The United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including eastern Jerusalem and Israel (COI), issued a report last month falsely accusing Israel of intentionally killing Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. True to U.N. form, this anti-Israel screed provides not a shred of evidence that Israel deliberately harmed any innocent civilians, nor does it mention Hamas’s use of human shields or Israel’s unparalleled success at limiting civilian casualties in a treacherous urban war.
Just last September, the same COI issued a report slanderously accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, also without an iota of proof. In fact, the COI’s latest report on targeting children fails to produce a single case of an Israeli soldier deliberately killing a Palestinian child.
Furthermore, the report largely removes Hamas from the battlefield, not mentioning that the terrorist group deliberately uses innocent Palestinians in schools, hospitals and mosques as cover for their military actions. Moreover, the COI claims that Israel violated laws of war by attacking military targets where civilians are present, though in fact the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) permits targeting bona fide military objectives even if civilians are present.
In short, a rebuttal of the recent COI report by UN Watch reveals that the COI “constructs an entire narrative of intentional killing through stacked assumptions rather than verified facts, transforming uncorroborated allegations into definitive findings of criminal conduct.”
This COI report offers more glaring proof that many major U.N. agencies are irredeemably corrupt—openly ignoring factual and moral reality to make the world safer for tyrannical governments and more dangerous for the weak, dispossessed and wronged. Indeed, rot throughout the world body is so pervasive that it’s no exaggeration to assert that the organization itself does more harm than good.
Examples of pervasive, day-in, day-out corruption abound, rarely covered by news media, which these three examples demonstrate:
• The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has welcomed such notorious actors as Iraq (the third-worst country in the world’s gender-equality ranking), Iran and Saudi Arabia—all of which have laws brutally suppressing women. While the world’s worst violators of women’s rights attract virtually no CSW condemnation, democratic Israel receives critical resolutions nearly every year.
• Many U.N. “independent” monitors (“rapporteurs”) take unauthorized pay-outs from member nations, plus push blatant lies based on unverified facts and anonymous sources. The recent re-appointment of one such rapporteur, the virulently anti-Israel Francesca Albanese, was opposed by the United States, Argentina and the Netherlands, but the United Nations renewed her anyway. Washington has enacted punishing financial sanctions against her.
• The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, issued arrest warrants for Israeli politicians to distract from confirmed evidence that he sexually harassed a court employee.
But such pervasive instances of corruption are just daily background noise to much larger U.N. schemes to support the world’s most oppressive regimes; hide massive injustice to poor and dispossessed peoples; and incessantly attack Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy.
The most egregious such corruption and injustice takes place in four notorious agencies:
1. The U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC)
2. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)
3. The World Health Organization (WHO)
4. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
The details of how these agencies undermine and pervert the mission of the world body are enough to justify the withdrawal of financial support by nations that truly stand for world peace, justice for the oppressed and the universal rule of law.
UNHRC protects human-rights violators while attacking Israel
Outrageously, the Human Rights Council’s membership has historically consisted of serial human-right abusers, including China, Cuba, Pakistan and Sudan. Furthermore, the council adopts few or zero resolutions on many humanitarian travesties while obsessing over Israel. Indeed, the UNHRC has passed more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, while downplaying or ignoring evidence of abuses by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and other authoritarian regimes.
UNRWA as an arm of Hamas terrorists
Recent investigations by parties such as UN Watch have found that numerous UNRWA staff members participated in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. UNRWA has responded by firing dozens of employees for terrorist ties, but still won’t acknowledge its operational links to Hamas. Furthermore, instead of working to end Palestinian refugee status as intended, UNRWA has perpetuated it, offering the Palestinians no option for resettlement with prospects for better lives other than the mythical “right of return”: the meaningless promise that Palestinians will one day return to a “Palestine” that never was.
WHO, UNESCO as a propaganda agency for oppressive regimes
During the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised China’s response, despite the communist dictatorship’s documented suppression of COVID’s source, whistleblower silencing and delays in transparency. The WHO also relies on data from authoritarian sources, refusing to investigate data origins rigorously, including in conflict zones like Gaza, where the agency made uncritical use of faked casualty figures from Hamas-run health authorities.
Indeed, UNESCO has a long history of promoting a political agenda, especially against Israel. The agency has designated sites such as the Temple Mount, Hebron’s Old City and Rachel’s Tomb as Palestinian heritage sites, ignoring historical Jewish connections to them.
In 2011, UNESCO even gave non-existent “Palestine” full membership. The agency has also passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined. UNESCO’s latest, and possibly gravest, sin: Condemning Israel for killing seven journalists, who were, in fact, Hamas terrorists masquerading as journalists.
Even so, Western democracies continue to fund most of the organization’s annual budget of approximately $3.72 billion. The United States alone contributes about 22% of this budget, making it the largest donor to the United Nations.
American taxpayers may well ask why they or citizens in any Western democracy should continue footing the bill for such a politically biased and corrupt organization.
Originally published on Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME).
