Professor Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, has accused UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk of facilitating global antisemitism and Palestinian terrorism. She alleges they bear responsibility for the deaths of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two Israeli children brutally murdered by Hamas, reports Israel National News.
Bayefsky criticised Guterres and Turk for their reactions to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Shiri Bibas and her young sons, four-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir, by Hamas in Gaza. She condemned their statements after the children’s bodies were returned, accusing them of prioritising public relations over human lives.
„The comments of Turk and Guterres after the sheer horror of the Bibas’s kidnapping, torture, murder and final return is one of the most sickening displays of moral turpitude in UN history,” Bayefsky stated. „They cared more about the PR annoyance of dead Jews coming home in a box than they did for saving Jews while they are still alive.”
Forensic teams confirmed that Kfir and Ariel were strangled by their captors in November 2023. Hamas returned their bodies with broken coffin locks and initially sent back the wrong body, delaying the return of Shiri Bibas.
Bayefsky argued that Turk and Guterres „turned Jewish babies into bargaining chips,” accusing them of using human rights rhetoric as a front for antisemitism. She claimed that their „moral equivalence” between Israeli victims and Hamas terrorists emboldened further violence.
Bayefsky highlighted Guterres’s statements on October 9, when he said the violence in Gaza „does not come in a vacuum”, attributing it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s history. She argued that this contextualisation justified Hamas’s actions and „demonised Israelis.”
She also criticised Turk for drawing a moral equivalence between Israeli victims and „convicted terrorist murderers in Israeli jails” by calling for „all parties to respect international law”.
Bayefsky argued that Guterres and Turk provided diplomatic cover for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority, allowing them to leverage Jewish hostages as bargaining chips. She accused them of propagating the „root cause” narrative that blames Israel’s occupation for Palestinian violence, thereby „contextualising Palestinian depravity.”
„Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their diplomatic entourage, the Palestinian Authority, got Guterres and Turk’s message. They could count on UN handlers… to invert the narrative of right and wrong,” she stated.
Bayefsky concluded by urging the United States to defund the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, accusing it of „lethal antisemitism”. She argued that the UN’s response to the Bibas murders exemplifies its institutionalised bias against Israel.
„If ever there was a reason for the United States to refuse to fund the agency, Turk leads… this is it. If ever Americans needed one more reason not to pay another cent for UN-driven lethal antisemitism, this is it,” Bayefsky concluded.
This incident has intensified accusations of institutional antisemitism within the United Nations, with critics arguing that its leaders’ statements create moral equivalences that embolden terrorism. The US is now under pressure to review its funding of UN human rights agencies amid growing concerns about their role in global antisemitism.
Photo credit: Yoni Kempinski
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