Barbados PM Mia Mottley criticizes Netanyahu’s selective use of Bible at UNGA

Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was bold and trenchant as she critiqued Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu at the 2024 United Nations General Assembly, boasting a candid remark that Netanyahu used what she calls “the selective use of the Bible” to justify his political actions.

Her remarks came on the back of Netanyahu’s speech, where he relied on many biblical references to plead his case over the territorial claims of Israel.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley is known to be forthright in style and for being internationally leading on issues of climate change and financial reform. She said that things need to be done cautiously in light of religious texts manipulated to promote political ideologies.

Making political mileage out of religion, Mottley believed Netanyahu was blocking every attempt at a diplomatic way to settle the armed conflict between Israel and Palestine that had lingered for decades.

In her speech, Mottley renewed calls for the two-state solution, urging both Israelis and Palestinians to have the right to live in peace and security. Her condemnation of Netanyahu was part of a greater call to global cooperation on pressing humanitarian issues.

“We cannot afford the distraction of war,” Mottley said, focusing on some of the crises in Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and the broader Middle East. She noted that wars currently raging in many parts of the world take away essential resources and precious political attention from far more critical global threats, climate change chief among them.

Mottley said there was a need for a wholesale “reset” of how the world should address leading global issues. She repeated those words for the third time when saying that all of those problems she talked about, including climate change, economic inequality, and the world debt crisis, were all of them demanding joint action.

Mottley is an ardent backer of reforming the global financial institutions, saying that those institutions have always been kept at a systemic disadvantage to benefit developing countries.

She promised to fight for equal opportunities in capital access and debt relief. She often pointed out that many nations, along with the Caribbean countries had to devote more funds to debt repayment than to health services or education.

Criticism extended to the working of the UN Security Council, in which she condemned the lottery inequality given to different member countries. She refused a system whereby some are “full-time” members while others are “part-time”.

Mottley averred that such a hierarchy has no place in the modern world. Mottley’s address, said many, struck the right chords, sending ripples among the sea of people attending UNGA.

As Mottley continues her global charge for change, her words at the UN remind us of the need for leaders to be willing to question the status quo in helping the world into a more perfect circumstance.