U.S. Out of U.N.

Those who pay attention have known for years that UNRWA–the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency–is nothing but an arm of Hamas. UNRWA has, in large part, run the schools where Gazan children are taught to hate Jews. UNRWA, like the Palestinian “stringers” used by the major wire services, has long run interference for Hamas and other terrorists. See current “Picks” by Brendan O’Neill and the Times of Israel for a great deal more.

Recently, it has come out that a number of UNRWA employees actually participated in Gaza’s October 7 massacre, helping to kill and kidnap Jews. So the UNRWA story has finally–for the first time, perhaps–reached the legacy media. Reuters is on the case, sort of. As you would expect, Reuters talks in terms of Israeli allegations:

An Israeli intelligence dossier that prompted a cascade of countries to halt funds for a U.N. Palestinian aid agency includes allegations that some staff took part in abductions and killings during the Oct. 7 raid that sparked the Gaza war.

The six-page dossier, seen by Reuters, alleges that some 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, have doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants. It has names and pictures for 11 them.

The dossier said one of the 11 is a school counsellor who helped his son abduct a woman during the Hamas infiltration in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed and 253 kidnapped.
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Another, an UNRWA social worker, is accused of unspecified involvement in the transfer to Gaza of a slain Israeli soldier’s corpse and of coordinating the movements of pick-up trucks used by the raiders and of weapons supplies.

A third Palestinian in the dossier is accused of taking part in a rampage in the Israeli border village Beeri, one-tenth of whose residents were killed. A fourth is accused of participating in an attack on Reim, site both of an army base that was overrun and a rave where more than 360 revellers died.

And so on. The U.N. says it is shocked–shocked!–to learn that some of its employees are Hamas terrorists. But I don’t think it came as much of a surprise to the countries, including the U.S., who have cut off funding to UNRWA:

More than 10 countries, including major donors the United States and Germany, have halted their funding to the agency.

Reuters of course sees this as a problem, but I think it is entirely to the good. It has been decades since any arm of the United Nations has played a positive role in the Middle East. UNRWA has been a vehicle through which the United States, among others, has shamefully supported Gaza’s terrorist infrastructure and its perverted culture of Jew-hatred. If and when the Israelis complete their conquest of Gaza–may it come swiftly–they should bar the U.N. from any ongoing role in that territory.

More broadly, one can’t help asking: what good is the United Nations? Is there any agency of that shambling organization that is actually a positive force in the world?

I don’t know. There might be. But for the most part, the U.N. plays a negative part. Its “peacekeeping” forces seem to function mainly as enablers of rape and sexual abuse. Its General Assembly is an anti-Semitic joke. Its Security Council, the source of real power to the extent the U.N. has any power, is an archaic post-World War II arrangement where any positive action (few of which are ever proposed) can be vetoed by Russia. And more often, it is the U.S. vetoing evil resolutions.

The U.N.’s main focus in recent decades has been the Middle East, where it, as typified by UNRWA, has played a generally negative, pro-terrorist role. In areas that should be of higher priority, like Ukraine and China, what has the U.N. done? Nothing. Has the U.N. even acknowledged the Uighers’ slavery, let alone tried to remediate it? Not that I know of.

Then we have the International Court of Justice, a creature of the United Nations, which just a few days ago helpfully “ordered” Israel not to engage in “genocide” in Gaza. Thanks for that input.

So the question naturally arises: why should the United States have anything to do with the U.N.? I understand why Russia wants the U.N. to exist, and why the 57 Islamic countries that dominate the General Assembly want it to exist, and why evil regimes like Iran’s that gain political cover by being appointed to the U.N’s Human Rights Council want it to exist, and why tiny third-world countries that are hard to find on a map, but get equal votes in the General Assembly, want it to exist. But why should we want the U.N. to exist? Why should we support it?

I don’t think there is a good answer to that question. The U.N. purports to have moral authority superior to ours, but that is a lie. The U.N. has no moral authority at all; certainly less than that of the United States. The U.N. does obvious evil in the world, and I can’t see any substantial good to outweigh that evil. If there are specific agencies of the U.N. that actually do something productive, they could easily be reproduced in a post-U.N. world.

The United Nations was seen, at its birth, as a harbinger of world peace. That vision obviously turned out to be a mirage. The time has come, I think, to pull the plug.