Responses to Gutteres
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan responded to remarks made by UN Secretary General António Guterres during this week’s the UN Security Council session.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
“The slaughter of Jews by Hamas on October 7th was genocidal in its intents and immeasurably brutal in its form. Part of why it differs from the Holocaust is because Jews have today a state and an army. We are not defenseless and at the mercy of others.
However, it puts to test the sincerity of world leaders, intellectuals and influencers that come to Yad Vashem and pledge “Never Again”. Those who seek to “understand”, look for a justifying context, do not condemn the perpetrators, and do not call for the unconditional and immediate release of the abducted – fail the test. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres failed the test.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) expressed outrage on Tuesday over the morally reprehensible comments made by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres where he seemed to blame Israel for the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in which more than 1,400 Israelis were brutally murdered and around 200 others taken into captivity in Gaza.
‘It is unbelievable and unconscionable how out of touch with reality the UN secretary-general is,” said CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa. “Over the last couple of weeks, our generation has had a chance to reflect and better understand how the Holocaust was allowed to happen by the silence and complicity of global decision-makers and opinion-shapers in the face of Nazi-style atrocities.”
“The fact that the so-called leader of the most prominent international institution has engaged in victim-blaming shows how he clearly has different rules for Jews among all the other peoples of the world,” Roytman Dratwa added. “He sees the blood of masses of Jews spilled and can only think of the political ramifications.”
“Would he have said that the Holocaust didn’t happen in a vacuum, which is a repugnant but sadly increasing global sentiment?” Roytman Dratwa asked. “These comments are just a thin whisper away and hold the Jewish people uniquely responsible for their own massacres, rapes, beheadings, and kidnappings.”
CAM joins the growing number of people and institutions calling for Guterres’ immediate resignation as UN secretary-general.
In his remarks at a UN Security Council meeting earlier on Tuesday, Guterres said, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
