How else to interpret the notorious statement made by its secretary general, António Guterres, just weeks after the attacks, that they “did not happen in a vacuum”, implying that there was some justice to be found in the rape of innocent women with knives? This remark reflected that attitude of the organisation that had been unmistakable since the morning after the atrocities. On October 8, before the blood was dry in southern Israel, the Security Council met but was unable to reach a consensus condemning Hamas’s “heinous terrorist attacks”, so no statement was released. Despite further sessions, more than two weeks later, there had still been no condemnation; it wasn’t until November 15 that a resolution was finally adopted, and this called for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses” and the release of hostages, but did not mention the October 7 pogroms.
Iranian cleric and head of the Imam Reza charitable foundation, Ebrahim Raisi, gestures after registering his candidacy for the upcoming presidential elections at the ministry of interior in the capital Tehran on April 14, 2017. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Similarly, it took eight weeks of silence for UN Women, the organisation’s women’s rights body, to condemn Hamas’s sexual hyper-violence, and even then, its statement led with “regret” over hostilities in Gaza. Of course, resolutions demanding a ceasefire – code for calling upon Jews to lay down their weapons until they are exterminated – have been rigorously pursued.
Using the language of human rights, the UN has weaponised itself against the Jewish state consistently over the last ten months. Take the question of whether Israel has provoked famine in Gaza, something that lies at the heart of the shameful International Criminal Court case against Jerusalem. Spoiler: there was no famine. The UN began such talk in February with talk of “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and in May, the UN’s World Food Programme agency raised the stakes still higher, alleging that there was a “full-blown famine” in the Strip.
In June, however, when an actual investigation was carried out, another UN body catchily named the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee was unable to find evidence to support the smear. It “does not find the [famine prediction] analysis plausible given the uncertainty and lack of convergence of the supporting evidence,” it drily admitted. Officials, it turned out, had ignored the private food lorries that had been sent into Gaza, as well as deliveries to bakeries by the UN’s own World Food Programme. All they had to do was phone up a few ordinary Palestinians in Gaza and ask them about the conditions. I did this myself at the time. He was speaking from his stifling tent in Deir al Balah, which had been donated by the Saudis. “Food is available, everything is available,” he told me. “Meat, chicken, vegetables.
“It is not aid. It is coming from Israel, brought in by private people through the Keren Shalom crossing and sold to us as a business. The prices are much better, just a little bit higher than before the war.” Those Gazans who had refused to evacuate the war zone in the north were experiencing deprivation, he added, but he had little sympathy for them; these were Hamas families, who had ignored the IDF evacuation order because they wished to remain with their terrorist relatives on the battlefield.
The UN has little time for such facts, which do not fit its narrative. It has been this way for decades. As long ago as 1975, after nearly a decade of Arab and Soviet lobbying, the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, endorsing the shameful propaganda slogan that “Zionism is racism”. For years, the Kremlin had been trying to persuade the world that Zionism was an expression of Jewish racial superiority, a modern manifestation of a supposed “chosen people” complex. Now it had won a huge victory. As the Spectator journalist Goronwy Rees despairingly reflected: “The fundamental thesis… was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of the human race.” The resolution, which prompted British students’ unions to ban Jewish societies on campuses, was only repealed in 1991. Fast forward to the present, and the exclusion of the Jewish state, the world’s foremost target of terror, from a memorial to its victims, reinforces that same message. To be a Jew is to be an enemy of the human race. In this way, the UN – which assumes the ultimate world authority by virtue of its brand and reputation – once again endorses the antisemitism that courses through so much of our cultural bloodstream.
The controversial United Nations Human Rights Council meets[Missing Credit]
The fact of the matter is that the UN is structurally designed to enable and legitimise the world’s oldest bigotry. At the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which was founded to address human rights abuses around the globe, the Jewish state, whose population is a seventh of that of Britain, has been officially condemned more than twice as often as any other nation. At the UN General Assembly, meanwhile, there were 15 resolutions about Israel in 2022 and just 13 about all other countries in the world combined.
The UN has no fewer than seven formal bodies investigating Israel, including the Division for Palestinian Rights; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine; the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories; and the United Nations Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
This didn’t happen by accident. The UNHRC’s actual rulebook dictates that Item Seven, which addresses the “human rights situation in Palestine”, must be discussed at every single meeting, regardless of other pressing world affairs. No other subject is permanently on the agenda, and as a result, its conferences enter the realm of absurdity. In 2019, at its 41st convocation in Geneva, activists rallied outside to demand an end to the genocide of the Uighurs while delegates discussed the “rise in hate speech by political representatives and on social media in Israel”. Setting aside the deep irony of the fact that Israel is by far the most maligned country in the world on social media, it was grotesque to see tweets by Israeli politicians eclipsing the genocide of Muslims in China.
