U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Skips Holocaust Event for First Time in a Decade

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced on Thursday he will not attend International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Park East Synagogue in New York City on Saturday, the first time either Guterres or his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, missed the event in ten years.

The Jerusalem Post said it was “unclear” if Guterres decided not to attend the event or if the Park East Synagogue asked him not to come. A spokesman for the secretary-general said he felt his attendance would be a distraction.

A statement from Guterres’s office said:

Following the terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October, and the subsequent rise of anti-Semitism and the continued pain of the community, the Saturday service at Park East Synagogue will be focused on healing and the testimony of survivors. It will not [be] an event for the diplomatic community so, therefore, the Secretary-General will not be attending.

The synagogue would not comment further on Guterres’s absence, saying only that the event would be focused on “the Shoah and the barbaric attack on Israel on October 7, the kidnapped, the rise of worldwide anti-Semitism, and internal pain.”

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The Jerusalem Post suspected the decision for Guterres to miss the event was mutual, as Guterres has “faced heavy criticism from Israel and its supporters for his response to the war”:

[Guterres] has condemned Hamas’ October 7 invasion of Israel, but on October 7, he incensed Israelis by saying that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum,” linking the terrorist atrocities to occupation, settlements and economic woes. That statement led Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN ambassador, to call for Guterres’ resignation.

Guterres is also not expected to attend a Holocaust Remembrance Day event hosted by the Israeli mission to the UN on Wednesday, the mission said. The UN chief will attend a Friday memorial ceremony at UN headquarters that will be attended by Erdan and the State Department’s antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, according to the UN schedule.

Israeli advocates have pressed Guterres to speak out more forcefully in support of the Hamas hostages, with weekly protests outside his Sutton Place home. The protesters have formed a relationship with the UN chief but still believe he should do more to support the captives by speaking out unequivocally, and without accompanying condemnation of Hamas with criticism of Israel.

January 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the U.N. General Assembly in 2005. The date was chosen to commemorate the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz death camp. Guterres has spoken at the event every year since he became U.N. Secretary-General in 2017.

In his 2023 speech, Guterres compared the growing climate of antisemitic rhetoric to 1930s Germany. He said antisemitism was at “record highs” and called for “regulators, policymakers, technology companies, the media, civil society, and government” to implement hate-speech controls.

“Many parts of the internet are becoming toxic waste dumps for hate and vicious lies. They are profit-driven catalysts for moving extremism from the margins to the mainstream,” he said. 

It is a bitter irony of the times that giving such a speech in 2o24 would be politically impossible for Guterres because Palestinian terrorists raped and murdered hundreds of Jews on October 7, and Israel fought back.

The New York Sun scolded Guterres for not listening to his own speech in 2023:

He and UN bodies constantly scold the IDF for attacking UN Relief and Work Agency facilities taken over by Hamas fighters. Meanwhile, the UN’s judicial organ, the International Court of Justice, has leveled charges of genocide against the Jewish state. 

Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, is the first envoy from Jerusalem to call for the resignation of a secretary-general, referencing Mr. Guterres’s statement that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” 

The New York Sun noted that Guterres is still scheduled to speak at the U.N.’s Holocaust Memorial Ceremony on Friday. Ambassador Erdan will be one of the other speakers.