In the Media

Australian Jewish News – 5 September 2024

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, including attacks in New York and Boston and Kenya.

There’s even a dedicated day at the UN to remember victims of terrorism, but what’s missing from that day and the many exhibits of terror attacks is one group.

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 them, 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, was appointed to the UN Women Rights Commission in 2021 for a four-year-term – a decision that was thankfully overturned when a successful campaign led by UN Watch led to Iran being eventually expelled in December 2022.

As absurd as these appointments are, it actually makes 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, meaning it is dominated by non-free societies, including brutal dictatorships like Iran and North Korea.

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

Since the October 7 terror attacks, this bias against Israel has become so acute and obvious, that it should be impossible to ignore, yet shockingly, it is being ignored in Canberra and other Western capitals.

Despite the brutality of this heinous attack that murdered 1200 innocent people in the most brutal ways possible and kidnapped a further 250 more, this world body has still never been able to bring itself to condemn this evil attack.

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.

UNRWA, the main UN body for Palestinian refugees, has been implicated in scandal after scandal for years, and has now been directly implicated in terror activities on October 7, even firing staff members for their involvement.  Yet, somehow it still managed to con a naïve world into giving it more money, claiming it performs “life-saving operations.”

UN Women is another example. It claims to be “a global champion for women and girls” with a goal that “All women and girls live a life free from all forms of violence.”

Honourable goals indeed, but as the United Nations has proven again and again, they just words without substance and platitudes without meaning. Despite the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence committed against Israeli women and children, the UN Women remained shamefully silent and only on December 1, almost two months later, did they finally issue a weak statement of condemnation.

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.

This shameful behaviour was solidified when UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres left off Hamas in a report on organisations suspected by the UN of committing acts of sexual violence during conflict.

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

The message is clear: For the UN, innocent Israeli children playing in a soccer field are less worthy than Palestinian terrorists killed in Israeli defensive air strikes.

These kinds of hypocritical actions should demonstrate to all free-thinking individuals and countries that the United Nations is a morally corrupt organisation, and can never achieve the great moral purposes for which it was created by Western societies after World War II.

The values of western countries like Australia are being mocked by this immoral organisation and Australia should hold the UN to account and scrutiny, rather than continue to serve as enablers for its indefensible actions.

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