Joseph A. Klein is the author of Biden and UN Secretary General Call for New Left Wing Social Contracts
Joe Biden calls his plan to radically transform America’s economy "Build Back Better.” There are four pillars of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. Three that have already been rolled out are revitalizing domestic manufacturing and innovation, a $2 trillion environmental and green energy infrastructure initiative, and a $775 billion caregiving initiative. Biden will be rolling out the details of his final "Build Back Better" pillar, advancing racial equity, shortly. Biden has lifted the "Build Back Better” catchphrase from the United Nations he so reveres.
- Friday, July 24, 2020
“On this International Mother Earth Day,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres proclaimed, “all eyes are on the COVID-19 pandemic – the biggest test the world has faced since the Second World War.” He issued this proclamation under the banner “Climate Action” in an attempt to link the devastating health and economic crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic to the UN’s radical climate change agenda.
President Trump has decided to re-examine U.S. funding of the World Health Organization (WHO), which dropped the ball as the coronavirus began spreading in China and beyond. “We want to look into the World Health Organization because they really called it wrong,” President Trump said at this Tuesday's White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. “They seem to be very China-centric,” he added. “That’s a nice way of saying it, but they seem to be very China-centric, and they seem to err always on the side of China.” The facts are entirely on President Trump’s side.
President Trump is mobilizing an unprecedented all hands-on-deck response to the novel coronavirus 2019. He is using all available instruments of the federal government in order to save American lives, while not destroying the American economy in the process. Meanwhile, several Democrat senators, including Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, decided to waste their time writing a letter to President Trump urging him to turn to the United Nations Security Council for help. They asked him to introduce a “resolution to declare pandemics a threat to international peace and security, and require action by member nations to address that threat as soon as the Security Council reconvenes.”
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo met on March 6th with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres at UN headquarters in New York. The offices of the spokespersons for both the State Department and the Secretary General issued their own readouts of the meeting. One would think from reading them that the readouts were reporting on two different meetings.
Secretary General Antonio Guterres once again decried the rising violence and loss of civilian life in Syria, particularly in Idlib located in northwest Syria. He called yet again for an immediate ceasefire. The Secretary General’s statement on February 28th came a day after a UN Security Council meeting on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. The Secretary General said that he has spoken with Russian and Turkish leaders, urging a ceasefire.
United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov predicted that the Middle East peace plan proposed by President Trump on January 28th will not become the basis of negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians. The plan “does meet every single red line that Israel has put in place for negotiations, but stops very far from addressing the concerns of the Palestinian side,” Mladenov said.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is prepared to unveil his long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in a manner of days, shortly before his upcoming meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the prime minister's main political rival Benny Gantz. President Trump evidently has no intention of waiting until the Israeli election this March. “It’s a great plan. It’s a plan that really would work,” the president said. “Look, Israel wants peace, Palestinians want peace. They all want peace. Not everyone wants to say it.”
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres read a statement to the press at UN headquarters on Monday declaring, “The New Year has begun with our world in turmoil. Geopolitical tensions are at their highest level this century.” The Secretary General did not refer directly to the tensions between the United States and Iran that have escalated sharply during the last week. He punted, although he did make two observations that may have been intended as oblique comments on the current situation.
On December 18th, the United Nations Security Council held its periodic meeting on the Middle East, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With few exceptions, the discussion was full of Israel-bashing and short on condemnations of Palestinian terrorists. Most of the speeches placed Israeli settlements front and center as a “flagrant” violation of “international law” and the primary obstacle to peace.
The United Nations Security Council received a briefing Wednesday on the recent “deeply troubling” developments concerning North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs from the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, Khaled Khiari. He noted that North Korea has launched ballistic missiles or other projectiles thirteen times this year, including the late November launch of two projectiles. All such launches and testing are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, he said. Signs of a rocket-engine test at the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground were reported in the past few days, Mr. Khiari noted. North Korea has also refused to continue any meaningful dialogue with the United States and instead has issued increasingly hostile warnings.
Human Rights Watch is in a lather because the Israeli government decided to expel Human Rights Watch's "Israel and Palestine” director, Omar Shakir, on November 25th . Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, accused Israel of joining “the likes of Venezuela, Iran, and Egypt in barring Human Rights Watch researchers.” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ spokesperson responded to Shakir’s deportation, saying, “We regret the decision taken by the Israeli authorities to deport him. The secretary-general supports the important work by human rights defenders around the world, and that work should be allowed to continue.” Several UN human rights “experts” had previously criticized Israel’s decision to expel Shakir, which was upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court, as “a body blow to the protection of human rights defenders.”
The United Nations is an enabler of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions. For example, according to the official readout of a meeting last Friday in Turkey between United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Erdogan, who had invaded northern Syria to remove the Syrian Kurds from their homes near the Syrian border with Turkey, the Secretary-General expressed “his deep appreciation for the strong cooperation and support of Turkey to the United Nations.” There was nothing in the readout about the Turkish invasion and its devastating consequences for the Kurds displaced from their homes. Instead, Secretary-General Guterres welcomed Turkey’s presentation of its “plan for new settlement areas for the return of Syrian refugees.”
By secret ballot on Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly elected 14 member states to join the 47-member UN Human Rights Council for three-year terms beginning on January 1, 2020. The abysmal human rights abusing Maduro regime in Venezuela, which received 105 favorable votes in the election, is one of them.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched an invasion of northeast Syria last week in order to bring to heel the Syrian Kurdish population there. Erdogan's military operation reportedly displaced at least 160,000 people so far and put many more civilians in harm’s way. At least 38 civilians in Syria have been killed to date since the latest wave of Turkish aggression began. Turkish forces bombarded towns on the Syrian side of its border with Turkey and, with their Syrian allies, have seized large portions of a northern Syrian town six miles from the border.