Ramzy Baroud on Danny Danon and the mountain of evidence that cannot be shouted away about Israel’s systemic use of sexual violence and other abuses against Palestinians.
Danny Danon, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, addressing the Security Council last month. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)
Whether Israelis will ever comprehend the irreparable damage inflicted upon their country’s reputation by their U.N. ambassador, Danny Danon, is a moot point. The damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.
Danon, however, utilizes a peculiar approach to defending Israel within international institutions: he relies on bullying, intimidation, and an overt attempt to silence anyone who dares to challenge the official Israeli narrative — particularly women leaders. Yet, what makes his behavior most outrageous is his deployment of these abrasive tactics to suppress an issue that demands the utmost sensitivity: the systemic use of sexual violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians.
The confrontation took place last month during a U.N. General Assembly session convened to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Senior U.N. officials were presenting harrowing findings documenting sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.
True to form, Danon refused to engage with the substance of the reports. For Israeli diplomacy, the enemy is never merely the armed adversary; it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the U.N. investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.
The immediate target of Danon’s wrath was Pramila Patten, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict. Instead of reflecting on the grim findings, Danon demanded Patten’s resignation. He accused her and the broader international community of harboring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.
When Vanessa Frazier, the secretary-general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, attempted to intervene on a point of order per established protocol, Danon unleashed a vitriolic verbal assault. Refusing to yield, he shouted over her, ordering her to “be quiet” and drowning out the chamber with his outbursts. “Shame on you. You are part of this obsession,” Danon bellowed.
While such unruly behavior should have resulted in Danon’s immediate removal from the chamber, the diplomatic asymmetry of the U.N. prevailed. It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.” Danon shot back with typical defiance: “You will not be allowed to bully us.”
Children Deliberately Targeted and Killed
Herein lies the supreme irony of Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the U.N. and international law. Israel stands as one of the most egregious, serial violators of international law in modern history — a decades-long pattern of behavior left unpunished by Western vetoes, which ultimately emboldened it to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Yet, Israeli officials persistently claim the mantle of the ultimate victim, alleging they are the targets of anti-semitism, unfair bias, and now, “bullying” by the very institutions they defy.
But the mountain of evidence cannot be shouted away. According to an extensive report issued by Patten’s office, there are verified patterns of systemic abuse, sexual degradation, and psychological torture weaponized against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli detention like Sde Teiman.
Patten with Secretary-General António Guterres in April. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)
The weight of this evidence reached such an undeniable threshold that the U.N. secretary-general’s office formally added Israel to the global ‘List of Shame’ — the blacklist of states committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.
None of this exposure is enough to convince Danon or the broader Israeli political establishment that Israel does not possess a sovereign right to violate international law. In their view, merely pointing out these crimes constitutes an act of aggression.
This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict. A comprehensive U.N. investigation recently concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza as a core component of its military campaign. It is staggering: Between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2025, an estimated 20,179 Palestinian children were killed — about 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths.
Injured Palestinians children at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after Israeli airstrike of the Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Nov. 1, 2023. (Ashraf Amra /UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0)
Commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar, noting that Israeli authorities have systematically continued to commit the crime of genocide, said:
“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces.”
While these findings provide another layer of ironclad legal proof regarding genocidal intent, the true significance of the report lies in its exposure of the rationale behind targeting youth.
Typically, the disproportionate slaughter of children and women is dismissed by Western apologists as “collateral damage.” The U.N. inquiry shattered this defense, offering a far more consequential conclusion: the targeting of Gaza’s children is part of a calculated strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
As Muralidhar bluntly summarized:
“By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.”
It remains a profound disappointment that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice — often swift to indict war crimes committed elsewhere — continue to move at a glacial pace regarding Israel. Tragically, the catastrophe continues unabated because there is still no meaningful international mechanism willing to enforce sanctions or employ genuine pressure to halt it.
This is precisely why Danon wants the world to be quiet. His outbursts are not merely directed at U.N. diplomats; they are directed at global civil society, ordinary citizens, and anyone refusing to look away. Israel demands absolute silence while Palestinians are starved, raped, and murdered.
According to its twisted logic, committing these atrocities is an inherent right, and objecting to them is an act of malice.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a widely published and translated author, an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015), and was a non-resident scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB. Visit his website.
This article is from Z Network, is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Hitler and the Nazis tried to keep their genocide hidden from the eyes of western nations, and as the crimes became more known, western nations inflicted severe criticism on the perpetrators. But Israel has accomplished what Hitler and the Nazis could not; i.e., that genocide is an acceptable method of just warfare.
And instead of secrecy, the entire operation has been in full view of the entire world, with the precision of 4k video. But still, western nations have done nothing to materially restrict Israel in committing its atrocities, which go far beyond the genocide in Gaza to the extermination of civilians in the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
Can anyone explain the underlying reasons for such an unprecedented outcome?
Good PR experts and lots of money?
Adam H Johnson explains a lot in his book >>>> How To Sell A Genocide
An excerpt from my upcoming book
The first 12 pages of ‘How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza’.
hxxps://www.columnblog.com/p/an-excerpt-from-my-upcoming-book
The “west” or more accurately NATO, deny the obvious and keep supporting Israel because fundamentally they are still exhibiting a colonial imperialist mentality mixed in with decades of “Jews are the (only) victims of the world” and ‘Israel has a right to defend itself” (but nobody else does) propaganda. As we can see, it is a deadly combination.
