Friday, December 22, 2017
From Ian:
Michael J. Knowles: There Is No ‘United Nations.’ So Let’s Stop Paying For It.
Ben Shapiro: BREAKING: U.N. Votes 128-9 To Declare Trump's Jerusalem Embassy 'Null And Void'; ALSO BREAKING: Who Gives A S***
Michael J. Knowles: There Is No ‘United Nations.’ So Let’s Stop Paying For It.
In 1975, the U.N. adopted the resolution, “Zionism is racism.” In 2011, the U.N. General Assembly held a moment of silence to honor North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. In 2017, it condemned the United States for establishing an embassy in a member nation’s capital city. It wasn't always like this. During its founding period, the United Nations possessed greater moral clarity because it limited membership to countries that had declared war against the Axis powers in the Second World War. The modern U.N. bears no resemblance to that body.Daniel P. Moynihan (Feb. 1, 1981): “Joining the Jackals”
More than 20 years ago, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton explained the relation between the United States and the United Nations with characteristic bluntness. “The League of Nations was a failure because the United States did not participate. The United Nations would be a failure if the United States did not participate,” he observed. “There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interest.”
The image of a United Nations that does not rely for its very survival on the goodwill of the United States is a dangerous fiction that empowers the worst actors on earth and conflates their vicious self-interest with American moral clarity. It’s time to defund the fantasy. When next the ingrate children leading U.N. member states desire our blood and treasure, as they constantly do, they can come to us and beg.
The chain of resolutions passed in condemnation of Israel by the Security Council in 1979-80 forms a complex story. Yet to follow it only a single point needs to be understood. It is that, as a direct result of American policy, the Security Council was allowed to degenerate to the condition of the General Assembly.
Under the UN Charter the General Assembly reaches decisions by majority vote, but its decisions are purely recommendatory (Article 10). By contrast, the Security Council has power. In situations where it determines that there is a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression,” the Council “shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken. . . .” These include “such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary. . . .” The Security Council, in a word, may make war. And for that reason the Security Council does not operate by majority vote. Any permanent member may veto any action, simply by voting No. However, in the face of the increasingly vicious Soviet-Arab assaults that followed Camp David, the United States began to abstain. I have represented the United States on the Security Council; I have served as President of the Security Council. I state as a matter of plain and universally understood fact that for the United States to abstain on a Security Council resolution concerning Israel is the equivalent of acquiescing.
The first abstention in the sequence we are now tracing occurred on March 22, 1979 when the Council, in a resolution directed against Israel, established a three-member commission “to examine the situation relating to establishments in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.” The phrasing here was ominous: “Arab territories . . . including Jerusalem.” Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. How could its capital be in the territory of others?
Equally ominous, although at this point restrained, was the reaffirmation of earlier Council statements that the Fourth Geneva Convention “is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem” and the strict injunction upon Israel “as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.” Now, the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War is one of a series of treaties designed to codify the behavior of Nazi Germany and make such behavior criminal under international law. This particular convention applied to the Nazi practice of deporting or murdering vast numbers of persons in Western Poland—as at Auschwitz—and plans for settling the territory with Germans. The assertion that the Geneva Convention also applied to the West Bank played, of course, perfectly into the Soviet propaganda position that “Zionism is present-day fascism.”
On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly voted 128-9 to condemn the United States for President Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. They labeled the policy “null and void.” There were also 35 absentions. The nine countries voting no were the United States, Israel, Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands. The 35 abstentions were mainly centered in Eastern Europe. 21 countries didn’t bother voting.CNN’s Tapper: Many Countries Voting against U.S. on Jerusalem Have “Questionable Records”
The vote was hailed by the Left as evidence of . . . something. It’s really just the latest indicator that the United Nations is the Star Wars cantina of international politics — it would be difficult to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Here’s the breakdown on U.N. resolutions over the past few years, thanks to UN Watch:
OMG I can't believe the United Nations, that hive of scum and villainy, is condemning the US over recognizing Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. It's not like they're rabid anti-Semites or anything. (Stats below courtesy of https://t.co/bQQDd2bcVo) pic.twitter.com/EagaKWrjh7
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 21, 2017
The United Nations was always a garbage idea — the very notion of countries where citizens have been reduced to eating dogs (Venezeula) or thrown in jail for dissent (Turkey) declaring American sovereign policy “null and void” with regard to reinforcing a historical and verifiable truth is insulting. The foreign community has zero control over our foreign policy, and particularly over our placement of our embassy.
Fortunately, we now have a list of countries to which President Trump can minimize funding — and we can reconsider giving money to the U.N. in the first place. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has officially been appointed Daily Wire spirit animal, said as much:
A number of countries supporting Thursday’s United Nations General Assembly vote against President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital have “questionable records of their own,” Jake Tapper said in a commentary during his show The Lead on CNN.Critics with questionable records condemn US
Tapper singled out critics such as Venezuela, Syria, Yemen and North Korea, all of whose citizens suffer from tyranny and war.
“The U.S. imperils global peace says the representative of Venezuela, a country in a humanitarian disaster,” Tapper observed. After noting that Venezuelans are suffering from widespread hunger, Tapper asked, “On what moral platform does the government of Venezuela stand today?”
Tapper also rejected criticism of the U.S. position on Jerusalem from Syria noting, “We’re in the seventh year of the brutal Syrian civil war that’s killed half a million people and displaced millions. Syrian President Bashar al Assad has used chemical weapons against his own citizens including children.”
Yemen, which along with Turkey drafted the resolution criticizing the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem, is “seemingly more focused at least during the speech on where the U.S. puts it’s embassy on Israel than on the 7 million Yemenis on the brink of starvation in that country’s civil war,” Tapper said.
