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In December of 2023, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced a bill, titled the Disengaging Entirely from the
United Nations Debacle (DEFUND) Act, which called for the United States' complete withdrawal from the United Nations (UN). The press release
for this act said that the legislation confronted imperative issues of national sovereignty and fiscal accountability, which had been persistent
points of criticism against the United States involvement in the UN.
Included in the press release were the following: "No more blank checks for the United Nations. Americans' hard-earned
dollars have been funneled into initiatives that fly in the face of our values – enabling tyrants, betraying allies, and spreading bigotry. With
the DEFUND Act, we're stepping away from this debacle. If we engage with the UN in the future, it will be on our terms, with the full backing of
the Senate and an iron-clad escape clause."
“From UNRWA actively protecting Hamas and acting against our ally Israel, delayed condemning Hamas, to China being elected
to the “Human Rights Council", to the propagation of climate hysteria, covering for China's forced abortion and sterilization programs, the UN's
decades-old, internal rot once again raises the questions of why the United States is even still a member or why we're wasting billions - indeed,
$12.5 billion in 2021 - every year on it.
“The UN doesn’t deserve one single dime of American taxpayer money or one bit of our support; we should defund it and leave
immediately.”
The introduction of the DEFUND Act came in response to years of unchecked bureaucratic expansion and financial misuse by
the UN at the expense of American taxpayers.[Ref. 1]
As of 1 July 2024 and, as expected, Congress had not acted upon the proposed Disengaging Entirely From the United
Nations Debacle Act of 2023 legislation.
The failings and shortcomings of the U.N. have long been in evidence to anyone who isn’t blind. The U.N.’s glaring
shortcomings generally were ignored over the years. But, finally, the pot has boiled over.
Sympathy for Israel has long been in short supply at the United Nations, but the world body has outdone itself this
time.
That’s really saying something, considering its disgraceful treatment of Israel over the past eight months. After the
October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas resulted in over 1,100 deaths and hundreds raped and taken hostage, Israel rightly declared its intent to
destroy those responsible and rescue the hostages. Yet virtually every day since then, the U.N. seemingly has done everything possible to protect
Hamas from the consequences of its barbaric acts.
Now, more than 6 months later, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has listed “Israeli armed and security forces”
alongside repressive governments and terrorist groups guilty of “grave violations affecting children” in conflict in 2023.
Remember that, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, the United Nations condemned the attack in the “strongest terms.”
But, within one month, the secretary-general was saying the attacks didn’t happen in a “vacuum,” U.N. experts were voicing alarm at the plight of
ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, and the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a “sustained humanitarian truce.”
And after that came U.N. accusations that Israel was causing starvation, accusations of war crimes, giving the Palestinians
elevated privileges in the General Assembly, echoing Hamas’s false casualty data, and a Security Council resolution designed to pressure Israel into
supporting a cease-fire that would ensure the survival of Hamas.
Throughout this process, the U.N. member states refused to adopt resolutions condemning Hamas for its terrorism. Over and
over, U.N. officials neglected to properly place blame for the conflict and suffering on Hamas.
Blatantly ignored was the fact that Hamas instigated the conflict, that it used “Palestinian” civilians as human shields,
stole aid meant to relieve suffering, and perpetuated the fighting by refusing to release the hostages it took on Oct 7. A report from a
U.N. commission of inquiry even outrageously blamed Israel for not stopping the October 7 attack and protecting its citizens.
While the civilian death toll in Gaza is tragic, it is the demonstrated intent of Hamas to place “Palestinian” civilians in
harm’s way. The Hamas military leader stated his belief that more civilian casualties helped Hamas undermine Israel internationally and considered
them “necessary sacrifices.” Where was and still is the U.N. condemnation of this callous disregard for “Palestinian” civilians?
Clearly, Israel can do nothing right in the eyes of the U.N. Even rescuing hostages from Hamas is deemed
lamentable. Just see the reaction of U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to the June 8 rescue of four Israeli hostages. She said that the
rescue “should not have come at the expense of at least 200 Palestinians, including children, killed and over 400 injured by Israel and allegedly
foreign soldiers, while perfidiously hiding in an aid truck.”
