OPINION:
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called out the U.N. Human Rights Council as “foolish and unworthy of its name” after it passed five resolutions that share the common denominator of targeting Israel — and only one that blasted North Korea. Israel, meanwhile, condemned the body as a “sham” that was being exploited by “bloodthirsty dictatorships” to cover up their own atrocities.
Right on both counts. And now it’s time for America and Israel to quit this worthless body.
All five of the resolutions just passed by the 47-member UNHRC blasted Israel as an unlawful occupier of Palestinian properties; one even called for the Jewish state to give up all claims to the Golan Heights ridge to Syria.
The United States and Australia voted against all five. But the majority of this body bared its ugly anti-Israel teeth, once again.
Why pretend this so-called human rights council cares about human rights any longer?
It’s not as if staying on would sway the members to the side of Israel — or even to the side of fair shakes for Israel.
It’s really no secret the United Nations as a whole has engaged in drawing moral equivalencies between Israel and the nations of the world that would seek to abolish the Jewish state and its people completely for years. How else to explain the 2012 approval by the General Assembly, 138-9, to recognize “Palestine” as a non-member observer state — right after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Israel from the United Nations’ own podium as a perpetrator of “war crimes?”
This is the same Abbas who just this January went on an anti-Semitic tirade before his government’s legislative body using rhetoric so ugly it was described by one commentary writer, Michael Goodwin, in the New York Post, as “extraordinary, even by Mideast standards.”
But now, the very body at the United Nations that brands itself as being both bastion and beacon of human rights for the world, sending out a message that says, in essence, North Korea is bad — but not as bad as Israel?
That’s a new low for even the United Nations.
“Every March,” Haley said in a statement, “the [U.N. Human Rights] Council sets aside only two sessions to debate human rights violations and abuses in all countries, and another entire session just to debate a single country, Israel. When the Human Rights Council treats Israel worse than North Korea, Iran and Syria, it is the council itself that is foolish and unworthy of its name.”
She called for those “countries who know better to demand changes.”
And she threatened once again that the United States could very well withdraw from the UNHRC if the group didn’t shape up and quit its blatant anti-Israel bias.
Israel did the same, saying in a statement put out by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman: “[Israel] has no business being in the UN’s Human Rights Council [and our] presence there gives legitimacy to … anti-Semitic resolutions and the farce must end.”
Right. And with a strong leader in the White House, a take-no-B.S. face for America at the United Nations, and a new national security adviser named John Bolton who has a long-running history of defending Israel from its many, many foes of the world, it’s time.
It’s high time for both the United States and Israel to pull from this body and send a joint message of no-nonsense tone that underscores what this new White House has been saying for more than a year: This is a new administration, a new president, a new dawn, and the days of habitually slamming Israel and taking advantage of America’s goodwill have definitely come to an end.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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