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The leadership of the U.N. bureaucracy used to benefit from a thin fig leaf of deniability, insulating it from the blatantly antisemitic dealings of a membership of which many consistently singled out Israel while all too frequently ignoring the misdeeds of the world’s authoritarians and butchers. To the extent this was ever plausible, it’s now undeniable that the rot in the organization’s thoroughly corrupt “human rights” system and its bureaucracy goes up to the top.
Addressing the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres blew through the equivocations that normally protect officials like him from accusations that they don’t care about fighting terrorism.
Guterres said it was important to “recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
The comment was sandwiched between a condemnation of Hamas and a statement that Palestinian grievances “cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas.” But Guterres’s comments are an excuse for terrorism, and they echo Hamas rhetoric that Israel had this attack coming.
There is no “context” that has to be considered in condemning the unspeakable atrocities of Hamas. According to audio released this week by the Israeli government, one of the terrorists called his father from the phone of a woman he killed and said that he’d sent him pictures of the defenseless people he murdered. He excitedly reported, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” He boasted that he slaughtered ten Jews.
Guterres and his colleagues within the U.N. secretariat and the organization’s agencies have spent the past two weeks executing a campaign to cast Israel’s war against Hamas as fundamentally illegitimate. They’ve uncritically cited casualty numbers fed to them by Hamas, and they’ve covered for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which has been caught numerous times distributing textbooks that glorify jihadism. Guterres’s remarks weren’t a departure from the U.N.’s stance; he merely provided a blunt recapitulation of what his organization truly stands for.
Immediately following Guterres’s comments, Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan demanded his resignation.
By contrast, the White House has been unwilling to rock the U.N. boat. It has opted for an approach that fully funds U.S. commitments including to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency and the U.N.’s blatantly antisemitic human-rights operations. The administration’s thinking is that while reform is necessary, it can be achieved only if Washington invests fully in the U.N.’s programs.
That view sounded startlingly naïve in 2021 (not to mention, say, 1971 or any other point in the U.N.’s existence), and it is all the more reckless in light of Guterres’s comments. It’s time for America to dramatically scale back its engagements with, and financial support for, the U.N. Washington can no longer go along to get along. With the Middle East on the brink of all-out war, possibly involving Iran, the U.N.’s excuses for Hamas amount to an intolerable form of information warfare. Since it’s too much to ask the administration to be tough-minded about this, Congress should step into the breach and take an ax to U.N. funding.
The U.N. secretary-general never had any clothes, but that doesn’t make what we saw from Guterres yesterday any less unsightly.