Just How Awful is the UN?

By Alan Caruba

It is hard to imagine a more nauseating assemblage than those who gather for a meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Belonging to such an organization—and the United States does—is an insult to humanity.

When the General Assembly votes, it puts nations such as Liechtenstein and Tonga on an equal footing with the United States. It is one vote, one nation. The United States has more people living in Florida than live in more than 130 member nations of the UN.

The United Nations is so corrupt and so devoid of any sense of decency that it should have been abandoned by the United States long ago. By 2003, there had been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths and during that time, the UN had authorized military intervention only twice; once in response to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In both cases, the United States bore the brunt of the fighting.

Despite 17 resolutions, the UN disapproved of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime. Now long since swept under the carpet was the Iraq’s corrupt “Oil for Food” program during Kofi Annan’s stewardship as Secretary General, but it’s well to remember that Saddam benefited to the tune of $21 billion while UN officials looked the other way.

Unknown to most Americans is the role of the Muslim bloc of nations whose numbers dominate the United Nations, thwarting measures to improve the rights of women, enforce religious tolerance, and other worthy causes, while they frequently play host to terrorist organizations or supporting terrorist activities.

The UN’s Commission on Human Rights was so abysmal that it was scrapped and replaced with a “new” Human Rights Council, but how new can it be when its first members included Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other regimes famous for human rights abuses?

President Obama will be among the heads of state addressing the General Assembly, but that podium will also be open to the odious Mamoud Ahmadinejad.

On September 24, the President will preside over a meeting of the UN Security Council and five seats away from him will be Libya’s longtime dictator, Col. Moammar Quaddafi. The discussion will be about “non-proliferation” of nuclear weapons, but there will be no discussion of disarmament.

Next week, the Human Rights Council will hear a report by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who agreed to investigate Israel’s brief war on Gaza. Though a Jew and self-described supporter of Israel, the report has been widely reported to lay all the blame on Israel and none on Hamas, the Palestinian organization responsible for years of rocket attacks on Israel.

The UN Commissioner of Human Rights, Navi Pillay, will also make a presentation whose 80 paragraphs devote 66 to Israel’s alleged misdeeds and 8 to Hamas, an organization devoted to the genocide of the Israelis. Thus, the ancient principle and right of self-defense will be flushed away in pursuit of the continuance of the UN’s insane hatred of Israel.

In 2000, the former Commission passed a resolution endorsing a Palestinian right of resistance to what it deemed Israeli “occupation” of lands lost in the wars against Israel. Six of the nine European Union nations voted in favor of it. The U.S. had lost its seat on the Commission in the previous year.

The UN’s idea of refugee relief has been to run “camps” for Palestinians, some of whom are in their second and third generations, living in isolation from Middle East nations that refuse to accept or integrate them as citizens.

One could rightly condemn the United Nations as utterly useless in lieu of its long record of failure to deter wars, the purpose for which it was founded following World War Two, but its own record of abuses is breathtaking. The introduction of UN peacekeeping troops has often been a prelude to rape and other crimes against local populations, nor has the presence of UN troops prevented massacres such as in Srebrenica during the Serbian-Kosovo conflict.

Its International Atomic Energy Agency has never prevented the acquisition of technology to make nuclear weapons. Both Pakistan and India secretly achieved their own weapons and the IAEA has proven useless with regard to North Korea and Iran.

It should also be noted that the entire “global warming” hoax was hatched by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, a farcical group that for years issued reports filled with preposterous computer models predicting what the climate would be in 2050. The IPCC has been the driving force behind the odious Kyoto Protocols upon which the current “Cap-and-Trade” bill in Congress is based.

The one thing the IPCC did not count upon was the onset of a global cooling cycle in 1998 that will be around for decades.

Most awful of all has been the unending effort of the United Nations to establish itself as a world government with its own military, control of the world’s oceans and seas, population and health issues, and, of late, the suggestion that it establish a global currency.

It is an Orwellian global bureaucracy, determined to become a global government that would exert its control over every aspect of life on planet Earth.

The United Nations is a failure.

Nations will not cease to conduct diplomacy with one another if the UN headquarters is shuttered.

Its presence on U.S. soil is a national disgrace.

Its existence is a threat to our national sovereignty.