UNITED NATIONS (AP) – French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi challenged the world at the first-ever U.N. General Assembly meeting devoted to anti-Semitism to take action to counter the rising hatred of Jews, which he denounced as “radical inhumanity.”
In a keynote address, Levi decried that “faulting the Jews is once again becoming the rallying cry of a new order of assassins.”
The United Nations was established on the ashes of the Holocaust after World War II, and one reason was to fight the “plague” of anti-Semitism, Levi noted. He called for new arguments to counter Holocaust deniers and those who deny Israel’s legitimacy.
“It is up to you who are the faces of the world to be the architects of a house in which the mother of all hates would see its place reduced,” said Levi, who is Jewish. “May you in a year’s time, and in years after that and every other year, reconvene to observe that the mobilization of today was not in vain.”
The assembly meeting was held in response to the global increase in violence against Jews and was scheduled before the killing of four French Jews at a kosher market during three days of terror in Paris earlier this month. Paris was just the latest attack to raise fears among European Jews, following killings at a Belgian Jewish Museum and a Jewish school in southwestern France.