this year. One need only look at the 18 resolutions against Israel adopted during the UN General Assembly in September; or the 12 Israel-specific resolutions adopted this year in the Human Rights Council—more than those focused on Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan put together—to see that in 2016 Israel continues to be treated differently from other Member States.

Nothing has changed in the intervening years. In fact, the situation has only gotten worse. If Israel controls the UN, it is doing a singularly poor job of it.