Jeffress: 'UN is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic'
Christian leader Robert Jeffress is calling out the United Nations for its consistently blatant anti-Semitic policies over the years – noting that it gives virtually all other nations of the world mere lip service for their atrocities.
Jeffress – who is the senior pastor of the 13,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas – commended the commander-in-chief for standing up to the U.N. and the global community by sending the loud and clear message of moving the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
U.N. opposing Israel and God
Reflecting on the sentiments he shared at the nation’s capital, Jeffress elaborated on why he has tagged the global agency as being anti-Israel virtually every time it meddles in matters in the Middle East.
“That the United Nations is on the wrong side of history and would condemn President Trump’s declaration about Jerusalem was completely expected – and totally illogical,” the nationally syndicated TV and radio host expressed. “Historically, Jerusalem has been the recognized capital of Israel since 1000 B.C. From a geopolitical perspective, the United Nations recognizes the right of every other nation to designate its own capital. Why not Israel?”
Jeffress was one of the first to commend the president for slashing America’s funding of the U.N. by hundreds of millions of dollars because of its anti-Israel policies – ultimately seeing the move as the defunding of a global anti-Semitic campaign.
“The only logical explanation for the U.N.’s condemnation of U.S. policy about Israel is that the United Nations is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic,” the 24-time best-selling author reasoned. “President Trump is right to oppose the financial excess, corruption and growing anti-Semitism in the United Nations by cutting U.S. contributions $285 million – nearly 25 percent – in 2018.”
He went on to clarify his depiction of the U.N. as being an agency that works to spread racism around the globe.
“It is clear that the organization – which receives nearly a quarter of its budget from the United States alone (far more than any other country) – is increasingly a safe place for pure anti-Semitism to grow,” Jeffress added. “Its opposition to Israel has gone far beyond political opposition; it is a racist organization.”
U.N.’s shameful legacy of embracing hate and violence
Jeffress, who hosts the
Pathway to Victory program on more than 900 radio stations in 195 countries, says that the absurd policies and actions of the U.N. – which he noted as being
well-documented by UN Watch – are virtually limitless.
“It’s unthinkable that Turkey is now on the executive board of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is responsible for promoting and protecting cultural sites around the world,” the outspoken pastor pointed out. “This summer alone, Turkey seized [dozens of] ancient Christian churches and properties, not to mention the countless schools and universities affected by Erdogan’s vicious crackdown on human rights, schools and cultural institutions.”
Turkey – which is nearly 100-percent Muslim – has a long record of U.N. support and anti-Semitic and anti-Christian maneuverings, with some of its latest atrocities reaching global headlines.
“Tensions are high among Turkey’s oldest indigenous community over fears that a recent land grab by the government could lead to its cultural extinction,”
Fox News reported this summer.
“Turkish authorities recently seized about 50 properties – monasteries, cemeteries and churches – that belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Church, claiming the ownership deeds had lapsed.”
Turkey’s campaign to eradicate everything in and around its borders that has anything to do with biblical history was witnessed at the time.
“Church and community leaders in the southeastern region known as Tur Abdin, which translates to ‘The Mountain of the Servants of God,’ say that among the properties seized were two functioning monasteries built some 1,500 years ago and that their loss will be a crushing blow their culture’s survival,” Fox News’ Perry Chiaramonte noted.
Philos Project Executive Director Robert Nicholson – who heads the advocacy group assisting Christian minorities in the Middle East – indicated that the Turkish government’s abusive campaigns should be condemned … making the U.N.’s recent decision to include the rogue nation on its UNESCO executive board unfathomable to many.
"Erdogan's government is working to consolidate power and control over the country, especially its restive southeastern region where Kurds and Christians make up large parts of the population,” the Middle East analyst told Fox News. “In the case of the Syriac Christians, Erdogan is using legal pretexts to seize and redistribute lands and churches that have been owned by Christians for over a millennium. Christians haven't always faced pressure from the Turkish government or even from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party. But Turkish politics are changing, and it's still unclear how minority groups like the Syriacs will fare in the end."
Condemning a human rights champion, rewarding human rights abusers
Jeffress noted the hypocrisy of the U.N.’s decision to condemn Israel, which has an extensive track record providing humanitarian aid for its Middle East neighbors (including Syria) and nations overseas (including Haiti, Japan and the U.S.) – while embracing serious human rights violators.
