OPINION:
Since its creation, the United Nations has proved itself to be entirely corrupt and morally bankrupt. It’s time we stopped the U.N. gravy train.
Since the Cold War ended, the U.N. has become a playground for every sort of despot, dictator and tyrant. At the most recent convening of the U.N. General Assembly, President Biden spoke bizarrely about climate change, and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi showed his appreciation for the $6 billion ransom Mr. Biden recently paid Iran by threatening Americans with assassination.
More importantly, the Israeli ambassador was forcibly detained when he stalked out of the hall rather than listen to Mr. Raisi’s speech.
More on that in a minute. A little history is necessary to explain how U.S. globalists have kept us playing the U.N.’s games.
The creation of the United Nations was, like a second marriage, a triumph of hope over experience. The post-World War I League of Nations was intended to prevent war by arbitration. It was supposed to be a recognition that war was a crime against all humanity.
The league failed dismally, unable to stop any significant conflict. Nevertheless, the U.N. was established after World War II with the same intent. President Harry Truman, himself a globalist, carried around a copy of Tennyson’s utopian poem “Locksley Hall,” which is full of dreamy words about world peace, a “parliament of man” and “universal law.”
The U.N. has never functioned as a parliament of man, but only as a forum for the worst of humanity to gain attention and credibility.
The U.N. is both diplomatically and financially corrupt. We should remember the Oil for Food scandal in the mid-1990s: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein managed — with the U.N.’s connivance — to steal over $12 billion from a program intended to buy food and medicine for his people. Many women in Haiti, Somalia and the Central African Republic have been raped by U.N. “peacekeeping” troops.
The U.N. would be better if the Mafia managed it. At least they hold their members and employees accountable for job performance.
Then-President Donald Trump tried to reduce U.S. donations to U.N. agencies, quitting UNESCO, the U.N.’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the U.N. Human Rights Council as a result of those organizations’ anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli actions. President Biden has, of course, rejoined both.
In 2021, the last year for which figures are available, the United States paid the U.N. and its various organizations $12.5 billion. That amounted to about 22% of the entire U.N. budget.
What we get for all that money was demonstrated at the September convening of the U.N. General Assembly.
President Biden spoke proudly of the more than $100 billion he has spent addressing “climate change,” calling it an existential threat to humanity. He said it was even more frightening than nuclear war. Mr. Biden’s evident senility notwithstanding, that statement was bizarre. He went on to say that America didn’t want to contain any nation.
What about China and Iran?
Many leaders didn’t attend — including Russia’s President Putin or China’s Xi Jinping — but Iran’s president did. Mr. Raisi used his U.N. speech to threaten the assassination of U.S. officials who were responsible for the drone strike that killed Iran’s chief terrorist, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, in 2020.
While Mr. Raisi spoke, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, held up a poster displaying the face of Masha Amini, the young woman who died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Her offense was wearing her Muslim hijab incorrectly. Mr. Erdan and the Israeli delegation walked out rather than listen to Mr. Raisi.
It was not the first time an ambassador held up a poster and walked out rather than listen to a speaker. Not by a long shot.
After Mr. Erdan walked out of the General Assembly, he was stopped and forcibly detained by U.N. security police. Mr. Erdan later told Fox News that he was restrained with “unacceptable” force. It was the first time, I believe, that U.N. police detained any ambassador.
It is utterly outrageous for Mr. Erdan to have been detained by any amount of force and for any amount of time, no matter how brief.
Mr. Erdan’s detention could not have been decided by some individual U.N. police officer or even a police commander. How high among the U.N. bosses the determination was made to restrain him was made will never be known. That’s because the culture of the U.N. prevents accountability for anything.
So why do we even play the U.N.’s games? We need to be a U.N. member only in order to exercise our veto in the Security Council because the council’s resolutions are supposed to have the force of international law. But there is no reason why we should continue to foot the bill for this nonsense.
Mr. Biden is too fond of spending our money to cut off any of the U.N.’s largesse, but our next president can and should. He or she should cut off all U.S. agency contributions to U.N. organizations and ask Congress to cap our “dues” payments to the U.N. at a fraction of what they are now.
If the other 191 members of the U.N. want to fund it, they can. It’s not our circus, and they’re not our clowns.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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