Forum: Should The U.S. Leave The UN?

Every Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:Should The U.S. Leave The UN?

James Kirwan: Good question. I believe the US should leave the organization and turn the building into rent-controlled apartments on Turtle Bay to help alleviate the dearth of affordable apartments in NYC. I’d love to see the General Assembly turned into a food court: they could even keep the flags if they add Panda Express and Taco Bell.

The truth is the current administration could simply walk out of the organization. Nikki Haley would resign her position and the President and Secretary of State would refuse to submit her replacement. Since the position is appointment, there is nothing Congress could do about it.

If Congress wanted to support the move, it could defund the organization by submitting and approving legislation to the President to do that. During both Bush administrations the USA withheld dues to the organization, but succeeding presidents Clinton and Obama reversed those moves.

Such moves would be temporary. The next Democratic administration could simply return to the organization by paying the dues and appointing a UN Permanent Representative.

Permanently leaving the UN would be a major change in diplomatic policy, and major changes are difficult to get done in a huge, bureaucratic organization with checks and balances built in. There would be significant bureaucratic resistance to doing so, with every step likely fought in the courts. It would take years and require like-minded Democrats - something that I don’t see happening without a major screw up by the UN. And an organization that promotes anti-Semitism, protects child rapists, and is incapable of protecting villages from genocide or the world from a nuclear North Korea proves it has staying power after some pretty serious screw ups.

But the truth is that the UN has little clout and with each scandal it loses more. Perhaps the best solution from the perspective of those of us who want the USA to leave the UN is to ignore it and allow the organization to sink into complete irrelevance through its own mistakes.


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Doug Hagin:WE should leave post haste frankly. The UN (Useless nations, as I call it) is a nest of miscreant nations which always seem to favor dictators and terrorists while bad mouthing the western nations. Especially the US and Israel.


Rob Miller: Why now? Why not 30 years ago?

The UN was a good idea on its face after WWII. Unfortunately, FDR, the first world leader to recognize the Soviet Union insisted that 'Uncle' Joe Stalin have a major seat at the table and a veto. President Truman had a whole host of Soviet sympathizers and outright spies like Alger Hiss advising him that he inherited from FDR's administration. So he likewise compounded this grave error, even giving Soviet satellites who were basically colonies of the USSR their own seats and votes. Big mistake...totalitarian dictatorships never play well with democracies. That of course opened the door for all sorts of dictatorships and failed states to destroy the original premise like termites while milking western democracies for all kinds of cash.

The UN Human Rights Commission(UNHRC) was always one of the laughable misnomers ever. It was constantly dominated by some of the most despotic countries in history, and it's main objective, really, was demonizing Israel which made it a great group to be part of as far as Barack Hussein Obama was concerned.

A year year after it was established, in 2007, the UNHRC passed what they called Permanent Agenda Item 7. What it did was to establish a separate standard for judging anything Israel did. It provided a platform to automatically 'investigate' Israel and condemn it for just about anything it did to defend itself, while taking for granted any Palestinian libel against Israel.

In other words, special standards for Jews and Israel and a different one for say, Iran, Venezuela or Pakistan. There's a word for that.

To show you how this worked in practice, out of 135 resolutions the UNHRC passed, 68 of them condemned Israel for 'human rights violations.' By contrast, Iran was mentioned just six times.

UN organizations like UNESCO and UNWRA operate on similar levels. They're all simply just money pits for the U.S. taxpayer.

We get nothing out of it, and nothing of any value whatsoever is accomplished based on the UN's original goals. There's no reason for America to stay in the UN.




Laura Rambeau Lee: With a total of 193 member nations, the United States is assessed 22% of the United Nations regular budget and 28% of its peace keeping budget, which they calculate as our “fair share” contribution to this organization. This translates to over eight billion dollars annually our government is taking of our hard earned tax money which is being turned over to be redistributed to other member nations as they see fit. The United Nations is at the forefront of the climate change hoax, which is a scheme to redistribute wealth from developed to developing countries. Even more insidious is the impact the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has on our educational system. What started out as the International Baccalaureate programme, a high school charter school, now has programs beginning in elementary school and continues through middle and high school. The agenda has been to promote cultural diversity and indoctrinating our youth to believe they are citizens of a global community. This is pure Marxist and collectivist ideology and it is being inserted into much of the curriculum to which our children are being exposed. We should absolutely pull ourselves and our money out of the United Nations and get the United Nations out of the United States.


Well, there it is!

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Yet Another Biased Anti-Israel U.N. Investigative Committee Formed

 

By David Gerstman

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has decided that Israel's self-defense needs to be investigated. (Note in the UN"s announcement the words "Hamas" and "rockets" are nowhere to be found.) After Operation Cast Lead the UNHRC picked a panel of four individuals, all of whom had prejudged Israel's guilt. The leader of that investigation, Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa later recanted his group's conclusions, but the damage was done.

The UNHRC has decided that having a committee that is biased against Israel is necessary and selected an Irish professor of human rights law named William Schabas to head the new committee. Schabas has been involved in the travesty called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine along with crackpots such as Cynthia McKinney. At a hearing this "tribunal" in 2012, Schabas said "[m]y favorite would be Netanyahu within the dock of the International Criminal Court."

UN Watch has compiled a list of statements and from Schabas showing his bias against Israel, including:

- A few years earlier, Schabas called for “going after” Israeli president Shimon Peres in the ICC, saying, “Why are we going after the president of Sudan for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza?”

