The anti-Zionist racist and the man who fought the UN’s ‘Zionism is racism’

Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a patriotic New York liberal, led the West’s fight against the UN’s Zionism is racism resolution. Moynihan called this assault on Israel an assault on democracy and decency. Americans’ near-unanimous disgust with that resolution marked the fall of the UN — its reputation never recovered.

Today, New York is terrifyingly close to electing an America-bashing, police-defunding, snake-oil-peddling, socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose anti-Zionism became his political launching pad in college. Let’s hope that our descendants in 2075 won’t mark this Election Day, Nov. 4, as the 50th anniversary of the fall of New York.

In 1975, Americans recognized that singling out one form of nationalism — Jewish nationalism, meaning Zionism — in the world forum of nationalisms, singled out Jews, which is antisemitic. Moynihan, America’s UN ambassador, scoffed that Zionism isn’t racist, which means biologically-based bigotry. Israel’s conflict with Palestinians is national not racial, with dark-skinned Jews and light-skinned Palestinians. “Indeed, the idea that Jews are a ‘race’ was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews,” he emphasized.

This kid from Hell’s Kitchen who rose to become a Harvard professor and, after the UN, New York’s four-term senator, worried. If the vocabulary of human rights was drained of its meaning and weaponized against Israel, it would undermine liberal democracy. “If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries,” he thundered, “we will not have words to replace them.”

Israeli UN Ambassador Chaim Herzog, the father of current Israeli President Isaac Herzog, noted the sick coincidence. Nov. 10 was the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, he told the General Assembly. “This was the night of 10 Nov. 1938 when Hitler’s Nazi stormtroopers launched a coordinated attack on the Jewish community in Germany,” burning synagogues and holy books, heralding the Holocaust. Then, his knockout punch: “Hitler would have felt at home … listening to the proceedings…during the debate on Zionism.”

It’s an interesting question for New York voters, asking which mayoral candidate would make America’s enemies feel more at home.

Many Black activists feared the devaluing of the term racism too. “Smearing the ‘racist’ label on Zionism is an insult to intelligence,” wrote Vernon Jordan, the National Urban League president. “Black people, who recognize code words since we’ve been victimized by code words… can easily smell out the fact that ‘Zionism’ in this context is a code word for antisemitism.” Jordan wondered how the UN could say “national self-determination is for everyone except Jews.”

New Yorkers beamed in 1946 when the UN’s General Assembly, representing post-World War II optimism, voted to establish its permanent headquarters in the Big Apple. Now, they lost respect for this dishonest den dominated by dictators. The next day, more than 100,000 New Yorkers mobbed a noontime “rally against racism and antisemitism” at the Brotherhood-in-Action plaza in Manhattan’s Garment District — Jews and non-Jews, Blacks and whites, labor union organizers and Wall Street types, priests and nuns, ministers and pastors.

Bayard Rustin, the labor leader and civil rights activist who helped his friend Martin Luther King Jr. organize the 1963 “I Have a Dream,” March on Washington, kept warning about the “incalculable damage” done to the fight against racism, when the word becomes a political weapon not a moral standard. Rooting anti-Zionism in the ugly intersection between traditional antisemitism and the Arab desire to eradicate Israel, Rustin quoted King, who said: “when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking antisemitism.”

That day Rustin ended his speech by singing “Go Down, Moses.” As thousands of New Yorkers, shouted “Let my people go,” Blacks and Jews bonded together, united in fighting all haters.

The fight Moynihan spearheaded so inspired Americans and especially New Yorkers — because the 1970s were so depressing. Americans were reeling from Watergate, Vietnam, inflation. Teetering on bankruptcy, New York was dirty, chaotic, and crime-ridden. Days before the UN’s farce, on Oct. 30, the Daily News captured New Yorkers’ frustration with President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out the city, by running that epic headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Now, as the world targeted Israel — obviously trying to humiliate its closest ally, America, Moynihan resisted. Exposing the Soviet Communists, dictators like the Butcher of Uganda, Idi Amin, and the bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, championing this resolution, Moynihan didn’t defend the “accused” — he blasted “the accusers.”

His State Department bosses then accused him of being “undiplomatic.” He took it as a compliment.

Diplomats, he explained, charm when possible, but must know when to fight too, especially when national honor is at stake. Moynihan blamed whatever backlash he encountered on the new Western defeatism. He tried to fix whatever flaws America had, but he could distinguish between democracies like America and Israel — and their totalitarian enemies.

Americans craved such boldness. Polls showed most Americans approved Moynihan’s move. All of America’s 50 leading newspapers ran editorials condemning the UN, with 34 branding Resolution 3379 antisemitic.

If Hollywood made a movie about Moynihan’s moment, its tag line would be: When America was down… one man stood tall. “As a sort of ambassadorial fighting Irishman, Pat Moynihan has become an American pop hero,” Time magazine gushed. Cabbies honked their approval, shouting “attaboy Pat,” as he walked around New York. Everyone at Carnegie Hall rose and cheered when Moynihan attended a concert there.

A decade later, President Ronald Reagan recalled that “Few events have so offended the American people as the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution.” Reagan promised to keep leading a years-long bipartisan effort, trying to remove “this blot from the UN record.”

Six years later, in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the General Assembly rescinded the resolution. That year, Zohran Mamdani was born in a Uganda still recovering from the raving anti-Zionist and mass murderer, Idi Amin.

Nevertheless, this UN-sanctioned lie that Zionism is racism became a gateway to hatred. It opened the floodgates, leading to waves of antisemitic anti-Zionism. Generations of young Westerners have been raised on a new anti-Jewish obsession. Today, unlike Medieval times, it’s not “the Jew” but “the Jewish state,” Israel, that’s blamed for so many problems — and found guilty of the worst crimes.

Exploiting the world’s justifiable disgust with South African apartheid, Palestinian activists deemed Israel an “apartheid state.” Watching academics reduce so many conflicts to “oppressed versus oppressors,” Palestinians posed as the ultimate victims, forever innocent and oppressed by their perpetually-guilt Israeli oppressors. And as “settler-colonialism” became progressives’ slur du-jour, Israel became a “settler-colonial” enterprise, denying Jews’ 3,500-year-old roots in the Land of Israel, and Zionism’s rebellion against Ottoman Turkish and British colonialism.

The parallels today are unnerving as a new generation raised on this anti-American, illiberal, breast-beating, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing, anti-Zionism tries seizing power.

• Moynihan warned: “a great evil has been loosed upon the world,” the “abomination of antisemitism” has “been given the appearance of international sanction.” Now, New York’s mayoral frontrunner is so blinded by anti-Zionist hatred, he couldn’t even condemn Hamas after its Oct. 7 barbarism. Instead, he parroted the updated version of the Zionism-is-racism lie by tweeting on Oct. 8, condemning Israeli “apartheid.”
• Moynihan noted that Jews were Nazified, being accused of racism, despite having been victimized by Nazi racism. Now, Mamdani keeps Nazifying Israel, accusing a country founded by Jews who survived the Nazi genocide, of committing genocide.
• Civil rights activists revealed that anti-Zionism used anti-Jewish “code words” and what we now call “dog whistles.” Mamdani admits that the Palestinian cause is “central to my identity,” even though the Palestinian national movement has long used Israel-bashing “code words” to foment Jew-hatred.

A half century ago, a courageous New York hero, a proud Democrat working for a Republican president, stood before the world and denounced the UN’s poisonous hatred that Zionism is racism, so how can anyone of good conscience support a mayoral candidate who aligns with that? I know what Moynihan would be saying today about Mamdani.

Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian and the author of the award-winning “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism.” His latest e-book, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred” was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI website.