The European indebtedness to the Zionist project in West Asia is explained quite well in this explanation I found on YouTube
Britain Used Palestine to Pay Off Its WWI Debt — The Balfour Declaration Was a Banking Deal
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve3dXel9LAM
“It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.””
It is sick sickness Sickness with a capital S that the United Nations did not effect “danon’s immediate removal from the chamber.”
The glacial pace of the United Nations is sadly frozen in time, and by the time they move it will be only over waste ground with no body body on it.
I want the UN to act as they did against genocide in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s immediately, because this is genocide now and it is one hundred times asfixiatingly worse than then.
There should be a shame list created for the so-called “advanced” western governments of the world for supporting the Palestinian Genocide by proxy and criminally depraved indifference.
I could not agree more ^^
“Beheaded babies!” and “Mass rape!” narratives pushed worldwide by Zionist media after “October 7!” are the epitome of ironic in view of the truly horrible practices of “the world’s most moral military” everywhere it — and for that matter the U.S. — plies its nauseating craft.
Re “This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict.”
This is de facto evidence for the truth of the allegations. Refusing to engage the claims is basically stating that they cannot because they have no arguments or data to the contrry.
Addendum:
Danny Danon, Israel’s current liar-in-chief at the United Nations is not the first, nor will this man be the last to serve the political aims of history’s conscienceless deceivers:
“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”
While widely attributed to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the exact phrase is actually a misattribution. Goebbels did not coin this exact saying, though his propaganda tactics utilized the core concept of endless repetition. Gee whiz! This is where the US president’s mastery resides; in lying!
For what it’s worth at this late stage in the unfolding of the copycat processes now taking place in the U.S., the Origin of the quote; the broader concept of the “Big Lie” (“große Lüge”) originated with Adolf Hitler in his 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf (still a bible to some), where he described a propaganda technique of stating a massive falsehood so outrageous that the public would never believe it was fabricated.
Are there any bells ringing – warning of authoritarianism now underway in the US, in Americans’ ears?
The Repetition Principle: Goebbels did touch on the power of relentless repetition in his 1941 article “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” but ironically, he was using it to accuse the British of employing this exact deception tactic.
Do enough Americans today actually believe that a genocide is ongoing in southwestern Asia; being perpetrated by the Israeli regime, that they may one day soon, stand up to ‘their’ representatives for international government policy, to simply instruct these so-called representatives to immediately cease and desist in continuing to deliver the means of destruction to the sadist, fascist Zionist regime in power over all of the land.
The phenomenon behind the quote reflects a genuine psychological concept known as the “illusory truth effect”. Psychologists have found that continuous exposure to false information makes a statement feel more familiar and credible over time, leading people to accept it as true regardless of the actual facts.
This has long been DJT’s, and other, unmentionable, likeminded, depraved sadists’ “M.O.” – “mode of operating”.
Danny Danon, like Adolf Eichmann before him, is simply “following orders”. Is DD as “perfectly intelligent, in a technical sense”, as Hannah Arendt described Eichmann in her work “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, yet too suffers from the same “extraordinary “thoughtlessness”?
Dannon definitely does NOT see the world from the perspectives of others who are not Zionist Israelis. He manifests the same “profound and outrageous moral emptiness” each time he performs for the world’s audience, during U.N. General Assembly sessions.
Note: Paraphrasing from an assortment of collected, collated, computerizations, from AI data ‘facts’ bases.
from the article:
“He accused her and the broader international community of harboring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.”
correct mr. danon. we are now all obsessed with bringing to account the genocidal, murderous, lying, warmongering zionist state of israel. and we have the proof.
just ask Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International, OHCHR and thousands of Palestinians.
The problem is that, if the Zionazis can do it to the Palestinians, it really isn’t much of a stretch to the U.S. doing the same to us.
The accounts coming out of Gaza and the Israeli prison system are not abstract politics — they are descriptions of real human beings being starved, beaten, humiliated, and stripped of basic rights. When a state uses overwhelming force against a captive population, and when those responsible face no consequences, it creates a moral vacuum that the world can feel. And we are feeling it as never before! Naming these actions plainly is not hatred; it is a refusal to let cruelty hide behind rhetoric. People deserve to know that these are not isolated incidents but part of a pattern that demands accountability and an end to impunity.
What matters now is restoring the simple truth that every life has equal worth. The suffering of Palestinians is not a “side issue” or a distant tragedy — it is a test of whether humanity can still recognize injustice when it is right in front of us. Speaking clearly, staying rooted in facts, and refusing to accept the dehumanisation of anyone is how we help. When readers see that the call is not for revenge but for dignity, protection, and an end to this abhorrent violence, it strengthens the collective insistence that this must stop.
Every American man, woman and child needs to hear Dennis Kucinich and Tucker Carlson discuss in great detail the very real threat to America’s 250-year sovereignty, embodied in the shocking, horrific, infamous Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (2027 NDAA) – which – IF Section 219 is allowed to pass, instead of becoming immediately rejected and tossed into the dustbin of history where it belongs – merges the armed forces of Israel and the United States of America:
See: hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ1u16CwUuk
Peace.
Thank you for letting us know about this, Jerry. Please, Americans, do NOT let this happen under any circumstances. I thought nazism and zionism were evil enough, but to put Section 219 into action?? That is sickening beyond conception. PLEASE DON’T LET IT HAPPEN.
i second that. thankyou Jerry.