As another year comes to a close, the consensus is in for 2021: Israel is the worst nation in the world.

At least, that is according to the number of resolutions the United Nations General Assembly made in 2021. This single country (out of nearly 200), with just 0.1 percent of the world’s population has managed to accrue a whopping 74 percent of condemnations at the General Assembly (14 out of 19).

China’s Uyghur genocide failed to make the cut this year (despite continually emerging accounts of survivors of the camps describing forced sterilizations, commonplace organ harvesting, and institutional rape). Resolutions against China? None.

What about Afghanistan? Now that the Taliban have retaken control, there has been a spree of revenge killings—public executions, hangings, women burned alive, torture. There’s the forced marriages of minors to Taliban “warriors” as “spoils of war.” Parts of the nation are on the brink of starvation (with examples such as this 9-year-old girl being sold to a 55-year-old man so her family can eat). The higher education of girls has ended, and a genocide of Afghan Christians has begun. Resolutions against Afghanistan? Zero.

North Korea did make the list—one would think so, given much of the nation is essentially an internment camp in which people are killed by firing squad for trivialities such as watching K-pop videos. (The nation is currently in an 11-day period of mourning for the anniversary of Kim Jong-Il’s death, a period in which laughter is banned.) Still, the nation received only one resolution.

What awful thing must Israel have done to receive 74 percent of the General Assembly’s resolutions? And it’s not just this year. Since 2015, Israel has received 112 of the condemnatory resolutions out of 157 worldwide—or 71 percent of the total. A quick perusal of the 2021 rap sheet reveals the answer. Here are the (sometimes rather vaguely worded) resolutions for calling for investigation or action against Israel:

• Work of the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the occupied territories
• The occupied Syrian Golan
• Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan
• Assistance to Palestine refugees
• Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East
• Palestine refugees’ properties and their revenues
• The risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East (aimed singularly at Israel)
• Oil slick on Lebanese shores (condemnation against an Israeli strike on an oil storage facility during a war initiated by Hezbollah)
• Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources
• The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination
• Assistance to the Palestinian people
• Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine
• The Syrian Golan
• Jerusalem.

What?

It shouldn’t matter where you stand on the “Israel-Palestine” situation. This, from the United Nations General Assembly—14 resolutions out of 19 worldwide—is “Alice in Wonderland” absurdity.

And it proves the assessment of our organization’s predecessor, Herbert W. Armstrong, who was present at the UN’s inaugural session in San Francisco in April 1945. He reported at the time: “Already I see the clouds of World War iii gathering at this conference. … I do not see peace being germinated here …. [T]he United Nations conference was producing nothing but strife and bickering, and was destined from its inception to end in total failure. Yet world leaders were pronouncing it the world’s last hope.”

In the nearly 77 years since its founding, the UN has indeed proved itself a total farce, in appointment as well as action. Various examples include appointment of Iran as vice chairman of the UN Disarmament Commission (2007); Zimbabwe as chair of the Commission on Sustainable Development (2007, months before its hyperinflation crisis); Libya as chair of Disarmament International Security (2013, with Iran as rapporteur); Syria appointed vice president of the Atomic Energy Agency (2007); Iran given a seat on the women’s rights commission (2014); and China, Russia and Saudi Arabia appointed to the Human Rights Council (2013).

Not to mention the internal corruption scandals, including millions of dollars siphoned off by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il; billions of dollars conned by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during an “oil-for-food” program; the Congo sex scandal, in which minors as young as 12 were raped by UN “peacekeepers”; even the UN cooperation with Hezbollah on the Lebanon-Israel border, in the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers (2000). The UN is also directly responsible for the remilitarization of Germany and Japan. (For more on this subject, request our free booklet He Was Right.)

But ignore all that—just know that Israel is the worst ever.

This is international-scale infantilism. But there is another angle to this story, besides the sheer anti-Semitic, playground-bully nature of the disgrace that is the United Nations General Assembly.

