The history of the United Nation’s double standards and virtually antisemitic policies directed against Israel from its birth, illustrates a fundamental flaw in the agency.
This from frontpagemag.com.
The “cockpit in the tower of Babel.”
The very existence and selected behavior of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)—the only UN agency devoted to one small group of global refugees—is testimony to their politicization.
– Two World Wars created millions of refugees, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tended to and helped to relocate in new homes.
– The birth of Israel also created refugees. Nearly a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from Middle Eastern countries in 1948. But those Jews did not get their own UN refugee agency, as did the Palestinian Arabs who fled from the battlefields of Israel’s defensive war against five invading Arab armies, many of them ordered to flee by the Arab commanders.
NOTE: Israel welcomed many of those expelled Jews to the new Jewish homeland, while still today Middle Eastern Arab countries refuse to let in Palestinian Arabs.
Egyptian autocrat Gamel Abdel Nasser later expressed much of the Arab world’s contempt for their Palestinian brothers. He told a Western journalist in 1956:
The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are. We will always see that they do not become too powerful.
The UNRWA, which created and maintains a class of permanent, ever increasing refugees hostile to Israel, was merely the start of the UN’s animus against Israel:
– Resolution 2708 in 1970 states that the UN ‘reaffirms its recognition of the legitimacy of the struggle of the colonial peoples and peoples under alien domination to exercise self-determination and independence by all the necessary means at their disposal.’ In effect, that latter phrase exempted the brutal violence of ‘national liberation’ movements from restraints on armed conflict,
– The free pass for terrorists was reaffirmed in 1982 when the General Assembly approved the ‘legitimacy of the struggle of peoples . . . from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.’ The idealism of ‘national self-determination’ had degenerated into a license for murder,
– Resolution 3236 formally recognized the ‘Question of Palestine,’ and legitimized the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, allowing it to participate in international diplomacy,
– Resolution 3237, which designates the PLO as a ‘non-member’ observer in the UN General Assembly, and
– [I]n 1975––on the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against German Jews––the UN passed Resolution 3379, which redefined Zionism as a form of racism. This despicable slur was repealed 16 years later––not on principle, but only under pressure from the U.S. and Israel.
The major venue of UN attacks on Israel has been the Human Rights Commission, supposedly reformed in 2004 by changing the name to the Human Rights Council. In both versions, autocratic thug states like Iran, Sudan, Cuba, China, Zimbabwe, and North Korea—all of whom serially violate human rights as a matter of policy—have been allowed to sit on the Council, where terrorist and state violence is seldom censured, even as Israel is barred from participation, and serially faces condemnation.
For example:
– [I] April of 2002—when perhaps the most revealing example of this moral idiocy occurred—the UN Human Rights Commission ‘affirmed the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation’ just after a Hamas suicide bomber killed thirty Israelis celebrating together the Passover Seder,
– [I]n April 2005 the Commission refused to condemn killing in the name of religion, at the same time asserting that criticizing [moslem] terrorists was ‘defamation of religion,’
– In March 2007, the Council’s response to the murders and riots over the Mohammed cartoons was to demand a ban on the defamation of religion, even as it ignored the threats to the human right of free speech, and
– [T]he genocidal charter of Hamas—the widespread state-sanctioned anti-Semitism throughout the Middle East—has seldom been condemned. For decades Israel––the only liberal democracy in the Middle East–– has been singled out multiple times and is the only nation permanently on the Council’s agenda.
Given all of the above-noted examples, no one should be shocked or surprised by the news that some United Nations Relief Works Agency staff directly participated in the heinous savagery of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7.
According to Israeli intelligence, AJC reported:
[S]ix UNRWA workers were part of the wave of terrorists who breached the Gaza-Israel border and massacred civilians inside of Israel.
Additionally, two helped to kidnap Israelis, two others were tracked to sites where hundreds of Israeli civilians were shot and killed.
Others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.
Seven were identified as primary school teachers, and one is a Hamas commander.
Of course, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres implied that those staffers were just a few bad apples, but Israeli intelligence estimates that 10% of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees have links to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
And, no doubt, U.S. taxpayers finance a third of the UNRWA’s budget, including paying for schools where terrorist sympathizers indoctrinate half a million students with murderous hatred for Jews.
Again, no surprise there. Ever since its birth, the UN has been rife with corruption, politicization, and failure.
Until we start making this “cockpit in the tower of Babel”—as Churchill in 1946 presciently warned that the most important institution of the ‘new world order’ might become—accountable to U.S. taxpayers, our national interests and security will remain hostages to those of other nations, many of whom are sworn enemies of the free world.
Finally, the abject failure of the UN should have been predictable from the start, given the sorry record of its precursor, the League of Nations, which included future aggressors like Germany, Japan, and Italy as signatories. The UN repeated the same incoherence that compromised the League and quickly became a paper tiger, its offices and resolutions hostage to such interests, especially those of the great powers that comprise the permanent, veto-bearing, nuclear-armed members of the Security Council.
For example, in 1986 the Soviet bloc saw passed a resolution that in effect “proscribed the use of human rights abuses as a preterite for UN intervention.” Likewise in 1993, a UN conference on human rights ended up writing a declaration that left out any reference to individual rights such as freedom of speech.
As Dore Gold wrote in Tower of Babel (2004):
The new UN majority had emptied the term ‘human rights’ of its original meaning and hijacked it to serve its authoritarian political agenda.
Further:
As a result, over the years the General Assembly introduced enough exceptions into prohibitions against aggression to give a pass to states that initiated armed conflict.
And it was this loophole that legitimized the terrorism and savagery we recently witnessed Hamas inflicting on Israeli civilians, including infants and the elderly.
