UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer hosted the event direct from UN Watch headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, recounting how UN Watch had made world headlines by calling out the absurd election of China, Russia, Cuba, and Pakistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Neuer updated attendees on some of UN Watch’s activities over the past few months, including:

• When the UNHRC brought the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement into the world body, by blacklisting companies operating in Israel’s disputed regions, UN Watch submitted the sole rebuttal.
• When Uruguay voted in September for an Iranian-backed UN resolution that singled out Israel as the world’s only alleged violator of women’s rights, UN Watch’s protest led to the Foreign Minister of Uruguay apologizing for the vote — and actually firing his director-general for political affairs.
• In the last three sessions of the Human Rights Council, UN Watch led the world in relentlessly exposing China’s incarceration of 1 million Uighurs in camps, atrocities by Venezuela and repression by Cuba, provoking sharp reactions in the chamber by each of their delegates.

Tribute was paid to Ambassador Alfred Moses, who has served as Chair of UN Watch for the past two decades, and who will become Chair Emeritus on January 1st, while distinguished board member Philippe Peress was congratulated on his unanimous election as the next Chair of UN Watch. A dramatic video of UN Watch’s many achievements over the past year was also screened, which will be posted online soon.

Morris B. Abram Award Winner Shaparak Shajarizadeh

Courageous Iranian women’s rights activist Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who was jailed and beaten in Iran for removing her headscarf in public protest, was presented with the Morris B. Abram Award.

Shaparak recounted her extraordinary story of courage in standing against the oppressive Iranian regime and issued an appeal to the world:

Enough is enough. The UN must stop rewarding abusers. Instead, the UN needs to condemn Iran, punish the Rouhani regime, and expose its transgressions to the world.

I appeal to the UN, and to politicians and ordinary people around the globe, to stand in solidarity with human rights defenders in Iran, and with the Iranian people, to challenge the oppressive regime. We really need your support.

 

Per Ahlmark Award Winner Bari Weiss

Journalist Bari Weiss, who made international news when she resigned her position at the New York Times, received the Per Ahlmark Award, in recognition of her moral courage and eloquence in defending the principles of democracy and in combating antisemitism.

In her keynote speech, Weiss exposed the truth behind the New York Times’s capitulation to the new ideology that threatens to replace the liberalism underpinning our democracy, and inspired us with her principled exit from the pinnacle of her profession:

At the Times, if you do not profess allegiance to this new ideology, you are suspect, your character and your work scrutinized and put to a crazy double standard. Bullying in theory is wrong, but bullying the right people? That’s ok. Diversity and inclusion: yes! Just not for some people.

The ascension of this ideology—and my obvious lack of true belief in it—meant that I could no longer do the job that I was hired to do.

So I had an important choice to make: stay and become a kind of half version of myself. Or leave so I could do what I came to do in the first place—pursue the truth in a moment of incredible importance for this country. Leave knowing I was going to lose some things but with the belief that I would gain infinitely more for having walked away.

Outstanding Support

In anticipation of a funding shortfall in the wake of COVID-19, our Online Gala sought to raise $500,000 to ensure the continuation of our critical activities. Not only did we reach our target, but we raised close to an astounding $700,000. Thank you all for your outstanding support.

If you haven’t already, consider making an investment in our future. It’s still not too late to contribute to UN Watch’s vital mission and help us do even more to combat anti-Israel prejudice and defend human rights for all.

The post Success: UN Watch’s 2020 Online Gala appeared first on UN Watch.

What an honor it is to be here. 

When I look at the other people who have been recognized by UN Watch for moral courage–people like Shaparak Shajarizadeh and Masih Alinejad–it’s clear I’m way, way out of my league, and I am humbled to be in their company.

But fate has given me two clues that I might have the distinction to speak to you all this evening.

The first is that I suspect I am the only person to have spoken to UN Watch to have profiled Hillel Neuer for my college political magazine. Yes, I was extremely cool. 

The second is that I may actually be the only person ever to have written her senior year thesis on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s time as United States ambassador to the United Nations. As I said: I have always been very cool.

I had really good reason to be fixated on these two hell-raisers in Geneva during my college years. It was as an undergraduate at Columbia now 15 years ago where I first encountered the Soviet lie that Moynihan famously bellowed against during his unforgettable speech in November 1975–and that remains among the most durable and insidious untruths that Hillel Neuer and UN Watch continue to battle tirelessly today. 

That lie? That Zionism is racism.

The obscene resolution, as those watching this surely know, was repealed three decades ago. But its evil echoes on. And not just in Turtle Bay, and no longer on the lunatic fringe. It now resides firmly in the mainstream, including at American universities like my alma mater, which are meant to be the guardians of liberalism.

If Zionism was racism, as so many professors and students believed, then Zionists were racists. And everyone knows how we should treat racists.