- In a 2009 blog post about the UN’s infamous Durban II conference on racism, Schabas urged the world not only to “ignore” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements, but to stop “exaggerating” them. According to Schabas, those who “deserve the blame” are “Israel and its friends, who have manipulated the truth about the nature of the work of the United Nations by gross exaggeration of the role and intervention of certain fanatics.” Schabas described Ahmadinejad as nothing more than a “provocative politician,” and not a torturer of dissidents, inciter of genocidal anti-Semitism, and arch-sponsor of terrorism.

- In 2011, Schabas went to Iran to co-sponsor conferences with the Tehran-based “Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity,” despite its intimate ties with the fundamentalist regime, and avowed propaganda agenda. The center’s director, Kamran Hashemi, a former political officer with Iran’s foreign ministry, wrote his Ph.D under Schabas at the Irish Center for Human Rights.

After citing Schabas' record, Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, wrote "“Under international law, William Schabas is obliged to recuse himself because his repeated calls to indict Israeli leaders obviously gives rise to actual bias or the appearance thereof.”

After Goldstone retracted the report that bears his name, Schabas mocked Goldstone for  being “certainly more indulgent towards Israel.”

None of this surprising as the UNHRC as Israel is the subject of a permanent agenda item of the council.

George Clooney's fiance, Amal Alamuddin was also selected to serve on the panel but declined.

"I am horrified by the situation in the occupied Gaza Strip, particularly the civilian casualties," Alamuddin said in a statement, "and strongly believe that there should be an independent investigation and accountability for crimes that have been committed." ...

Clooney's wife-to-be wished the other panelists "courage and strength," as they go forward with the inquiry into Israel's actions during the month-long Operation Protective Edge.

Alamuddin didn't decline on account of principles. She even falsely called Gaza "occupied," when Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005.

Early reporting on Schabas had him acknowledging that Israel's actions during Cast Lead "were not on the same scale as more serious violations elsewhere in the world." But the reasonableness of such a claim has been outweighed by Schabas' overall record. Last year Schabas argued that Syria's use of chemical weapons was not technically a war crime and instead used the killing of over 1000 civilians to argue that it was the United States that wants to "monopolise" its possession of weapons of mass destruction.

 

Crossposted at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

UN HRC Accuses Israel Of 'War Crimes' In Gaza

The UN Human Rights Council isn't sitting idly by while war in being waged in Gaza. Today, Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights and head of the Council accused - wait for it - Israel of committing war crimes, and the Council adopted a Palestinian resolution calling for condemnation of Israel and a full investigation into 'violations' Israel allegedly committed.

For cover purposes, a brief pro forma condemnation of Hamas was included for their "indiscriminate attacks" on Israel. Not for their using civilians as human shields, not for using hospitals as military command posts, not for storing armaments in UNRWA schools, not for targeting Israeli civilians or a civilian airport, all of which are war crimes under the Geneva Convention Hamas/Fatah just signed on to and all of which Israel has documented.

None of that is going to be investigated by the UNHRC. Just a brief mention of "indiscriminate attacks" which implies that attacks on Israel in general are just fine with the UNHRC, if they're targeted.

Navi Pillay, a South African, has a long history of anti-Israel activism and border line Jew hatred, including her helping to organize the notorious Durban II and Durban III conferences that were so rife with Jew hatred that a number of western delegates walked out on them.

She is a real piece of work, and it's not at all unexpected that she would spearhead this. In th eend, the vote was 22 in favor of the resolution (almost all Muslim and Arab countries) and one against (the United States) while 17 other countries, mostly EU nations cowardly abstained.

 

The Palestinian delegate from Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction,  Riyad al-Maliki who brought the resolution forward and was last seen accusing Israel of fabricating the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens Hamas murdered  said "Israel is in the process of committing hideous crimes."

"Israel is destroying residential areas completely. Israel is targeting journalists. Israel has destroyed 2,500 houses. Infrastructure has been destroyed. Israeli forces are targeting Gaza's medical centers. What Israel is doing is a crime against humanity.  How many martyrs must die before Israel puts an end to its aggression?"

Martyrs.

As you can imagine, that screed got huge applause from the usual suspects.

Israel's envoy to the UNHRC, Eviatar Manor, responded to Pillay's comments by accusing Hamas of committing war crimes and insisted that Israel was acting as any other state would in seeking to defend its citizens. "There can be no moral symmetry between a terrorist aggressor and a democracy defending itself," he argued.

Even Israel's Justice Minister Tzipi Livni expressed her outrage insisting her country was acting according to international law.

"It is regrettable civilians are killed, but when we call on them to vacate and Hamas calls on them to stay, then that is what happens," she told Israel radio,describing the UN Human Rights Council accurately as an "anti-Israel" body.

The upshot of this is easy to see. The UNHRC will do its 'investigation' and condemn Israel, no matter the reality. They will rely on hearsay, they will slant 'evidence' they will simply make things up if they have to. That's what they're there for.

Israel will issue a rebuttal, which will be ignored. And the entire exercise will have no real effect but to deepen Israel's distrust of the UN and make them less and less willing to cooperate with it.

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met today with the UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon to protest UNRWA allowing Hamas to store rockets and other weaponry in UNRWA schools..and the fact that UNRWA, once it was caught doing it 'resolved' the situation by turning the rockets over to Hamas, a terrorist group so that they could be fired against Israeli civilians.

Lieberman told Ban that it was inexcusable for a UN organization to allow a terrorist group to endanger Palestinian children by using a school for a weapons depot and then to turn the rockets over to Hamas so they could endanger Israeli children.

Ban had no official response.

This is what the UN has degenerated into...a shill for terrorist groups and a haven for anti-semitism.