The United Nations Charter devotes twelve articles to preventing and responding to “threats to” and “breaches of the peace” and “acts of aggression.” All of them are worthless.
At a closed-door meeting of the U.N. Security Council over the weekend, the United States pressed all permanent and rotating members to condemn “these heinous terrorist attacks committed by Hamas.” But the UNSC produced no unanimous statement. While Russia denies the charge, the United States alleged that Moscow’s ambassador declined to produce a robust statement condemning Hamas’s actions alone. The Chinese mission to the U.N. reportedly would support only a watery collection of ambiguities that condemned “all attacks against civilians,” which would only minimize Israel’s unprecedented experience.
On Monday, the United Nations Human Rights Council could only muster some enthusiasm for condemning Israel. It held a moment of silence memorializing only “the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.” What followed was an attack on Israel for maintaining an administrative cordon around Gaza, which has been occupied by a terrorist regime charter-bound to the destruction of Israel and the murder of its citizens. The barrier is responsible for “breeding violence,” said Pakistan’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva, Ambassador Zaman Mehdi. The statement effectively blames the Israelis who were shot, beheaded, had their throats slit, or were burned alive for provoking their slaughterers.
The indignities Israel has been made to suffer in that body are too numerous to recount. This is only the latest. Just a few weeks ago, Israel’s U.N. diplomat, Gilad Erdan, was detained by the organization’s security personnel for unknown reasons after he walked out of the General Assembly to protest remarks being given by Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi as Islamic Republic’s figurehead condemned “certain powers” trying to “incite conflicts” — a clear allusion to both Israel and the United States. In contrast to Erdan’s display of moral courage, America’s U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield just sat there and took it.