In the first couple of decades following WWII, the United Nations seemed like a beacon of hope for a war-torn world subsequently split by the Cold War.
Yet, when the world came perilously close to full-scale nuclear war in 1962, the UN was mostly irrelevant. Instead, it was old-fashioned personal diplomacy between the US and the USSR that averted the crisis.
In the ensuing decades, the UN has only become more and more essentially useless. Worse than useless: corrupt and dangerous.
The UN was completely missing in action when Rwanda and the Balkans descended into genocidal madness. At the same time, in open contravention of its own charter, which supposedly protects the sovereign equality of its member states, the UN has declared its ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, which it has used to ‘intervene’ in nations like Libya. Thanks to the UN’s intervention, Libya went from being merely another African tinpot dictatorship to a full-blown failed state run by warlords and with open slave markets.
Well done, UN.
In the final insult to its founding ideals, the UN, which was brought into being after a war that saw the extermination of six million Jews and which ruled to re-establish the Jewish state of Israel, is now an open forum for anti-Semitism. The UN is obsessed with Israel, passing more resolutions against the sole Jewish state than the rest of the world combined.
The UN’s hypocrisy doesn’t end there. A body supposed to promote peace and security for the world’s peoples is now a soapbox for the world’s most brutal dictators.
On Tuesday it was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey who was up. And from the main podium at the UN he used an analogy that people like him enjoy using on 1st Avenue.
“Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must also be stopped by the alliance of humanity.”
Without a blush of shame, Erdogan proceeded to lambast the UN for becoming ‘a dysfunctional structure’.
He’s right on that last bit, at least. But unfortunately he seems not to realize is that one reason the UN is dysfunctional is because it allows despots like him to use the stage to attack not only the country that is hosting them but also our democratic allies.
Democracies who, in the age of ‘build back better’ globalism, are apathetically useless.
When faced with people like Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, the Mullahs in Iran and the terror-sponsoring, slave-state of Qatar, you would have thought that the world’s democracies would have a chance to shine.
But then you would be wrong.
Take, for instance, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy screeching at a clearly bored and rudely inattentive Russian representative.
In the same way that Tim Walz cannot answer a question on the economy without talking about the house in which he grew up in, so Lammy believes that there is no issue of international politics that cannot be brought back to his favorite, chosen specialized subject: himself […]
“I say to the Russian representative, on his phone as I speak,” he said, his voice rising in anger like a school teacher telling off an errant pupil, “that I stand here also as a black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved.”
Not only is such a silly diatribe completely irrelevant, it also begs the question of what the solidly upper-class Lammy actually knows about what he babbles.
Mr Lammy was educated at a choir-school in charming Peterborough, England. From there he went on to, among other places, Harvard.
And while he is black, there is no special insight he could possibly have gained from ancestors he never knew fighting rebellions he never saw […]
It was rude of the Russian representative to be on his phone. But people who invade sovereign countries often are rude. You might say it comes with the territory.
And one thing that is very unlikely to scare them or subdue them is Western politicians behaving as though a good telling off in New York is going to rein in their behavior.
They’re certainly not going to pay the least bit of attention to a senile lame duck. Even when he’s engaged in the UN’s favourite sport: undermining Israel.
On a rare break from the beach, President Biden told the General Assembly that there should be a ceasefire in the Middle East.
“Now is the time for the parties to finalize its terms, bring the hostages home,” Biden said. As if the terrorists of Hamas were listening and famously vulnerable to reason.
Not content with not solving that conflict Biden went on to say of the escalating war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon: “Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest.”
Quite the contrary: a war which is well on the way to wiping out Hezbollah is very much in the interest of the non-Muslim minorities in Lebanon who’ve been persecuted for decades by Iran’s proxy army. It would be even more in the interest of millions of Israelis who’ve had to endure decades of Hezbollah rocket attacks. Israelis who just might finally get a break from their Arab neighbours continually trying to exterminate them.
They certainly can’t expect any help from the UN, which oversees the UNRWA that for decades has disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda dressed as ‘schoolbooks’ in Gaza – a UNRWA whose compounds were used with impunity by Hamas and whose own employees gleefully participated in the terror atrocities of October 7.
A UN which, while it shrilly passes resolution after resolution against Israel, does nothing to enforce its own resolution of 18 years ago: Resolution 1701. That resolution was supposed to prevent Hezbollah’s arms build-up.
It clearly didn’t work.
Neither does the UN. In fact, it would be better for all concerned if the UN did simply stop working. But it’s doing worse than that.