Earlier this year, a reportedly “foundational event in the history of Israel” occurred: Israel’s foreign minister and prime-minister-in-waiting, Yair Lapid, gave a speech at the seventh Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism. His speech was “groundbreaking” in that he attempted to redefine anti-Semitism as no different from other hatreds around the world. He said:

Anti-Semites weren’t only in the ghetto in Budapest. The anti-Semites were the slave traders who threw chained slaves into the ocean. The anti-Semites were the Hutu tribe members in Rwanda that slaughtered the Tutsis. The anti-Semites are those Muslims who have killed more than 20 million fellow Muslims in the past decade. The anti-Semites are the Islamic State and Boko Haram. Anti-Semites are those who kill young people from the lgbt community. Anti-Semites are anyone who persecutes people not because of what they have done, but because of what they are.

Anti-Semitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. Anti-Semitism is extremism, so let’s cooperate with everyone who is afraid of extremism. Anti-Semitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider ….

Despite high praise for the speech over at Haaretz (one author celebrating the equivocation as a “foundational event in the history of Israel and maybe even in the history of the Jewish people”), he’s entirely wrong. Anti-Semitism is something different and unique. Rwanda isn’t constantly lambasted before the world at the United Nations. Muslim nations are rarely condemned on the floor of the UN (this year saw only two—Iran and Syria, with only one resolution each). Anti-Semitism is something else entirely. Delusional anti-Semitism is the reason Israel consistently receives over 70 percent of condemnatory resolutions at the UN.

Other nations have experienced bouts of violence and even genocide. But is there any comparison to anti-Semitism? Germany (one of the most respected members of the UN) famously used its opportunity to extinguish the Jewish people, and succeeded in wiping out two thirds of the Jewish population across the European continent, killing 6 million Jews. But there were also massacres and pogroms in Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Morocco, Iran, Lithuania, Mongolia, Moldova, Afghanistan, Turkey, Algeria, Ecuador, Austria, France, Iraq, Tunisia, Romania, Mandatory Palestine, Latvia, Libya, Hungary, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, the Caucasus and more that led to the additional deaths of hundreds of thousands more Jews.

And these are all just the ones in living memory. Not to mention the numerous historical examples: the Spanish Inquisition; the Black Death (blamed on the Jews, which itself led to the killings of many thousands); the repeated, near-extermination of the Jewish people by the Roman Empire; massacres and oppression by the Byzantines, the Sassanids, the Babylonians, the Assyrians—the list goes on. Are we to believe, as Haaretz’s Nir Guntaz concurred in reaction to Lapid’s speech, that “the hatred of Jews is no different from any other hatred … nothing is unique about the Jewish people”? Is this just regular-old, nothing-to-see-here hatred?

What is the real reason for this demonization?

The Jews are commonly referred to as the “people of the Book”—so it would make sense that the Bible reveals the answer.

The Bible does explain the source and rationale of anti-Semitism’s unique irrationality. It is tied directly to the spirit world, to the original “father of lies,” accuser, adversary and murderer, Satan the devil, who “deceives the whole world.” Anti-Semitism, a persecution that is so irrational to man, is perfectly rational to this “accuser of the brethren”—after all, the Jews, the tribe of Judah, are key not only to salvation but also to the overthrow of Satan’s rule on this Earth. This is to be fulfilled with the establishment of the Messiah’s rule at His coming (e.g. Genesis 49:10; Daniel 2:31-44; 8:23-25; Zechariah 14:13-20). And so Satan’s hatred is poured out against God’s plan and the people whom He has chosen. His anger toward the Jews, harbored for as long as they have existed, is channeled into ready minds, moods and emotions of people all over this Earth (e.g. Genesis 3:1-6; Jeremiah 17:9). The Bible reveals that Satan’s hold over this Earth is just about finished. His control over this world is to be overthrown at the coming of the Messiah—of the tribe of Judah.

This is a biblical explanation. Some may find that hard to believe. That’s fine—they’ll have to try to rationalize for themselves how a modern, advanced and “enlightened” Western society, in living memory, could take millions of men, women and children of all ages and brutally torture and murder them in some of the most barbaric ways imaginable.

And they’ll also have to rationalize how this year, again, the United Nations gave 74 percent of its condemnation to Israel. Because it is the same biblical explanation. The UN mantra is “to maintain international peace and security.” The Bible responds: “[T]he ambassadors of peace shall weep bitterly. … The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace” (Isaiah 33:7; 59:8).