As a believer in the fundamental justness of Israel’s cause, I learned that the hard way. Many, many, many more young and proud Jews since me have since experienced the cost of that lie.

There were times that I felt besieged and alone. But Hillel Neuer and the memory of Daniel Patrick Moynihan before him–to say nothing of my heroes, like Sharansky and Saharkaov and Solzhenitsyn–they were something like human lighthouses for me and for my small group of allies.

In them, I saw how a person could exist in a hostile atmosphere.

In them, I saw the dignity of telling the truth in an atmosphere of lies.

In them, I saw the power of a single person willing to go against the herd.

In them, I saw models of moral courage.

***

When kids are little, we tell them all kinds of things. We tell them to wash their hands and be nice and work hard and to share their toys and to make their beds and  . . . to tell the truth.

The last of those sounds as simple as all of the rest. But in my experience, it can be the hardest thing in the world to do.

Everyone wants to be liked. Everyone wants to get along. Human nature is to want to be in rhythm with the people around you.

I think the hardest thing is to be out of step, to be the thorn in the side, to be the skunk at the garden party. When the whole crowd is running to embrace the convenient fiction, to tell the white lie to make things just a little bit easier, my God, is it hard to resist that pull.

In my tiny way, I have tried to do that in my own life.

Those watching this and those who heard the introduction will likely know that I am now a newspaperwoman without a newspaper–a curious position for someone who appeared to be standing at the pinnacle of American journalism–The New York Times–not five minutes ago.

What happened? It’s a question I get a lot.

The story is a complicated one that involves Twitter and Slack channels, livestreams and hashtags, but in a way, it’s a very simple–and very old–story.

I left because I did not want to participate in a project that was betraying my values.

I became a journalist and I had come to the New York Times–the paper of record–to tell the truth. But The New York Times, like so many institutions in this country that uphold the liberal order, is undergoing a fundamental transformation that makes that job–the job of truth-telling–increasingly difficult.

The old liberal values I had taken for granted–the belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group; in judging a person based on their deeds rather than their lineage; the belief in due process and the presumption of innocence and the rejection of mob justice; the belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; toleration a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, of faith, and of speech are the bedrocks of democracy–all of those virtues are under siege.

That worldview is under siege by a new, illiberal, and powerful ideology that doesn’t have time for any of that. The new creed says: We are in a war. We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress and righteousness are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—the rules of due process; a political compromise; of free speech; even of reason itself—they must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

Over the past few decades and over the past few years with increasing velocity, this ideology has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. The wind is at the back of these true believers, who do not hesitate to smear those that dare disagree with their creed.

At the Times, what that meant is that the old school idea of reporting the news without fear or favor, of striving for objectivity even while recognizing that we are all fallible, that’s given way to something much more strident, a kind of blinding moral certainty in which stories that do not advance the narrative, that do not advance whatever is perceived as just, or as progressive, are seen as something like traitorous. 

That’s why an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator caused my boss to lose his job. Meantime, Chinese Communist Party propaganda and apologias for medieval antisemites like Louis Farakkahn, those are acceptable.

At the Times, if you do not profess allegiance to this new ideology, you are suspect, your character and your work scrutinized, and put to a crazy double standard. Bullying in theory is wrong, but bullying the right people? That’s ok. Diversity and inclusion: yes! Just not for some people.

The ascension of this ideology—and my obvious lack of true belief in it—meant that I could no longer do the job that I was hired to do.

So I had an important choice to make: stay and become a kind of half version of myself. Or leave so I could do what I came to do in the first place—pursue the truth in a moment of incredible importance for this country. Leave knowing I was going to lose some things but with the belief that I would gain infinitely more for having walked away.

I did walk away and I have lost some things–and not just good health care! I’ve lost the excitement of telling people where I work and the automatic respect it commands. I’ve lost an editor that I love. I’ve lost a professional network. And I have lost some friends.

But when you hear what actual dissidents like Shaparak have sacrificed for the cause of liberty and freedom, you realize that to even make the kind of choice that I made is a privilege.

You see I believe that there are eternal values more important than the day’s politics.

There are things more important than prestige or status or social acceptance or money.

Or, as the great American judge Learned Hand put it so perfectly, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, and no court can even do much to help it.”

Keeping the spirit of liberty alive in an age of creeping illiberalism is our moral obligation.

And that, in the end, is why I am speaking to you tonight, not as an employee of the New York Times but as a free agent.

If my heroes — who were buffeted by history in ways I can never imagine — have taught me anything, its that history is always written in the present, nothing is a certainty, nothing is assured, and small groups of people can and have changed its trajectory. But we must fight for those ideas and the values that make civilization worthy of its name.

