Riyad Mansour speaking to reporters on April 6, 2015. (UN/Loey Felipe)
WASHINGTON — The US expressed “deep concern” over a comparison between Israeli soldiers tackling Palestinian stone-throwers and Nazis quashing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, made by the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UN.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner made the comments in response to an April 27 press conference by Ambassador Riyad Mansour.
“Obviously, we would condemn any anti-Semitic remarks very forcefully,” Toner said, noting that he had not yet examined Mansour’s comments, and was basing his assessment on remarks read to him by a JTA reporter. “It’s deeply concerning.”
Mansour, who called the press conference to discuss UN action on Israel and the Palestinians, attacked Israeli diplomats for their terming stone-throwers “terrorists.”
“All colonizers, all occupiers, including those who suppressed the Warsaw Uprising labeled those who were resisting them as terrorists,” he said.
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Israel’s ambassador to the UN Danny Danon rejected Mansour’s comparison outright, and said world powers should be disgusted with the Palestinian envoy’s claims.
Ambassador Danny Danon speaking at the UN Security Council on October 22, 2015. (Screen capture: UNTV)
Mansour has in the past claimed Israel is harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians, saying bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.”
Danon called that charge a “blood libel” and said the claim had shown the Palestinian ambassador’s true “anti-Semitic face.”
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