WASHINGTON – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the United Nations has “been an incubator for Israel-bashing” and that he hopes Israel will be “treated fairly” in the UN one day.

“Another place where cloaked anti-Semitism lurks is in the halls of the United Nations. The UN singles out Israel more than any other nation, especially in the Human Rights Council, which remains hell-bent on admonishing the only beachhead of democracy and representative government and equal rights in the Middle East,” Schumer said at the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum today.

“I was heartened to hear the new secretary-general recently say he would be on the front lines in the fight against anti-Semitism, and he proclaimed that Israel must be treated as any other state in the UN. And just last week, [Israeli Ambassador] Danny Danon was elected vice president of the 72^nd session of the UN General Assembly – that’s progress,” he added.

Schumer continued, “AJC played a role in that as well, and your continued engagement as a group with UN officials in Turtle Bay is very important. At the UN, we can never let our guard down.”

Schumer urged the U.S. to speak up when Israel is singled out at the UN.

“Since the days of ‘Zionism is racism,’ the UN has been an incubator for Israel-bashing, a forum where Israel is almost always the villain and never the victim. We should all be wary of it. I hope that, one day it will happen. Israel will come to be treated fairly in the UN,” he said.

“But until that day comes, the U.S. must always come to the aid of our friend Israel at the UN, and it must continue to serve as a bulwark against smear campaigns and efforts to isolate Israel. We can’t be silent when the UN singles Israel out for condemnation,” he added.

Schumer argued that the Obama administration should have vetoed Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements to be a violation of international law, in December and said the U.S. “should never use the United Nations as a forum to put pressure on Israel of any kind.”

Schumer slammed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as a “deeply biased campaign aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish State.”

“There’s no greater example than this insidious effort to harm the Jewish State than through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions,” he said. “The global BDS movement is a deeply biased campaign aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish State and its supporters, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, but all of them practice a modern form of anti-Semitism, and we have to call them out for that.”

Schumer said the BDS movement is silent about the human rights abuses happening in the Middle East.