We are at a hinge moment in history in America and around the world. The evidence of that is everywhere around us. Look at what just happened recently in France. A school teacher beheaded for showing his student cartoons. Could there be a more powerful reminder of the importance of defending free thought and free speech than that? That is what is in the balance. Those are the stakes. They could not be higher.

Duty isn’t a popular word these days, but duty is essential for courage.

It is our duty to resist the crowd in our age of mob thinking.

It is our duty to speak truth in the age of lies.

It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity.

And it is our duty to sacrifice something of ourselves for the causes that allow us to be ourselves in the first place.

Growing up as a kid, I was always taught that the best ideas win out in the marketplace of ideas. That’s not true. As I wrote in my resignation letter to the Times, ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. And above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.

I am. UN Watch is, and I hope you are, too.

The post Remarks by Bari Weiss on Receiving UN Watch’s Per Ahlmark Award appeared first on UN Watch.

UN Watch’s prize will be presented at the watchdog group’s 2020 Online Gala on November 1st.

“During a time when critical thinking, reasoned arguments and resistance to mob mentality are considered fatal to one’s career, Bari Weiss dares to confront those on either side of the political aisle who betray the liberal ideals of freedom and independent inquiry,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“And during a time when Jews in the United States were targeted more than ever before by deadly attacks, from her own family’s Pittsburgh synagogue to a New Jersey Kosher grocery, Bari Weiss has become a leading voice for a new generation in decoding today’s varied manifestations of the world’s oldest hatred, and she inspires so many with her determination to fight it.”

“I am honored to be chosen for this award,” said Bari Weiss. “UN Watch is a leading human rights organization that provides global platforms for dissidents targeted by repressive regimes, shining an international spotlight on horrific abuses that require the world’s attention.”

“When I feel wobbly and need an example of moral courage, I watch my friend Hillel Neuer sitting in a room of despots and speaking up in favor of the downtrodden. A few minutes and his powerful example inevitably stiffens my own spine.”

“Telling the truth is hard, and increasingly so in our present age. But UN Watch lights the way. You show the rest of us the power of living in truth.

Recipients of previous UN Watch awards include Nobel Peace Prize laureate David Trimble, former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.

About Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss made international headlines when she resigned in July 2020 from her position as an opinion editor at The New York Times, accusing the newspaper of an ideological dogmatism hostile to intellectual curiosity, and of bullying by colleagues for her dissenting views — and for “writing about the Jews again.”

Author of the award-winning 2019 book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” Weiss was previously an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

She is the winner of the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.”

In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times’s “star opinion writer,” and The Jerusalem Post named her the seventh most influential Jew in the world.

About UN Watch

UN Watch is a non-governmental organization that monitors the United Nations by the yardstick of its own charter, advocates for human rights dissidents, and combats antisemitism and anti-Israeli prejudice at the UN.

UN Watch was founded in 1993 by civil rights leader Morris B. Abram, drafter of the UN’s anti-racism convention, following his term as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

Since 2009, UN Watch has chaired the coalition of 25 NGOs that organizes the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy.

Accredited as a non-governmental observer, UN Watch is a key participant in the debates of the UN Human Rights Council. UN Watch’s truth-telling message appears worldwide in more than 600 newspaper articles and media broadcasts per year. For more, visit unwatch.org.

Per Ahlmark, 1939-2018

UN Watch’s inaugural Per Ahlmark Award is named after the former deputy prime minister of Sweden, public intellectual, writer and defender of democracy who served for two decades as the European Co-Chair of UN Watch. He passed away in 2018.

“Per Ahlmark was a moral giant,” said Neuer, “and he would have been privileged to have his name associated with Bari Weiss and her work. In her writing, the noble causes she champions, and the courage she exercises to defend them, Bari has much in common with Per.”

For more about the life and legacy of Per Ahlmark, see UN Watch’s tribute, “Sweden’s Prophet.”

Swedish Friends of Per Ahlmark Welcome the Award

“As a friend of Per Ahlmark, I cannot think of a more worthy recipient of the award in his name than Bari Weiss. Per was a classical liberal who dedicated his life to the fight against antisemitism wherever it occurred—be it on the extreme left, extreme right, and among Islamists,” said Paulina Neuding, a columnist with Svenska Dagbladets.

“Bari Weiss has taken on the same cause with great courage and integrity. She has also bravely chosen to defend freedom of expression and journalistic ethics when the New York Times betrayed its own standards.”

“‘Don’t do any nonsense while I’m dead,’ Per warned in one of his most famous lines, which was also the title of his last book. Few other public figures have done more than Bari Weiss to fight the nonsense of our time in the spirit of Per Ahlmark,” said the Stockholm-based journalist.

I’m honored to be recognized by an organization I admire so deeply. Thank you, @UNWatch, for your steadfast commitment to telling the truth, even if it means standing alone. https://t.co/mF3qBeeylU

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) October 6, 2020

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