A Viral Shouting Match at the UN has Turned Into an Israeli Campaign to Oust a Senior UN Official
"You will be quiet now!”
About ten days ago, a very unusual scene unfolded at the UN when Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon and Vanessa Frazier, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, got into a very public shouting match, culminating with Danon screaming at Frazier, “You will be quiet now!”
Here’s what happened: Danon was delivering a formal response to a report by a different UN official, Pramila Patten, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. In that report, Patten found that Israeli security forces could be credibly suspected of engaging in a pattern of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. Danon took exception to this and, in his response, impugned the motives of Patten, who was not in the room.
Vanessa Frazier, however, was in the room, and she intervened in defense of her colleague.
What followed was this wild scene.
Needless to say, things like this do not happen at the UN, where protocol and diplomatic niceties typically restrain this kind of outburst. To be sure, diplomats often “trade barbs,” but that rarely includes actual shouting matches like this. Not long after this heated exchange, Danon and Frazier took their beef to social media — and that’s when things took an even uglier turn.
Danny Danon is now on a mission to get Vanessa Frazier fired.
In today’s episode of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali Dayal and I discuss what is driving this beef. (There’s much more to this story than what has already been reported.) We also discuss whether Israel is simply trying to deflect attention from the substance of reports containing credible accusations of violations of human rights and international law by alleging bias on the part of the authors of those reports.
The full episode is available below the fold for our paying subscribers.
Also in this episode: what we learned from the first public hearing of the newest entrant in the Secretary-General race, Guyana’s UN Ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, and how the UN managed to stave off a financial apocalypse in July.
This is exactly the kind of conversation we created To Save Us From Hell to have: informed, unscripted, well sourced, and focused on what is actually happening inside the UN system — beyond the diplomatic theater.
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