Caught on Tape, a U.N. Interpreter Wonders Aloud at its Israel Bashing

“There’s other really bad s**t happening, but no one says anything”

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

Yesterday was “bash Israel” day at the United Nations–which is to say, Thursday. The U.N. General Assembly, which last year passed 22 resolutions condemning Israel and only four against other individual countries, approved nine such resolutions lambasting the Jewish state. Naturally, it had nothing to say about violations in the rest of the world, though it did manage to lament the situation in Syria–that is, Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights.

You don’t have to be a Zionist or a supporter of Israeli policy to recognize the profound injustice at work in the U.N.’s treatment of the Jewish state. In fact, as it turns out, even an official U.N. interpreter would be hard pressed not to notice it. Thus, during yesterday’s session, between the sixth and seventh resolution against Israel, the interpreter on the floor expressed her mystification with the body’s obsession with Israel at the expense of other global concerns, not realizing her microphone was still on:

    I mean, I think when you have five statements, not five, like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there’s gotta be something, c’est un peu trop, non? [It’s a bit much, no?] I mean I know… There’s other really bad shit happening, but no one says anything, about the other stuff.

As you can see in the video below, the remark was greeted by laughter among the assembled delegates, after which the mortified interpreter apologized. The proceedings then continued, with Mauritania asking to retroactively add its voice to the sixth resolution condemning Israel’s human rights abuses. Mauritania, of course, boasts nearly a million people in chattel slavery. It is also the vice president of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Watch the whole circus below (the hot mic moment occurs at 1:56):