Libyan envoy likens Israel to Nazis

Jewish and international groups called on the U.N. secretary-general to rebuke the Libyan envoy, who currently leads the General Assembly, for likening Israel to Nazis.

Ali Abdussalam Treki’s “comments are an outrage, a blight upon the United Nations and his high office, and an impediment to historical truth and to peace,” B’nai B’rith International President Dennis Glick and Executive Vice President Daniel Mariaschin wrote May 18 in a letter to Ban Ki-moon.

Treki, elected last June to the General Assembly presidency for a one-year term, told Syrian television that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, “is worse than the camps of the Nazis in the past.”

“Will Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon follow in the footsteps of his distinguished predecessor and speak out against this man who called for exterminating the Jewish people and who now falsely accuses the Jewish State of responsibility for death camps in Gaza worse than those of the Nazis, where Hamas, not Israel, rules with an iron hand?” Harris Schoenberg, president of the U.N. Reform Advocates organization, asked in a statement issued last week.

While he was Libya’s permanent U.N.  representative in the 1980s, Treiki was well known for his Nazi-like, anti-Semitic diatribes, says U.N. Reform Advocates. — jta