Melanie Phillips: As Haley’s comet passes, UN itself must now be a fallen star
The Trump administration has broken with all that. The US has withdrawn from UNESCO and the UNHRC; Israel is set to withdraw from UNESCO at the end of this year.
This is not enough. The UN itself has to be effectively neutralized, deprived of its power to hurt America and Israel and promote evil in the world.
On the American Thinker website an anonymous army officer outlined how this might be done. The US should steadily withdraw its funding from the UN. It should demand changes to the permanent membership of the Security Council – for example, by getting rid of France, no longer a world power, and bringing in India instead.
In addition, he suggested, the US should clog the schedules of all UN bodies on which it sits with resolutions that would not only divide the membership, but also force them to address awkward questions. For example, resolutions condemning Israeli settlements should be followed up by resolutions on New Zealand’s historically genocidal policies towards the Maoris, Russia’s military adventures in Ukraine and Georgia, Britain’s colonial history, Venezuela’s economic policies and China’s occupation of Tibet.
You get the general idea. Impossible, you think, since the UN is an essential part of the world order? But that world order is bust; and the UN has helped bring it to this pass.
And as for impossible, did anyone ever imagine in their wildest dreams that the president of the United States would be one Donald J. Trump? Desperate times sometimes require desperate measures.
Caroline Glick: Standing up to the elitist mobs
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s sudden resignation this week distressed a lot of Israelis. On the face of things, the widely felt concern makes little sense. After all, Haley wasn’t a lone wolf in the Trump administration.Nikki Haley triumphed at the UN because she saw through it
Then-president Barack Obama’s anti-Israel UN ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power weren’t free agents when they took hostile actions and made hostile statements about Israel. They were speaking and acting as representatives of their boss, Obama.
Just so, in defending Israel by word and deed, Haley was a loyal representative of the policies of her boss, President Donald Trump.
So why did her decision to resign make so many Israelis anxious?
Because while Haley was a loyal representative of the administration, she was more than a mouthpiece. She was a leader.
Leading in a place like the UN means speaking truth to the most powerful sort of mob – the elite mob.
The UN’s mob mentality doesn’t manifest itself in book burnings and mass rallies. Rather, it expresses itself in a thousand ways – often passive-aggressive – every day in UN institutions.
It isn’t just that Haley was forced to cast the lone nay vote last December, when the other 14 Security Council members (including Britain and France) voted in a favor of a resolution demanding that the US reverse its sovereign decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city.
Every day, the UN shows its mob mentality in its obsessive-compulsive bias against the Jewish state.
Haley, by contrast, may have come in without experience — but that meant she also lacked for illusions. What a difference when someone knows they’re in a viper pit — that the UN is itself the problem.
And has the gumption to say so.
This became apparent the instant Haley opened her first press conference. She had just come from a regularly scheduled Security Council meeting devoted to the Middle East.
It was, Haley noted, her first such meeting. She called it “a bit strange,” given that the parley was supposed to be about how to maintain international peace and security.
Yet instead of being dedicated to, say, Hezbollah’s “illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon” or Iran’s funding of terrorists or even the slaughter in Syria, it was, she said, “focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East.” She confessed she was “new around here,” but she was clearly flabbergasted.
Then the famous words: “I am here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore. I am here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel.”
“I am here,” she promptly added, “to emphasize that the United States is determined to stand up to the UN’s anti-Israel bias.”
It’s hard to think of a single moment quite like it.
