OPINION:
I have a suggestion for dealing with the current coronavirus crisis in New York City:
Step One: Empty out the entire United Nations building.
Step Two: Fill it with COVID-19 patients.
Step Three: There is no “Step Three.”
From the Department of Silver Linings comes a report that the U.N. is on the verge of going broke. According to emails obtained by CBS News, the United Nations is facing a “dire” liquidity crisis and is imposing an austerity budget on itself, says the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for management, Catherine Pollard.
This austerity “will hinder our ability to carry out the work of the Organization at a time when the world needs the United Nations more than ever,” Ms. Pollard wrote.
Included in that work: Letting China help pick the people who will investigate human rights violations. This is akin to letting “Tiger King” Joe Exotic decide who works at PETA.
Then again, who would put China on a (so-called) Human Rights Commission in the first place? Or Cuba? Or Saudi Arabia?
Guess what: Just last year, all three of these nations were serving on the UNHRC — at the same time.
It takes a world-class mix of arrogance and cluelessness to declare yourself the world’s arbiter of human rights and then give the job to police states and places where people are executed for being gay.
So why be surprised to learn that, when a global pandemic threatened the world’s health, the least-reliable institution was the U.N.’s “World Health Organization.”
Like they say on the interwebs, #YouHadOneJob…
On Jan. 19, the WHO told the world “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”
What they didn’t tell the world, but they knew all too well, is that China was engaged in a campaign of lies and cover-ups to hide the viral devastation their nation had unleashed. In fact, China had been tracking the person-to-person transmission for more than a month by the time that tweet went out.
China’s deceit likely doomed hundreds of thousands of people around the world to an unnecessary death. But instead of outrage, the U.N.’s representatives lavished China’s Communist regime with praise.
“We have met the [Chinese] president. We have seen the level of knowledge he has on the outbreak, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a Feb. 12 briefing. “Don’t you appreciate that kind of leadership?”
“China has done many good things to slow down the virus,” Mr. Tedros added. “There is no spinning here.”
This isn’t the PR flak for some pharma company or an NBA player desperate to keep his million-dollar sneaker contract. This is the head guy at the U.N.’s Department of “Stop the Pandemic From Killing Us All!,” and he’s still on Team China vs. Team Truth.
The same goes for Bruce Aylward, a senior official at the World Health Organization who infamously hung up on a reporter asking about Taiwan’s (far more effective) handling of coronavirus. Mr. Aylward was apparently afraid of offending the Chinese regime.
Every year the world dumps $4.4 billion in the WHO alone — not to mention tens of billions more into the U.N. — and for what? To send troops around the world to rape teenage girls? To launch anti-Semitic attacks on Israel? To speed lies about a pandemic in service to the thugs of Beijing?
Most of the time, Americans view the U.N. as a harmless bureaucratic waste of time, the international version of their high school student council. “It’s a nice idea,” we shrug. “What can it hurt?” The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that, as in Bosnia, Rwanda and so many other places in the world, the answer is “a lot.”
If emptying their New York headquarters and filling it with COVID patients saved just one life, that would be the U.N.’s best performance in years.
• Michael Graham is politics editor of New Hampshire Journal.
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