And then we have another insult, with U.N. Secretary-General Guterres listing Israeli armed and security forces alongside
the armed forces of Burma, Russia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army,
and the Taliban as parties that “commit grave violations affecting children in situations of armed conflict.”
The original report was compiled by the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and
Armed Conflict, established in 1996 to raise awareness of the plight of such children and assess progress achieved in addressing the problem.
The 2024 report unprecedentedly listed Israel as a state offender. The U.N. defines a child as anyone under 18, and Hamas
is known to recruit and use “children” in its attacks. Thus, it is unclear how many of these “verified violations” involved combatants.
In addition, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad deliberately embrace tactics that place children at risk. These terrorist
groups conduct indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian areas in Israel, launching these attacks from the vicinity of civilian buildings, and
storing weapons in schools and hospitals, including U.N. facilities. Ignored by the U.N. report is the fact that Israel, by contrast, does none
of this. It goes to unprecedented lengths to protect children and civilians from harm, including forewarning civilians before its forces enter
an area, sharing maps of safe areas, and “roof knocking” on targets with non-explosive bombs so that civilians have time to flee before an attack.
According to the chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, “Israel has taken
more steps to avoid harming civilians than any other military in history.”
Equating Hamas and Israel in any way is reprehensible. Quite simply, Hamas deliberately places children
in danger while Israel goes to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties.
The U.N., however, won’t let reality intrude on its narrative that Israel is in the wrong and must be condemned. One can
only conclude that, as the U.N. sees it, the drumbeat of attacks on Israel must be incessant, even if it erodes the credibility of its reports or
the organization itself.
The United States has long criticized rampant anti-Israel bias in the United Nations. The time has long since passed for
the U.S. to hold the U.N. accountable for its prejudice. Congress has withheld funding for the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA for its complicity
with Hamas. It is now past time for the U.S. to take similar action for other parts of the
U.N.[Ref. 2]
Calls for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations have historically been the purview of fringe right-wingers
and garden-variety paranoiacs. Today, however, it is not unreasonable to ask ”Is there is any point in remaining part of what has swiftly
become the most corrupt, compromised, and useless international organization since the League of Nations.”
In recent years, the international body’s problems have verged on the farcical: Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Cuba, and Russia
elected as members of the U.N. Human Rights Council, with Iran set to chair the council’s Social Forum; Iran and North Korea presiding over the
U.N. Conference on Disarmament; a Chinese-hand-picked leader managing COVID at the World Health Organization (WHO); rape and sexual abuse rampant
among U.N “peacekeeping” forces.
And then there’s the money. The Biden administration requested $1.7 billion in funding for the U.N. (an increase of
$265.8 million) for the 2024 fiscal year. But those are just the assessed fees. Biden also asked for $485.8 million for “voluntary contributions”
to various United Nations specialized agencies, and $7.4 billion will go to the U.N. through accounts at the State Department and USAID. The total
U.S. bill for 2022 was an eye-popping $18,095,456,587 - 33.6 percent of total government donations - to the United Nations.
But wait, there’s more! There was evidence that the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus was complicit in both facilitating China’s delay in sharing genetic sequencing and in the cover-up of Beijing’s role in
Covid’s genesis. This was cause enough for former President Donald Trump to pull the United States from WHO. But it was far from enough to
stop the Biden administration from returning, no questions asked, to that organization. Ditto, Trump’s withdrawal from the Human Rights Council,
which was reversed nearly immediately by Team Biden. Indeed, the Biden administration also rejoined UNESCO (the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, which Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2017), and requested funding to repay back dues withheld because,
in violation of U.S. law, UNESCO admitted a state of “Palestine” in 2011.
WHO’s complicity in the COVID scandal and the manifest and public malfeasance of the Human Rights Council -
particularly its extraordinary and anti-Semitic obsession with Israel - are merely the tip of the iceberg. A more insidious
problem at the United Nations and its specialized agencies is the creeping Communist Chinese domination. Well documented by think tanks and
the press, the Beijing government has made the United Nations its pet project. While Washington and Europe were sleeping at the switch,
Chinese operatives took over Interpol, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU),
and myriad other alphabet soup agencies within the United Nations and other U.N.-related organizations which most of us have never heard of.
