After Decades of Bias, It's Time to Hold the UN to Account

"Those who believe that a U.S. withdrawal from the UNHRC would be ill-advised and hasty should remember that the council has had more than a decade to get its act together. Created in 2006, the UNHRC succeeded the former Commission on Human Rights, a body that was similarly obsessed with Israel. At the time, there were vague hopes that the UNHRC would expend more energy on the gravest abusers, but the wildly disproportionate attention upon Israel has persisted. Nor has the UNHRC prevented grievous human rights abusers, from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia, from serving as members and participating in its decisions-because in the U.N.'s universe, having an appalling human rights record never disqualifies you from judging the human rights records of others...

If confronting this blatant discrimination against a state that was first admitted to the U.N. in 1949 is to be a marker of the Trump administration's approach to the international body, then it's important to realize that the battle is much wider than simply the UNHRC. The deeper rot that needs to be addressed set in more than 40 years ago-Nov. 10, 1975, to be exact.

On that date, the U.N. General Assembly passed the Soviet-inspired Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism-a resolution that was rescinded in 1991. Less well-known is another resolution passed on that day-3376, which created the grandly named Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, giving us the unwieldy acronym CEIRPP...

For more than 40 years-longer, when you remember that the U.N. set up its first Israel-bashing committee, the...wait for it...Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories-yes, SCIIHRPOAOT-in 1968, the U.S., Israel and other democratic nations have devoted precious resources to the U.N. even as it deepened its institutionalized anti-Zionism. Since 1979, the CEIRPP has been serviced by a Division for Palestinian Rights, churning out an endless stream of anti-Israel propaganda through international conferences and publications.

(And no, there isn't a division for Tibetan rights, or for Kurdish rights.)

All this costs around $6 million annually. In international organizational terms, that's unremarkable, but when you consider how the money is spent, it's little short of obscene. One would like to imagine that fact is one that President Trump will grasp instinctively, and act upon accordingly."