Fresh Air

In the entrance hall to the United Nations in New York, there’s a passageway where all visitors pass through. Along the walls, there’s an exhibition reminding those visitors of the victims of terrorist attacks from around the world.

But among the many exhibits of attacks, including those in New York and in Boston and in Kenya, there’s one glaringly obvious group that is missing.

The UN has even dedicated a specific day for the International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism, held on August 21 this year, along with an Instagram tribute page devoted to terror victims. Once again that same group was completely missing.

And that is Israeli victims of Palestinian terror attacks.

That’s because the United Nations is unable to see Israelis as victims of terrorism and Palestinians as perpetrators of these attacks.

For the United Nations, the October 7 attacks never seemed to have occurred – only Israel’s response to them.

This should come as no surprise.

For decades the UN has been obsessed with the Jewish State, passing more resolutions each year against Israel than the combined states of serial human rights abusers such as Iran, Syria, North Korea, China and Russia.

Its various committees are dominated by these same abusers often leading to farcical situations such as when Iran, in which women are so brutally oppressed that their situation led to months of mass nationwide protests in 2022, was appointed to the UN Women Rights Commission in 2021 for a four-year term. However, after a successful campaign led by UN Watch they were eventually expelled in December 2022.

These kinds of absurd appointments can only make sense when we remember that the UN is not made up of democracies that value human rights and freedoms in the way Western societies do.  Just 84 of its 193 member states are rated as Free Democracies. That means it is dominated by non-free societies, including brutal dictatorships like Iran and North Korea.

For countries like that, the UN is a platform for a global audience in which, rather than being ostracised for their awful and oppressive views, they are elevated instead.

Although bias against Israel is nothing new at the UN, since the October 7 terror attacks, this bias has become so acute and obvious, that it is impossible to ignore.

At least it should be, but shockingly, it isn’t.

Despite one of the most brutal terror attacks in modern times, where the Palestinian Hamas terror group raped, tortured, and murdered some 1200 innocent Israeli men, women and children and kidnapped a further 250 more, this world body that sees itself as some kind of moral barometer for the international community has never been able to bring itself to condemn this evil attack. And now it seems determined to pretend it never even happened.

It did however hold a moment’s silence for the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for his brutal role in 1988 in the “Death Commissions”, which ordered the execution of Iranians citizens accused of crimes against the regime.

This kind of absurd, twisted morality is unfortunately not limited to any one body or person at the United Nations but permeates the entire institution.

For example, UNRWA, the main UN body for Palestinian refugees, after being implicated in scandal after scandal for years, has now been directly implicated in terror activities on October 7, even firing staff members for their involvement.  Yet countries, including Australia, continue to fund them, turning a blind eye to the obvious systemic problems of the organisation.

UN Women is another example. It’s one of the UN bodies that says in its charter it is an “entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls.”

One of its goals is also that “All women and girls live a life free from all forms of violence.”

Who can argue with goals like that?

But as the United Nations has proven over the years and especially since October 7, these are just words without substance and platitudes without meaning. Despite the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence committed against Israeli women and children, including the testimonies of witnesses and the physical evidence of human remains, UN Women remained shamefully silent.

Only on December 1, almost two months later, did they finally issue a weak statement of condemnation against “gender-based atrocities and sexual violence” during the October 7 attacks.

Israeli women were thus victimised twice. Once by the monstrous actions of the Hamas terrorist groups whose depraved cruelty sent shockwaves through Israeli society, and secondly through the abhorrent behaviour of groups like UN Women whose so-called charter, when it came to Jewish lives, was nothing more than a lie.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres yet again confirmed this in April 2024, when he left off Hamas in a report on organisations suspected by the UN of committing acts of sexual violence during conflict. What makes this kind of action even more preposterous is that the UN even sent out a Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, to investigate the sexual violence and stated in a report  “that rape likely occurred during the Hamas attacks, and said there was convincing evidence hostages were facing sexual abuse in Gaza.” But now these inconvenient findings appear to have been “disappeared” by the UN’s bureaucracy.

As recently as the last few weeks, the UN Security Council held an emergency session after an Israeli strike on a terror compound set up in a former school building in August killed at least 31 Palestinian terrorists – yet they failed to hold a similar emergency session on a Hezbollah rocket attack that murdered 12 Druze children on the Golan Heights a month earlier.

The message is clear: Palestinian terrorists killed in Israeli defensive air strikes in their headquarters are more worthy of the UN’s attention than innocent children murdered while playing soccer in the afternoon on a sports field.

It’s these kinds of hypocritical actions that should demonstrate to all free-thinking individuals and countries that the United Nations is a morally corrupt organisation, contemptuous of the values Western society holds dear. Given this, it can never achieve the great moral purposes for which it was created by these same Western societies after World War II.

Western countries like Australia, whose values are being mocked and subverted, should hold an immoral organisation like the UN to account and scrutiny, rather than continue to serve as enablers of its indefensible actions in the vain hope that it can still somehow achieve the noble goals for which it was created.