“The time for talking and having a conversation is over.”

Israeli envoy calls for criminalizing antisemitism after NYT cartoon
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Danny Danon speaks during a meeting of the UN Security Council at UN headquarters in New York, February 20, 2018. (photo credit: LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS)

The only way to stop antisemitism is to criminalize it, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told reporters in New York on Monday.

“The time for talking and having a conversation is over,” Danon said. “What Israel and the Jewish community around the world demands is action and now.”

Danon, speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations Security Council meeting said that those who engage in antisemitism “must be punished, whether it is here at the UN, political leaders, editors, policy pundits, or college professors, it does not matter.

“Antisemitism should have no place in our society,” he continued. “Until it becomes criminal, this bigotry will persist. It will fester. It is only a matter of time until it erupts again in violence and bloodshed.”

Danon spoke just two days after a shooter, believed to be a white supremacist, killed one Jewish worshiper and wounded three others in the Chabad synagogue in Poway California. Separately, that same weekend, The New York Times published an article widely held to be classically antisemitic. The paper has since apologized. Danon linked the two events and a shooting that occurred at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, in which 11 worshipers were killed.

“From the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to the Chabad synagogue in Poway California, antisemitism is no longer a fringe bigotry in the US,” Danon said. “Then, as now, all the right people are saying all the right things. They express their sympathies and call for an end to this violence and bigotry.

“It seems that we have learned nothing from the Pittsburgh attack, and we are likely to continue to do nothing following the attack in San Diego,” Danon continued.

He added that since October, members of the United States Congress have openly exposed themselves as antisemites and that the NYT cartoon “could have been taken from the pages of Der Stürmer, the Nazi propaganda paper.

“And yet these actions have gone unpunished,” Danon said. “I have not seen the NYT [hold] any one accountable for this horrible cartoon. When you have pictures, cartoons, words, demonstrations, it leads to violence and shootings.”

As reported by The Jerusalem Post