“Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has provoked yet another international diplomatic stir with Israel. Speaking, (where else?), at a United Nations conference in Vienna last week, Erdogan listed ‘Zionism’ alongside ‘fascism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ as “crime[s] against humanity.’ The remark promptly drew criticism from Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and a host of governments. Erdogan has yet to apologize, and it’s unlikely that he will.

Erdogan’s outburst has induced a feeling of eerie nostalgia. It was also at the UN, where, in 1975, the General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination.’ As the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the greatest Ambassador ever to serve at that ignominious body, declared from the well of the General Assembly in New York, it was not Zionism that was ‘racist’ but rather the resolution condemning it as such, the passage of which would be remembered as an ‘infamous act.'”

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