Leaving the U.N. "Human Rights" Council was the moral choice

"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Nikki Haley on Tuesday announced the United States is quitting the UN Human Rights Council - which, as Pompeo put it, is 'an exercise in shameless hypocrisy' whose members include serious abusers of the rights it supposedly aims to protect.

Plus, it's obsessed with bashing Israel, condemning the Jewish state 70 times on various trumped-up charges over the last 12 years, far more attention than it's given to actual human-rights violations in the entire rest of the world.

The council is the successor to the UN Commission on Human Rights, which had all the same problems - which is why Washington quit it under President George W. Bush. Setting up the new body was part of a deal that brought the United States back under President Barack Obama, who claimed he'd pursue 'reform from within.'

But the new council's members still included rampant abusers such as China, Venezuela, Iran and, most recently, the Democratic Republic of the Congo - which joined even as mass graves were uncovered there.

As long as so many UN members don't give a damn about rights, any UN body that pretends to protect them will be just a perverse and cynical sham. It's far better not to play along with the game."