“[T]he United Nations’ Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) now includes the nations of Venezuela, Cuba and the Philippines – all nations that are notorious for their violations of human rights,” the nationally acclaimed conservative commentator explained. “They also currently placed Syria – a virtual protectorate of Iran – on a committee focused on ‘decolonization,’ and they once named Zimbabwe’s brutal former dictator, Robert Mugabe, a ‘goodwill ambassador’ for the World Health Organization (WHO). These facts sound more like farce than fact – but the examples just go on and on; it would take pages and pages even to summarize them.”
In fact, UN Watch recently sent out the sobering warning that even though the stated mission of UNESCO is supposedly to promote education, science and culture, it has become “hijacked by dictatorships.”
The U.N. watchdog group then listed off five major reasons why Israel and the U.S. pulled out of UNESCO:
- Anti-Israeli Obsession: Between 2009-2014, UNESCO adopted 46 resolutions against Israel; 1 on Syria; and none on Iran, Sudan, North Korea, or any other country in the world. Betraying its mission to protect world heritage and culture, UNESCO repeatedly denies the ancient Jewish heritage and culture of the holy cities Jerusalem and Hebron, which was this year declared a World Heritage site of “Palestine.”
- Electing Syria’s Assad to Human Rights Committee: In 2011, UNESCO elected Syria’s Assad regime to its human rights committee. When UN Watch exposed the outrage and launched a protest campaign, the U.S. and UK were embarrassed and tried to remove Syria – but failed to get enough votes to do so.
- Glorifying Violence: In 2013, UNESCO enshrined “The Life and Works of Ernestor Che Guevara“ in its “Memory of the World Register” – even though Che Guevara led the first firing squads of the Cuban Revolution, and founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system that would later be used to incarcerate gays, dissidents and AIDS victims. President Obama’s representative demanded that UNESCO’s program not “not be used as a tool to glorify or legitimize violence.” His objection was ignored.
- Naming Prizes for Dictators: UNESCO created a $3 million prize in 2008 named for and funded by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – the brutal and corrupt dictator of Equitorial Guinea. His state radio announced that Obiang “can decide to kill” without anyone calling him to account because he is in “permanent contact” with God, “who gives him this strength.” In addition, UNESCO created an education prize in the name of, and sponsored by, the despot of Bahrain – the “King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize.”
- “World Philosophy Day” in Tehran: In a 2010 address, UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova spoke of her efforts over two years to sponsor a “Philosophy Day” in Tehran – despite Iran’s horrific record of repression and censorship after the fraudulent elections of 2009. Absurdly, Bokova said “I hope this will be a major opportunity for free intellectual debates around the topics.” Eventually UNESCO was forced to cancel the event.
The U.N. list against Israel goes on …
Jeffress also highlighted telling statistics that further piles on the U.N.’s track record of targeting Israel for condemnation, while making light of other nations’ grievous offences.
“The U.N. human rights council from 2006 to 2017 condemned Israel on 68 occasions, but only issued another 67 condemnations over the entire 10 years for all the other nations of the world, combined,” Jeffress noted. “The U.N. General Assembly criticized individual nations 97 times from 2012 to 2015, of which 83 were against Israel. In 2017 alone, the U.N. voted against Israel 21 times, and only voted to condemn Iran, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar and Syria, once.”
The conservative Christian personality is thankful that the U.S. now has a president – after eight years under former President Barack Obama’s pro-Palestinian foreign policy – who will stand strong with America’s longtime ally in the Middle East. An educated guess as to why Trump slashed U.N. funding and support was then given.
“The only logical conclusion is the United Nations has become the leading sponsor of anti-Semitic rhetoric and action in the entire world,” Jeffress observed. “President Trump is right to condemn this body, and the United States Congress needs to follow the president’s courageous example.”
With Israel being situated in the midst of the Middle East’s volatile “Powder Keg,” Jeffress sent a strong message to the U.N. that it must cease and desist its anti-Semitic onslaught against the only democracy in the entire region.
“Israel is also surrounded by enemies who not only believe Israel does not have a right to their land, they don’t believe Israel has the right even to exist,” Jeffress stressed. “The United States should not be convening those enemies to spew their anti-Semitism in New York City, which has the largest Jewish population in the United States.”
Words of praise were reserved for Trump’s unprecedented boldness in his recent stand for Israel and against the U.N.
