Tuesday, June 30, 2026
From Ian:
The UN’s toxic obsession with Israel lets the world’s worst regimes off scot-free
The UN’s toxic obsession with Israel lets the world’s worst regimes off scot-free
The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item devoted exclusively to Israel – a distinction enjoyed by no other country on earth, including North Korea, Iran and Russia. Even former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged the UN had produced a “disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticising Israel”.Israel is America's 'only true Western ally,' Florida's GOP House hopeful tells 'Post'
I encountered this phenomenon during my own time at the United Nations. It was impossible for any Israeli to secure a senior appointment in the organisation, no matter how well qualified. Israel is the only country of its political and economic weight never to have held a position at Assistant Secretary-General level (roughly a two-star general equivalent) or above. I also encountered cases of UN staff and contractors self-censoring on issues related to Israel for fear of being accused of anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias, as damaging an accusation as one of racism.
But by far the worst example of this bias is embodied by UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, some of whose staff have been accused of being directly involved in the Oct 7 attack on Israel.
As recently as 2024, the UK maintained a longstanding position of condemning the UN’s hostility towards the world’s only Jewish state. Successive British governments rejected the Commission of Inquiry’s open-ended mandate and criticised its obsessive focus on Israel. But that consensus has been overturned by a Labour government more ideologically and politically sympathetic to this excessive level of scrutiny, or more in hock to special interest groups as obsessively hostile to Israel as the UN is.
The tragedy is that, while the UN has rightly attracted condemnation from informed critics, it has somehow retained an almost sacrosanct halo among much of the wider public. To many, the UN remains the ultimate authority in international affairs. That reverence allows weak evidence, activist assumptions and ideological predispositions to be laundered into accepted wisdom.
The UN’s disproportionate focus on Israel has long ceased to be a curiosity of UN procedure. It has become a pathology that distorts priorities, consumes diplomatic bandwidth and allows some of the world’s worst regimes to escape meaningful scrutiny by sheltering in the comforting consensus of anti-Israel indignation. It has also become a cottage industry, with networks inside the UN acting in concert with well-organised bad actors like Qatar and Turkey to sustain a relentless momentum of anti-Israeli attacks.
Many casual observers may believe the Commission when it claims to be defending vulnerable children. In reality, by substituting ideology for evidence and prejudice for impartiality, it undermines the credibility of international law itself. And, in the process, demonises Israel, Israelis, and Jews at large as bloodthirsty child killers.
The UN should pay attention. This is the kind of abuse that has drawn the ire of the US, which is withholding its UN dues and has sent the organisation spiralling towards budgetary collapse. Unless the UN gets its house in order and brings these rogue agencies and commissions to heel, António Guterres may not have much left to hand over to his successor at the end of this year.
US AFFAIRS: Florida Republican David Burck discusses Israel, Iran, campus antisemitism, and why he believes Washington must deepen its alliance with Jerusalem.The CPJ Is Finally Acknowledging That It Called Gazan Terrorists ‘Journalists’
The US and Israel are the only two pillars of Western civilization still standing, according to Burck.
“Throughout the course of human history, we’ve objectively never had it so good,” he said. “We’re at an existential kind of point in the West as a whole as we go away from the ideas that have made us great, and we see it in Europe, and we’ve seen it here bubbling domestically in the United States,” he went on to say.
“I just feel like if I didn’t do my part to try to stem that tide in any way, shape or form, I’d be failing my son, the future generations out of the West, and America specifically,” Burck maintained.
“I think it’s high time for us to definitely codify our relationship even more with Israel; we need it. Europe is a rump of itself, it’s a husk, and it’s not going to get any better. And really, the only true Western ally that we have left is Israel,” he said.
While he had not yet had the privilege of visiting Israel, Burck said, he was looking forward to the situation calming down enough that he could cross it off his bucket list and visit along with his wife and 14-month-old son.
“I need to go look as a believer in Christ. I want to get out there, and I’ve heard so many great things,” he said.
“We need to keep this relationship thriving. I think that we’re going to work through this. I can understand why the people of Israel feel betrayed right now, but you know, Donald Trump’s done so many fantastic things for Israel, and I don’t think that he would do anything that would put Israel at a disadvantage,” the statesman said.
“Personally, I don’t believe so. I think this is just a part of the process of negotiating with the terrorist regime and the largest state sponsor of terrorism. I feel like Israel and the United States are just kind of like the two last vestiges of the best of the West.”
The CPJ announced on Thursday that it is undertaking a review of its own list of casualties of Gazan journalists.
The timing is not coincidental. In the past several weeks, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been publishing obituaries identifying their dead fighters, many of whom have been living double lives. The most prominent of these double lives are terrorists posing as journalists.
However, none of this information is new. Since the CPJ started recording journalists killed in Gaza, HonestReporting has similarly been tracking the many cases in which these journalists were directly affiliated with terrorist organizations.
As of June 23, 2026, more than half of the journalists listed by the CPJ as being killed in Gaza were either members or affiliates of an anti-Israel terrorist group.
Most recently, Ahmad Washah, a Hamas sniper who also worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in a targeted air strike in Gaza. CPJ quickly came to his defense, expressing “alarm” at his death.
This has been a pattern at the CPJ, particularly with terrorists affiliated with Al Jazeera. The Qatar-backed outlet has consistently aligned itself with Hamas, frequently publishing the terrorist organizaiton’s talking points. Still, on four other occasions, the CPJ has expressed concern or condemned the deaths of Al Jazeera journalists, even when there is overwhelming evidence of their affiliation with Hamas.
The CPJ has exerted great effort to suggest that the IDF has been purposefully targeting journalists throughout the war. This effort has led the organization to include in its casualty list the names of any media workers killed in a war zone.
The CPJ’s own criteria state that it excludes journalists who were “directly participating as combatants in armed conflict at the time of their deaths.” Yet the organization has on countless occasions done exactly that, and thus redefined international law to paint an inflammatory and false accusation against Israel.
For the past two years, the CPJ has found that Israel has been responsible for the majority of the killed media workers.
In both 2024 and 2025, when the data was broken down, an entirely different story emerged, revealing that Israel was not targeting journalists, but rather terrorists who posed a threat to national security and hid under the guise of a press vest.
Israel has been releasing evidence of terrorists posing as journalists for the past two and a half years. Why did it take terrorist organizations publishing their own obituaries for the CPJ to recognize what has been public information all along?
CPJ expects the full review of journalists to be done in July. HonestReporting will be ready to remind them, once again, that shielding terrorists from scrutiny for more than two years is not an oversight – it is a moral failure.
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