The 13 months since October 7 2023 have had a clarifying effect. No more hiding in the murk. Many people with pre-existing moral weakness or susceptibility to disinformation about Israel have since Hamas’s butcherous invasion leaned deeply and proudly into a variety of anti-Jewish positions. Ivy League college campuses, in particular, have shown their true colours. Too many have pioneered a new model of student life as a cesspit of open support for Palestinian jihadist groups.
Nobody showed up the anti-Jewish rot at the heart of America’s elite colleges quite like New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who presided over House hearings with the then-presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT. A highlight was when Stefanik asked the universities’ representatives whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. Their shameful answer? It depends on the context. Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard, was subsequently forced to step down over a plagiarism scandal.
How satisfying, then, to learn that Stefanik has been appointed by Donald Trump as US ambassador to the UN, the world’s greatest international hotbed of “respectable” Israel-loathing and a body so pernicious in its attitude towards the Jewish state that it makes Harvard look positively friendly.
For decades, the UN has been rigged against Israel. Its main relief organisation for Palestinians, UNRWA, is so rotten that nine of its staff (of many more suspected) were found to have actually participated in the October 7 attacks. While obsessed with false changes of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza, the UN has not managed to pass a resolution condemning Hamas. UN Women had nothing to say about the rape and torture of Israeli women on that horrible day until shamed into issuing a comment.
Then there are biased UN potentates like Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for “Palestine”, and the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres himself, whose response to the October 7 attacks was to appear to justify the Hamas attacks by saying they “did not happen in a vacuum”.
And so it is pleasing to know that into this bog will come the woman who made her name on the international stage for calling out just the sort of embedded anti-Israel rhetoric that the UN loves and emboldens. A woman who has a track record of making the great and the good tremble as they refuse to stand up against groups and forces justifying the murder of Jews.
Stefanik isn’t entirely good news. She was among those staunch Trump allies who denied the results of the 2020 presidential election and said that Nancy Pelosi shared the blame for the Capitol riots on 6 January.
But when it comes to angering and irritating all the right people, her appointment as US ambassador to the UN could not be better. In the post-October 7 court of “international opinion”, we need more people pointing out the moral cowardice and hypocrisy of those in positions of responsibility. Stefanik is unlikely to be afraid to do that.