“I thank God that President Trump – unlike any other U.S. president – is insisting that the United Nations no longer act as the international facilitator of such blatant anti-Semitism,” Jeffress concluded.” President Trump's willingness to financially drain this expanding cesspool of racism may be his most consequential global decision.”
A last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest control from the president.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow who focuses on Islamic terrorism and the radical left.
The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.
From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.
“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.
Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.
The blatant secessionism of the AG’s premise is no longer extraordinary. Not when California’s Jerry Brown tours the world signing independent environmental treaties. Schneiderman is one of a number of blue state attorney generals who have decided that their primary focus shouldn’t be enforcing the law, but resisting the Federal government. But Scheiderman is also articulating the central tenet of the new #resistance which, despite Antifa’s antics, is more dedicated to legal sabotage than actual violence.
It’s still a paper civil war. For now.
The loss of the two elected branches of government has forced the left to default to the unelected third.
Like AG Schneiderman, the left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. But despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with D.C.
New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t Federal, it’s democratic. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.
That’s what the civil war is about.
Will the American people govern themselves? Or will Mueller, Schneiderman, Watson, Yates and ten thousand other elites with law degrees be allowed to turn elections into a meaningless farce?
Federal judges have seized previously unimaginable amounts of power by not only blocking orders that had always been considered an essential part of presidential authority on flimsy premises that when dissected amount to a critique of President Trump’s character (not to mention the sovereign entitlement of the University of Hawaii to set national immigration policy for the entire country based on its urgent need for Syrian grad students), but by demanding that agencies under the control of the President of the United States enact their orders, such as accepting transgender military recruits.
The absurd outcomes of these rulings, that the University of Hawaii can set national immigration policy, but not the President of the United States, and that fitness to serve in the military can be determined by a Federal judge, but not by the military or the commander in chief, are only an irrational side effect of a conflict between the elected branches of government and an unelected class of political lawyers.
The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government.
Elections are being replaced by investigations and litigation as the engines of government. You don’t need to win an election to investigate elected officials. You don’t need public support to sue either.
Government by litigation and investigation shifts power away from voters to lawyers. What was meant to be a last resort for redressing serious violations instead becomes the primary test for holding political office. When investigation and litigation become more powerful tools than en election, then a politician must court the political legal class ahead of the country’s voters and put his obligations to them first.
That intended outcome is also the cause of the conflict.
President Trump refused to put the political class ahead of the voters. The legal civil war is being fought to reaffirm the centrality of the establishment over the voters. The civil war is a conflict between the political class and the people. It’s a struggle over the tools of government being waged with those tools.
Populism isn’t always a threat to the establishment. Obama’s populism didn’t threaten the establishment because its purpose was to reaffirm its power. Hope and Change just meant building a coalition that would vote for more government power in exchange for political goodies. But Trump’s populism challenges the existence of the establishment and its ability to distribute those goodies.
Politicians often run against the political machine. But most just want to pull the levers. Trump has challenged its power and its existence. And that is what set off the civil war.
Legal conflict is the last stage before physical conflict.
The lawyers’ war is a last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest physical control of the government from President Trump. Unable to give the orders as the representatives of the people, the left is asserting every possible valid and invalid legal stratagem to run the government anyway. And to run President Trump out of town.
If its legal gambit fails, the left will default fully to mass protests, street violence and terrorism.
But the beauty of the legal gambit is that it allows the left to make common cause with establishment non-radicals like Mueller or the FBI’s Strzok who disprove of President Trump without sharing the left’s larger political agenda.
A civil war fought by lawyers is cleaner and less ugly than one fought with bombs and bullets. If President Trump can survive the lawyers’ war, his opposition will be split between radicals who support violence and an establishment that wants to keep things running.
That is the Mueller test.
If the Democrats can’t sweep into office on the investigation’s coattails, the whole thing dies with a whimper. As Trump reshapes the judiciary, the judicial activism will matter less. The lawyers’ war will either end with the next election. Or it will begin in earnest. And only voter turnout will decide that.
Meanwhile the civil war continues. It’s a civil war fought with paperwork. But its outcome will determine whether the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that President Lincoln invoked in the Gettysburg Address will thrive or “perish from the earth.”
Governments are run by bullets and paper, by force and process. Today’s civil war is still a paper war. But if the paper civil war fails, the rest of it may be fought the same way as the original civil war.
