Tribute of Lies at the UN

IT TOOK only 60 years.

Sixty years after the world learned that bored Germans flung Jewish babies into the air for target practice at the Auschwitz death camp, our oily pals at the United Nations have officially acknowledged the Holocaust.

Enjoy it quickly, because if yesterday was any indication, the anti-American, anti-Semitic rats infesting the banks of the East River — a species alternately known as the "French," "Germans" and "Libyans," among others — will forget the lessons of Auschwitz, or just insist the camp didn't exist.

Only one man spoke the truth about anti-Semitism.

But that man was not Israeli or American, but Italian. Who knew?

The U.N. yesterday took the unprecedented step of inviting concentration-camp survivors, liberators and the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel for the purpose of shouting, "Never again."

Perhaps they should have whispered, "Maybe later."

Seats in the General Assembly were half-full. Jordan and Afghanistan were the only Arab governments whose reps spoke.

And then Marcello Pera, speaker of the Italian Senate, spoke up.

"We have an obligation to admit that anti-Semitism is still with us," Pera said. "Today, it also feeds on such subtle and insidious distinctions as are often made between Israel and the Jewish state, Israel and its governments, Zionism and Semitism. Or, it crops up when the struggle for life led by the Israelis is labeled 'state terrorism.' "

Even Europe's Constitutional Treaty cannot make reference to the continent's Judeo-Christian roots, he railed.

"If we believe that our core values are no better than others; if we start thinking that the cost of defending them is too high; if we give in to the blackmail or fear, then we have no more instruments to counter the anti-Jewish racism which continues to poison us than we have to counter the fundamentalist and terrorist racism which puts peaceful co-existence at risk."

Now political correctness prevents us from speaking the truth. How, then, will we prevent history from repeating itself?

Next year in Italy.

Andrea Peyser