In the Media

Daily Telegraph – 31 July 2024

On Tuesday, July 9, ten United Nations (UN) “rights experts” released a statement accusing Israel of a “targeted starvation campaign” resulting in “famine across all of Gaza”.

It was one more lie in a litany of lies that has turned the UN into a mouthpiece for some of the worst regimes in history, a sad legacy of an organisation that had once promised so much.

The UN, formed in the aftermath of World War 2, was supposed to be a place where all nations could get together and solve the world’s issues with the honourable intentions of making the world a better place for everyone.

However, for a long time now, those lofty ideals and goals have proven to be nothing more than a false illusion.

Since Hamas’ murder spree on October 7, it has shown itself to be not just ineffective, but dangerous too.

Its campaign against Israel has been malicious and dishonest and downright libelous, creating a false narrative in which Israel, the victim of an unprovoked and unprecedented act of mass terrorism, has been accused of war crimes, indiscriminate killings and deliberate starvation of the people in Gaza.

On May 10, the UN’s World Food Programme head, Cindy McCain, accused Israel of creating a “full-blown famine” in Gaza, but less than a month later, the UN’s Famine Review Committee issued a report saying it couldn’t endorse that view, due to a lack of evidence, evidence that included the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs admitting on May 24 that it doesn’t even count all the humanitarian aid entering Gaza.

The UN also quietly revised down its civilian casualty figures from Gaza, perhaps hoping that no one would notice that it had previously been blindly accepting figures provided by Hamas, the very same terror organisation that murdered, tortured and raped men, women and children without mercy.

Besides being incredibly twisted, these reports have a real impact on the international community’s decision-making process, because countries often accept and trust the reports coming out of the UN, despite the fact their many agencies are dominated by representatives of dictatorships and other non-democratic governments.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is one such example. It’s an organisation that supposedly looks after what it terms Palestinian “refugees” but has in effect been in collusion with terrorists for decades, teaching violent antisemitism in its schools and hiding Hamas weapons caches, including the discovery of a Hamas command centre in UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters alongside drones and rockets . Its members even participated directly in the October 7 massacre.

Then there is the Commission of Inquiry – set up to investigate Israel, headed by three of the most unhinged anti-Israel critics the UN could find. Its June 2024 report blamed Israel for the October 7 attack, effectively absolving the Palestinians of any responsibility. It also openly and quickly accused Israel of crimes against humanity, including completely unverified sexual crimes against Palestinians, but when it came to the sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women, the commission was predictably unable to “independently verify such allegations.”

These findings have been heavily influenced by Francesca Albanese, a UN Special Rapporteur. The position is supposed to be objective, yet her long history of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias makes a mockery of that. In 2014, she posted that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” while Europe is subjugated “by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust.”  On June 9, after Israel rescued four hostages from Hamas captivity, she responded by accusing Israel of using the hostages to “legitimise killing, injuring, maiming, starving and traumatising Palestinians in Gaza” with “genocidal intent”. On July 25 she even compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

Albanese was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), another dubious organisation, which, on October 9, just two days after the horrific attack, held one minute’s silence to remember “the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere” without even mentioning the Israeli victims.

It also took another two months before the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, aka “UN Women”, finally issued a feeble condemnation of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas, having previously ignored all evidence and testimonies.

But none of this should be surprising considering the UN is now dominated by despotic regimes and dictatorships in which only 84 of its 193 member states are rated as Free Democracies.

As if to illustrate this farce, it even held a minute’s silence for former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, “the butcher of Tehran,” responsible for the death of thousands of political prisoners.

To this day, the UN still cannot bring itself to condemn Hamas or its terror attacks that caused the biggest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.

It has failed all tests of decency, becoming an immoral and tainted organisation dominated by dictatorships and malevolent actors, so that every report and claim coming out of its biased committees should be treated with extreme scepticism and scrutiny.

It is a corrupted body that simply cannot be trusted.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).