Former CIA director James Woolsey is taking on Europe's media and cultural elite, saying they've drawn ''the first breath of totalitarianism'' due to their growing resentment of Jews.

The agency's director under the Clinton administration, Woolsey made the comments during a speech to a predominantly Jewish audience at York University in Toronto.

According to the National Post, Woolsey said Jews are history's great champions of the rule of law, so much so that they have come to embody it. He said anti-Semitism threatens the rule of law and intolerance of Jews is a first step toward dictatorial rule – a hallmark of the world's most oppressive societies.

"Once anti-Semitism raises its head, the rest of us who don't want to live with a foot on the back of our necks are likely to be the next targets," Woolsey said.

"So once you begin to dabble with the idea that you want to bully people, that you want to order them around, that you want them to do what you say, you very frequently start to drift into anti-Semitism," he said. "I think that is what is happening in some of the cultural elites in Europe."

He said Jews have always promoted the primacy of the law over the leader, as evidenced by their dietary restrictions and dress.

''People hate Jews to very much the degree that they have come to realize that this notion of the rule of law is something that came to the world something between three and four millennia ago in the Sinai desert. The idea that the government is above the ruler, and that rulers, whether it's King David or anyone else, are to be held to account by the people, by great prophets, by whomever – that notion essentially came out of the Sinai desert,'' Woolsey said.

Violence and vandalism against Jews have reached alarming levels in Europe, prompting Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to call anti-Semitism ''fundamental'' to the European outlook, reports the paper.

Meanwhile, Arab countries have succeeded in neutralizing Israel's bid to have the United Nations show as much concern for Israeli children killed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as it has done for Palestinian youth.

Israel's United Nations ambassador withdrew a U.N. draft resolution that called for the protection of Israeli children from terrorism after Egypt and a majority of other Arab countries asked to substitute the word ''Middle East'' for ''Israeli'' children and inserted language on Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian lands.

The General Assembly's human rights committee last week adopted a similar draft on protecting Palestinian children by a vote of 88 to 4 with 58 abstentions, reports Reuters.

''We would have preferred that no group of children be singled out,'' Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman told the committee.

''But once the plight of Palestinian children has been reserved for special attention in a separate and situation-specific resolution, Israeli children certainly deserve no less.''

Gillerman said the proposed amendments altered the title of the resolution, shifted its focus, erased every reference to Israel and singled out Israel ''for negative treatment'' when the resolution, instead, was designed to highlight the plight of children, according to the news agency.

''We gave the United Nations a chance to elevate itself above petty politics and rise to a moral level,'' he told a press conference. "The U.N. has failed."

Palestinian envoy Nasser al-Kidwa responded to reporters by saying there was a ''huge difference'' between the situation of Palestinian children and any other children in the world.

He said Palestinian children were deprived of every right included in a 1990 U.N. treaty on the rights of the child, beginning with the right of statehood up to the right of physical protection.

Editor's note: "THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM" a special issue of WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, is perhaps the most powerful journalistic probe yet of the current worldwide explosion of anti-Semitism.