B’nai B’rith President Robert Spitzer and CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin have issued the following statement:

B’nai B’rith hails the resignations of the members of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) anti-Israel “Commission of Inquiry” (COI). Chair Navi Pillay and members Miloon Kothari and Christopher Sidoti were chosen to participate on this commission precisely because of their stridently anti-Israel views.

Since they were appointed, they have confirmed all that we had warned about when this commission was created. It has become a bloated bureaucracy that has seen its task as a mission to attack Israel relentlessly, while excusing or failing to verify even the clearest human rights violations by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups.

Each of the commissioners has had issues with anti-Semitism in the past few years that would have been grounds for immediate dismissal at any respectable organization. Kothari created a firestorm when he claimed that Jews control social media. Pillay chose to back up his outrageous statements instead of condemning them.

Kothari eventually, after much pressure, was forced to apologize for his anti-Semitic rant, but Pillay has never been held to account for her despicable actions during the incident. Sidoti, meanwhile, upset by valid criticism of the COI, claimed that Jews were throwing accusations of anti-Semitism like, “rice at a wedding.” At this latest UNHRC session in June, he called Palestinian terrorists that Israel had legitimately detained “hostages,” grotesquely comparing them to the dozens of Israelis still held in horrific conditions by Hamas in tunnels underneath Gaza.

The world is much better off without these three individuals holding their U.N. positions. The problem, however, is deeper than any individual or group of commissioners. It is the commission itself, with its inherent bias and enormous budget, that must be removed. Replacing these commissioners with new commission members with the same views, as the UNHRC is wont to do, will not fundamentally change the ongoing moral rot at the United Nations. Moreover, the U.N. must take accountability for the anti-Semitism that has become so commonplace within the U.N. system that these commissioners were allowed to remain in their positions for such a long period of time.