B’nai B’rith President Robert Spitzer and CEO Evan R. Bernstein have issued the following statement:

B’nai B’rith International is appalled and dismayed by the selection of Navi Pillay for the Nobel Peace Prize. This choice is not only unwarranted but offensive and damaging. It cheapens the world’s leading prize for peacemaking and further reinforces a sense of isolation by Jews facing a surge in global antisemitism.

Pillay, a former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, epitomized systemic, singular U.N. bias against and mistreatment of Israel.

She had an open record of longstanding animus to the Jewish state—maligning it with the “apartheid” label and endorsing punitive economic measures against it.

As chair of the U.N.’s current, open-ended “commission of inquiry” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she shamelessly defended the outright antisemitism of colleagues and mimicked the outrageous lie of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. She was a defender of the U.N.’s notorious 2001 racism conference in her native Durban, South Africa, and of especially radical U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has repeatedly earned denunciation by major democracies for her bigotry against Israel and the Jewish community.

Bernstein noted, “With its senseless and shameful choice, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has done more harm to the peace prize than any similar step in recent history. This choice is an abomination.”