As recently as July we looked at a speech from ten years ago in which Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of United Nations Watch, delivered a “stunning rebuke” to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

UN Watch has a clear mission “to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter”.

In March 2017 Neuer was at it again, and this time his short speech was made memorable by the use of two rhetorical devices, and devastatingly powerful with a third.

You may like to open my Glossary page now – and keep it open.

The speech has a Face –

Where are your Jews?

He uses that Face as the repeated element in an epistrophe.

The entire speech – Face, epistrophe, and all – amounts to a rhetorical question. He throws over the whole place an impenetrable blanket of silence.

I tell my trainees that disciplined passion is worth buckets of technique. Here we have both of those deployed to astonishing effect. It’s a brilliant piece of speaking.