For the most part, efforts to suborn the U.N. by China have been treated in Western capitals as business as usual, the
cost of having a truly “international” organization. Even the U.N.’s single-minded efforts to delegitimize the state of Israel and target it with
investigations, sanctions and other disproportionate measures have been treated by the U.S. Congress - normally a redoubt of support for the Jewish
state - as ho-hum. That was until October 7, when in one fell swoop, the United Nations and its specialized agencies turned with
unprecedented and near-collective venom against the people of Israel. Finally, the U.N. may have gone too far.
U.N. Women - a group theoretically devoted to the rights and status of women around the world - remained silent
for nearly two months in response to the appalling rapes, torture, and murder of Israeli women on October 7. The deputy honcho of U.N. Women shared
her anti-Semitism on X, something she did more than 150 times (in violation of the U.N.’s “policy” of neutrality and impartiality) before deleting
her accounts.
She’s far from alone. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres also felt the need to explain to the Security Council that
the events of October 7 “did not happen in a vacuum.” This was his attempt to blame Israel for the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The U.N. General Assembly
demanded a ceasefire. And then there’s the incredible UNRWA can of worms.
For many years, the U.S. Congress has tried in vain to call attention to the U.N. Relief Works Agency for Palestine,
the only United Nations agency devoted to a single national cohort of “refugees” from Israel’s war of independence in 1948. UNRWA is nominally
committed to the “human development and relief” of “Palestinian” refugees, whose numbers have now swelled to 5.9 million. The litany of UNRWA’s
organized anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism labors is long and dispositive. It starts with the very curricula of UNRWA-run schools, where students
are taught that Israel is the enemy and that terrorism is justified. UNRWA leadership bashes Israel incessantly in public statements. Thousands
of UNRWA teachers celebrated the events of October 7 in a Telegram channel.
Then there’s South Africa’s appalling “genocide” case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a legal complaint so
perverted that the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom weighed in against both the process and the arguments themselves. The
ICJ is part of the U.N. system.
Indeed, there are few corners of the United Nations system that have not weighed in against Israel in its war with Hamas.
Far from outrage at Hamas’ abuse of women, kidnapping of children, use of human shields, targeting of civilians and worse, most U.N. agencies
have singled out only the Jewish state for disapprobation and sanction. Finally, Congress has noticed!
What exactly does the United Nations do for the United States in return for the tens of billions spent annually? Are U.N.
Security Council resolutions useful in maintaining the global order? Does the General Assembly play a constructive role in guaranteeing “world
peace?” Are the United Nations specialized agencies promoting the world’s economic interests, or just China’s? Does the International Court of
Justice actually deliver justice? If the answers to these questions are consistently “no,” is there a reasonable justification for the existence
of the United Nations in 2024?
The truth is that The Human Rights Council, UNESCO, UNRWA, most peacekeeping operations, the Office for the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office for the High Commissioner for Refugees, and too many other U.N. “humanitarian” organizations are corrupt,
fail to deliver for the neediest, and would generally be better replaced by bilateral or multilateral aid and advocacy programs run by sovereign
nations.
he time has come to listen to the criticism of U.N. skeptics and to reassess U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing
uncritically, and, for the most part, without accountability to a mass of international organizations that more often than not actively oppose
U.S. values and allies. Cutting dollars to the least worthy of U.N. bodies will, at the very least, begin the process of ending the waste, fraud,
hatred, and abuse that characterizes the work of too much of the
United Nations.[Ref. 3]
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References:
- Senator Lee Introduces Act to Defund and Depart UN, Mike Lee Press Release, 6 December 2023.
- The U.N.’s Latest Insult Against Israel May Be Its Worst, Brett D. Schaefer, The Heritage Foundation,
20 June 2024.
- Is It Time to Give Up on the United Nations?, Danielle Pletka, yahoo!news, 23January 2024.
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