It has been this way for years. The UN’s notorious 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban famously descended into naked Jew-hatred. When it was convened again, in 2009, the only head of state to speak was the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his speech, he smeared Israel as “totally racist”, called the Holocaust an “ambiguous and dubious question” and claimed it was used as a “pretext” for oppressing Palestinians. In his recent memoir, Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, recalls his first days in the job. “I knew about the hostility at the UN and I was prepared for that,” he writes, “but nobody can prepare for the volume of attacks against Israel. Some weeks we had to deal with a new crisis every day, such as resolutions, initiatives and reports. So basically, you end up working day and night to defend your position.”
In May 2023 – just five months before the October 7 maelstrom – the UN staged an event to commemorate the “catastrophe” of Israel’s birth (despite the fact that the organisation itself had voted for it in 1947). At this carnival of Israelophobia, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was allowed to give a speech lasting twice his allotted time of 30 minutes (though to be fair, he is currently enjoying the 19th year of his four-year term in office). He railed against the Jewish state in the most lurid terms. Attempting to deny the historical fact that Jewish agriculturalists made the wasteland of Palestine bloom in the early 20th century – before their time, in 1867, Mark Twain had described the country as “a silent mournful expanse” – Abbas even wheeled out a Nazi metaphor. “They lie and lie, just like Goebbels,” he ranted. “They lie, lie and lie until people believe.”
It is as plain as the nose on your face that the UN has become corrupted by autocratic antisemites, who have grown adept at appropriating its authority and language as cover for their Israelophobic and anti-Western agendas. Seeing that many Western progressives are not too keen on the Jews themselves, and understanding the pressure-points that can be prodded with words like “colonialism”, “racism” and “genocide”, they take Israel as an easy proxy for Western liberalism and power. They don’t care about playing by the rules. Meanwhile, blinded to the exploitation by a deep-seated progressive animus of their own, the European technocratic elites who should know better play a part in this deplorable charade, and ultimately their own demise.
Take, for example, the reaction of the UN to the death of the Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi in May. Here was the figurehead of one of the most malign nations on Earth, who as the “butcher of Tehran” became notorious for sending thousands of political prisoners to their deaths. Here was a man who spent his every waking moment undermining the global order, terrorising the innocent, brutally oppressing women and repressing democracy. Yet when he was killed in a helicopter crash, the UN lowered its flag to half-mast and paid tribute to him in the General Assembly, including a minute’s silence. Its clownish secretary-general, the aforementioned António Guterres, even saw fit to write a personal note of condolence.
It gets more sinister still. Less than a month after one of Iran’s numerous client militia, Hamas, launched its attack on the civilians of southern Israel, the new chair of the UNHRC was announced at a meeting in Geneva. Step forward Ali Bahreini, Iran’s ambassador to the UN. Entirely predictably, Bahreini opened the session by berating “colonial policies” of sanctions against his Islamic regime, while delegates nodded along. All of this leads to a single, radical conclusion: the UN must be radically reformed, if not dismantled and replaced, as Erdan demanded. The problem is clear. Given the fact that the majority of the world’s nation-states are not democracies, if you set up an organisation on the basis of equal membership for all, the autocracies will outweigh those who stand for freedom. From the point of view of the world’s dictators, the UN offers a wonderful opportunity for legitimacy, enabling them to pose as legitimate statesmen while robbing and suppressing their own people and subverting democracy abroad. It’s a simple question of numbers. As the 1960s Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once remarked: “If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the Earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13, with 26 abstentions.”
It is this moral relativism that lies at the heart of the scandalous state of the UN. From Putin to Xi, Maduro to the Ayatollah, the world’s worst regimes are given equal seats at the table as the democracies. For all of them, hatred of Jews and Israel provides the ideal cover under which to advance their own agendas of corruption, oppression and subversion. The aura surrounding the UN is of a global moral authority. As the coverage of the Gaza war has demonstrated most vividly, append those two letters to any allegation and the public will swallow it whole. What better Trojan horse for the dictator’s goals than this?
The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his short 1795 book Perpetual Peace, proposed the notion of a “League of Nations”, in which various nation states would hand authority in resolving disputes to a central body, reducing the necessity for conflict. This became a reality after WWI and was transmuted into the UN after WWII. If Kant could see the state of the organisation today, he would be deeply shocked.
As Sir Roger Scruton wrote: “Kant was adamant that there can be no guarantee of peace unless the powers acceding to the treaty are republics. Republican government, as defined by Kant, both here and elsewhere in his political writings, means representative government under a rule of law, and his League was one that bound self-governing and sovereign nations, whose peoples enjoy the rights and duties of citizenship.”
It is time for the democracies to shape the globe according to our values. As the women of Iran will attest, democracy is simply better than autocracy. As the dictatorships of Russia, China and Iran form an ever-closer union, drawing in smaller allies like Venezuela and North Korea, the fight is coming our way. If we are to win, the UN must begin to unapologetically project democratic ideals. The struggle must start now.
This article appeared on Jake Wallis Simons’ Substack. Visit: jakewallissimons.substack.com
