Avi Benlolo: Trump administration takes a courageous stand against the UN

The Trump administration’s efforts to call out United Nations bodies that have been co-opted by anti-western interests shows that the tide might be turning against a global machine that for decades has been working to undermine Israel and the United States — countries that have become the world’s leading purveyors of morality, freedom and democracy, the antithesis of the far left and radical Islam.

Global institutions and political movements have been weaponized to destroy democracies from the inside. This week, Jeff Bartos, U.S. ambassador to the UN for management and reform, told the Security Council that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its proponents seek a “standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach.

“The ICC is constantly seeking to aggrandize its own power, falsely asserting so-called jurisdiction beyond its mandate, including over nations who never consented to its authority. The ICC’s perverse attempts to encroach on the sovereignty of states, including some on this council, must be defeated. So long as this decades-old concern remains unaddressed, we will continue to take steps, as needed, to protect U.S. interests.”

Likewise, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued this week that, “The ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”

As Rubia said, “The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist non-government organizations, smug globalists and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.” As an example, he cited the case of the U.S.-based group Democracy for the Arab World Now, which called on Iran to grant the ICC jurisdiction over alleged “war crimes” committed in its territory by the United States.

As with the U.S., Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and therefore provides no legal jurisdiction to the ICC. The ICC overstepped its power and was weaponized by Israel’s enemies to issue standing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. To deploy these false allegations, the ICC decided it has legal authority over Israel because in the alternate universe it created, the non-existent “Palestine” is a member state.

The global machine is working overtime to undermine the West, but as former U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” The Board of Peace, an international body slated to take over Gaza, says that Hamas must disarm. More significantly, the board recently announced that, “UNRWA has no place in the new Gaza. We are turning the page on the complex of perpetual aid dependency & conflict. The people of Gaza deserve better.”

They certainly do. In conversation this week with economist Emily Brearley, author of “Aid Inferno,” she recounted to me her own experience while working in Gaza. “The UNRWA issue is one that I did a 180,” she said. “I was raised in quite an antisemitic household. I was wearing a Keffiyeh at 12, 13 years old to school and I was very anti-Israel.”

Brearley worked in Gaza with UNRWA and the World Bank and says the evidence she saw of children being indoctrinated into “hating Israel, hating the West and seeing their only option in life is blowing themselves up” was “horrific, especially because the senior people in this project didn’t seem to have concern.” What changed her mind about the organization was her observation that UNRWA’s reinforcement of the perpetual refugee status of Palestinians was not improving the lives of people on the ground.

That’s why there is momentum to defund UNRWA by U.S. officials, who are increasingly calling on UN member states to pay attention to its alleged ties to terrorism. Currently, more than 1,500 employees are being investigated by the U.S. for alleged links to terrorism.

The UN is beginning to crumble under increased American and Israeli pressure to uncover the truth. This week, its deputy special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process issued a rare statement acknowledging that Hamas is obstructing humanitarian assistance in Gaza by intimidating aid workers, disrupting food distribution and interfering with relief operations. Its one small step of progress within a sea of lies and deceitful conduct by detractors of Israel and the United States.

I concur with French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who said that the isolation of Israel is a “historic moral failure” and that the world’s silence in the face of terrorism represents a “defeat of humanity” and a “loss of any moral compass.”

That moral failure has been driven by UN agencies that have been co-opted by terrorist supporters, and whose agendas are driven by countries that seek to undermine the interests and values of the western world. That is why America’s efforts to push back against these malign interests is so important — for the U.S., Israel and the entire free world.

National Post

Avi Benlolo is chairman and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.