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“However much you hate the mainstream media,” goes the saying, “you don’t hate them enough.” The same applies to the United Nations, which in recent months has come under renewed scrutiny in large part because of the scandalous role of UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency – in the Gaza crisis.
The revelations about UNRWA should not have been a surprise to anyone. Founded after World War II at the initiative of liberals in North America and Western Europe who chose to pretend that Western Enlightenment values, rooted in Christianity, were in fact “universal values,” the UN was a sham from the beginning. The impetus was provided largely by Eleanor Roosevelt, the sainted widow of FDR, and naive Scandinavians played an inordinate role in getting it off the ground: the first Secretary-General, Trygvie Lie, was Norwegian; the second, Dag Hammarskjöld, was Swedish. The brutal totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union – which was given not only a permanent Security Council seat but also three General Assembly seats (one for the USSR itself, plus one apiece for the republics of Ukraine and Belarus) – was politely ignored, as was its refusal to sign on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Instead the UN’s founding fiction was that the representatives of free peoples, chosen by democratically elected leaders, were somehow morally equivalent to the representatives of tyrants whose countries were veritable prison camps. It was clear that this was an organization where foolish ideals and outright illusions would trump reality.
But oh, what a wonderful job the UN did when it came to promoting itself! When I was a kid in New York, we were all taken on field trips to the UN, where the level of brainwashing was through the roof. Americans who warned that the UN was a step toward “world government” were depicted as wack jobs and conspiracy theorists. In many places, Scandinavia especially, the UN became an object of near-reverence, as if its very existence amounted to a promise of utopia. In fact, of course, no organization made up of 193 countries, most of whose governments are outrageously corrupt, and many of them profoundly autocratic, can itself be anything other than outrageously corrupt and indifferent to autocracy.
Then, as vividly illustrated in UN Me, a splendid 2012 documentary by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff that I reviewed here at the time, there’s the sheer sloth, and the utter lack of discipline and accountability, that characterize UN staffers in New York as well as UN workers in hot spots around the world. UN peacekeepers have, with impunity, committed thousands of rapes. The Oil for Food Scandal was described by UN expert Claudia Rosett as “the biggest scam in the history of human relief.” UN forces stood by during the Rwanda genocide because their superiors prioritized the UN’s “image of impartiality” over the protection of innocent lives. The 16,000 people who work at the UN’s New York headquarters alone have little to do other than write reports that nobody reads and that accomplish nothing.
The very names of the UN’s agencies are deeply ironic. The Human Rights Council currently includes countries like Cuba and Qatar. In 2013, UNESCO – the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization – honored the memory of Che Guevara. Three years ago I wrote here about the UN’s obscure Office for Project Services, which under the leadership of a Norwegian woman named Grete Faremo frittered away a fortune on sheer nonsense, including three million dollars paid to a recent college graduate to produce (among other things having nothing whatsoever to do with legitimate UN goals) a song by Joss Stone. A New York Times exposé about this grotesque waste led to Faremo’s immediate resignation. (At the time, I predicted that the disgraced Faremo would, soon enough, “re-emerge as the head of some EU body or NGO.” I was close: Faremo now runs the agency that oversees Norway’s intelligence and national police security services.)
But when it comes to sheer obscenity, none of these UN agencies can hold a candle to UNRWA, whose official objective is to cater to the needs of Palestinians and perpetuate the notion that even in the year 2025 they must still be regarded as refugees. As Hugh Fitzgerald wrote here last November, “there is solid evidence that nearly two dozen UNRWA staffers, including officials, took part in the October 7 atrocities — the torture, rape, and murder of Israelis — and that more than 450 UNRWA staff are members of ‘terrorist organizations,’ that is, mainly members of Hamas but also of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Also, “UNRWA staffers who are not members of Hamas overwhelmingly declare their support for the terrorist group”; indeed, “23 percent of UNRWA’s male employees have ties to Hamas, a higher percentage than the average of 15 percent for adult males in Gaza,” while “10 percent of UNRWA’s school principals in Gaza and their deputies were leaders in Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Teachers in UNRWA schools have long sought to intensify their students’ hatred of Israel and of Jews. Hamas was allowed to store “weapons and rocket launchers” in UNRWA schools and hospitals and to build its headquarters “directly underneath UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.” On French TV the other day, a former UN lawyer acknowledged that while “most of the October 7 monsters were not UNRWA staff…nearly all were UNRWA graduates, educated at the expense of American and European taxpayers.”
Under Biden, the Justice Department seconded the position of the UN – and of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – that UNRWA employees who took part in the October 7 massacre enjoy immunity from prosecution owing to their UN connection. The Trump administration has reversed this view. In a recent law review article, Maryam Jamshidi argued that in this matter the universally accepted verdict should be that rendered by the ICJ, not the U.S. judiciary – even though the U.S., in 1986, ceased its practice of automatically recognizing the ICJ’s verdicts. Whereas the Trump administration argues that the General Assembly had no authority under the UN Charter to create the UNRWA in the first place, the ICJ has maintained, as Jamshidi stated, “that the UN, as a body, has implicit powers beyond those explicitly listed in the Charter.” That’s awfully sweeping – and unsettling. And while the Trump administration further claims that the UNRWA is not, as the UN insists, a “subsidiary organ” of the General Assembly, but rather a “specialized agency” that is not covered by UN immunity, the UN claims that although the UN Charter makes no reference to “subsidiary organs,” it has long been “UN practice” to describe agencies such as the UNRWA as such. This is pretty weak argumentation, and it has a despicable objective: to enable UNRWA employees who collaborated with Hamas to escape justice.
After October 7, many countries stopped funding UNRWA, but others reaffirmed their support, with Norway actually increasing its contribution. In a statement justifying this action, the Norwegian government noted that “nearly 200 UNRWA staff members have been killed” (never mind that many if not most of them were Hamas members or supporters), that UNRWA’s “schools and hospitals are under daily attacks” (never mind that these places are also Hamas military strongholds), and that UNRWA has the noble task of delivering “humanitarian aid, including health care and education,” to Gazans (never mind that most of the “aid” has been spent to ramp up Hamas’s military prowess and that the “education” consists largely of indoctrination in Jew-hatred). As recently as August 15, UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese whitewashed Hamas as “a political force that won the 2005 elections” and that has “built schools, public facilities, hospitals.”
Of course, instead of keeping UNRWA alive, the Western powers should at this point be doing everything they can to shut the thing down. In fact, this latest scandal strengthens the already highly persuasive case for dissolving the UN entirely. During the Cold War, as noted, it treated the Soviet bloc countries as if they were free. In 1971, Taiwan was thrown out and replaced with Red China, then in the midst of its barbaric Cultural Revolution. In recent decades, the majority-Muslim member nations have asserted their power in the UN to an unsettling degree, consistently using the organization as a club with which to beat Israel. The documentary UN Me ended with a provocative conclusion: the ultimate purpose of the UN is nothing more or less than to perpetuate its own existence – to keep alive this empty, soulless shell of an institution that provides members of the privileged classes of poor nations with an opportunity to live in comfortable Manhattan apartments and have impressive offices in a magnificent midtown high-rise where the pay is great, the job security is terrific, the workload is almost nonexistent, and the promise of promoting world peace and harmony is nothing but a sick joke. Time to turn that tower on First Avenue into – well – anything else: a hospital, an apartment block, an office building, a Trump hotel. Imagine the name of Trump – who has arguably done more for world peace in the last few months than the UN has done in its whole ludicrous history – displayed on the Secretariat building in huge golden letters: what a beautiful ending that would be to this eighty-year-long farce!
