Why United Nations is rotten from top down An analysis by National Review

The UN General Secretary has come under heavy fire after his remarks during the Security Council session on October 23, in which he called on the present diplomats to recognize the Hamas attack on southern Israeli from October 7, in which over 1,300 people were gruesomely killed, did "not happen in a vacuum", appearing to hint that Israel's past policies regarding the Palestine conflict to bare responsibility for this act. This comment by Antonio Guterres caused furious responses from Tel Aviv, with the country introducing multiple measures in retaliation for the offensive remarks, including halting visas from being issued to UN officials and calls for the secretary's resignation. The National Review has delved deeper into the situation and shed light on why Guterres' statement is not an isolated incident but the result of the UN's long-spanning refusal to truly take harsh measures against terrorism. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"The leadership of the UN 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 UN 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 UN 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 UN Relief and Works Agency, which has been caught numerous times distributing textbooks that glorify jihadism. Guterres’s remarks weren’t a departure from the UN’s stance; he merely provided a blunt recapitulation of what his organization truly stands for.
Immediately following Guterres’s comments, Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan demanded his resignation.

By contrast, the White House has been unwilling to rock the UN boat. It has opted for an approach that fully funds U.S. commitments including to the UN Relief and Works Agency and the UN’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 UN’s programs.

That view sounded startlingly naïve in 2021 (not to mention, say, 1971 or any other point in the UN’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 UN Washington can no longer go along to get along. With the Middle East on the brink of all-out war, possibly involving Iran, the UN’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 UN funding.

The UN secretary-general never had any clothes, but that doesn’t make what we saw from Guterres yesterday any less unsightly".