RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United Nations is running short of cash. This is not a crisis but an opportunity. Please rid us of this meddlesome, venal and baleful organization.

The Economist reports that “internal modeling” at the U.N. “suggests that the year-end cash deficit will, without cuts, probably blow out to $1.1 billion, leaving it “without money to pay salaries and suppliers by September.”

Apparently “some members are paying their bills late and others not at all” and it is the U.S. and China that “are pushing it to the brink of financial collapse.”

Who says the U.S. and Beijing have no common interests?

Two weeks into the second Trump administration, the White House announced it was considering withdrawing the country from, and ending funding for, three U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“UNRWA has reportedly been infiltrated by members of groups long designated by the secretary of state as foreign terrorist organizations,” says the White House, “and UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.”

Meanwhile, “UNESCO has demonstrated failure to reform itself, has continually demonstrated anti-Israel sentiment over the past decade” and has shown that it will not “reform itself.”

The U.S. is also quitting the U.N. Human Rights Council, which it has done once before, in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term. The misnamed Human Rights Council “has protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny,” says the White House.

For those who will disregard the administration’s explanations because they’re “political rants,” we offer some facts:

• The U.N.’s peacekeeping operations have not only failed, they’ve often undermined efforts to establish peace, allowed terrorist camps to thrive and indoctrinated “second and third generations into genocidal hatred.”
• “More than six decades of financial transfers” to the U.N. “running in the trillions of dollars” to alleviate poverty have failed, says the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow.
• The makeup of the Human Rights Council is a farce, with only 30% of the member countries “classified as ‘free’ by the U.S. think tank Freedom House,” says German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
• “At least 12 UNRWA staffers were directly involved” in Hamas’ unprovoked October 2023 massacre. The U.N. even had the gall to “overwhelmingly” pass “a disgraceful antisemitic resolution to demand that Israel surrender to barbaric terrorists who seek the destruction of both Israel and America,” says New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.
• Since 2015, there have been 170 U.N. resolutions condemning Israel. Russia has been condemned a mere 25 times, North Korea 10 and Iran only nine. It is on its face an “irrational obsession with one nation.”
• In 1988, the Heritage Foundation noted that despite more than “$8 billion in outlays,” the “sad fact is that the” U.N.’s Food And Agriculture Organization “has become essentially irrelevant in combating hunger.” Can anyone point out when and where the U.N. prevented or stopped a famine? If so, let us know, because we know of no instance in which either has happened.
• As many as 50 million are living across the world today as slaves and human trafficking has gone far beyond crisis levels. Again, if anyone can show us where the U.N. has made significant progress, or any progress at all, in addressing these blights, please share that information.
• The United Nations Population Fund has been credibly accused of “complicity in coercive abortion practices.”
• “Regrettably,” says UN Watch Database, “a Geneva-based non-governmental organization accredited in special consultative status with the United Nations,” “millions of human rights victims around the world are routinely ignored by the U.N. Instead of condemning their oppressors, all too often the U.N. awards powerful dictatorships, such as China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, with positions of honor.”
• More from the UN Watch Database: The “corruption of the United Nations’ founding principles and ideals should be a matter of grave concern for all who value democracy, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law. Regrettably, instead of using their power to challenge and improve the system, most Western democracies enable moral corruption at the United Nations by simply going along to get along.”
• The U.N. has “allowed some of the greatest crimes against humanity to occur on its watch” and “cannot stop genocide.”
• The U.N. admits that in 2023 alone it “received 758 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by staff.” This has been an ongoing problem.
• The U.N. General Assembly actually held a moment of silence to honor North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il after he died in 2011. No institution that would do such a thing should be allowed to continue in a sane world.

As is always the case, the political left would predict the imminent end of the world were the U.N. to be shut down. The reaction would be similar to the tantrum pitched by Democrats in response to the administration’s effort to rein in an unrestrained bureaucracy.

For all the good the U.N. does, which isn’t much, it’s outweighed by its failures and abuses. It is a sinkhole of resources and an obstructor of peace and decency. In the past, we’ve suggested that the U.S. should leave the United Nations. But better if the U.N. didn’t exist at all.