Simply put, the UN’s most “inclusive,” “democratic” body is complicit in the manifest evil of anti-Semitism, which no Summit of the Future or other UN-sponsored gabfest will even try to fix
With a recorded vote of 124 nations in favor, 14 against, and 43 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly passed its most virulently anti-Israel resolution yet on September 18th. Canada was one of the member states abstaining rather than voting against this despicable act of “diplomatic” jihad against the Jewish state, which was set in motion by the UN’s Observer State of Palestine.
The Palestinians exploited the privilege previously granted by the General Assembly to introduce (but not vote upon) draft resolutions to the General Assembly for its consideration. Fortunately, General Assembly resolutions, including this outrageous one, have no legally binding effect under international law.
Not surprisingly, the Palestinian crafted resolution paints Israel as the sole villain in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The barbaric terrorist massacres, torture, rapes, and kidnappings of innocent civilians committed by the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad monsters on October 7th receive no mention. The General Assembly has refused in the past to brand Hamas a terrorist organization. The vast majority supporting this Palestinian resolution considers them legitimate “resistance” fighters.
This resolution calls for Israel not only to immediately cease all new settlement activity but also to remove Jews who settled from whatever areas the United Nations calls “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” This would include Jerusalem’s Old City, the location of Judaism’s holiest sites, in what the UN refers to as East Jerusalem. Doing the Palestinians’ bidding, the General Assembly has backed what amounts to judenrein – i.e., no Jews allowed to enter or reside in the Old City. This would mean reverting to the time when Jordan illegally occupied Jerusalem before June 1967 and kicked out the Jews living there.
The General Assembly resolution also demands that Israel pay “reparation for the damage caused to all the natural and legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” and that Israel allow “all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their original place of residence.”
Furthermore, the resolution calls upon all UN member states to “take steps towards ceasing the importation of any products originating in the Israeli settlements, as well as the provision or transfer of arms, munitions and related equipment to Israel, the occupying Power, in all cases where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that they may be used in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
In other words, the General Assembly is calling for what amounts to a boycott aimed at crippling Israel economically. And it is calling for an arms embargo that would prevent Israel from defending its own citizens against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other genocidal terrorist thugs backed by Iran as well as against Iran itself. But the General Assembly resolution imposes no restrictions at all on arms sent by the Iranian regime to these same terrorist proxies.
The General Assembly referenced in its resolution the International Court of Justice’s findings in its non-binding advisory opinion that was stacked entirely against Israel. The General Assembly itself had requested this opinion in a scheme to confer a gloss of supposed "judicial" legitimacy to its abhorrent attempt to delegitimize the Jewish homeland.
"The Palestinian resolution castrates Israel’s very legitimacy by claiming that the country is engaged in apartheid and 'particularly severe forms of racial discrimination,'" said Professor Anne Bayefsky, President of Human Rights Voices and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. “To the resolution’s authors, facts don’t matter. Apartheid 'Palestine' is the planned state where no Jew will be tolerated, while in Israel, Arabs have more rights and freedoms than in any Arab state. It’s a classic Nazi antisemitic inversion technique. Switch victim and perpetrator.”
When asked during his press conference on September 18th about the Palestinian resolution to be voted upon later that day, Secretary General Antonio Guterres confirmed that he “will implement any decision of the General Assembly in that regard.” The question is what precisely the resolution mandates the Secretary General to do at this time. I sought clarification the next day on this point from the Secretary General’s spokesperson, including whether the Secretary General sees as part of his role helping to establish an international mechanism for reparations called for by the resolution. After some equivocation, the spokesperson said, “There is, I think, one clear mention of a request to the Secretary-General is to report back on the implementation of the resolution, and he will do so.”
Expect the General Assembly to soon direct Secretary General Guterres to fully enforce an expanded UN blacklist of firms based in Israel and international firms allegedly doing business in Israeli “settlements,” and to implement other punitive measures against Israel including the reparations mechanism.
Secretary General Guterres emphasized during his September 18th press conference the importance of the “Summit of the Future,” which leads off the week this September when many world leaders are gathering at UN headquarters in New York to bloviate. The purpose of the Summit of the Future, Secretary General Guterres explained, is for the member states to come to an agreement on ways to bring the United Nations and other global institutions up to date for today’s challenges. “Those institutions were born in a bygone era for a bygone world,” he said. “So many of the challenges that we face today were not on the radar 80 years ago when our multilateral institutions were born.”
Thus, the Secretary General promoted the need for agreement on new global governance structures, such as a reformed Security Council with additional permanent members from developing countries. He also encouraged “reform of the International Financial Architecture” to strengthen the role of developing countries and “governance measures for new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, in all their applications -- with the UN at its centre.”
It is easy to mock the Summit of the Future initiatives as more pie-in-the sky ideas echoing past initiatives that have gone nowhere. But much time and resources have been wasted on this travesty. And there is a fundamental flaw underlying any globalist initiative like those envisioned by the Summit of the Future that seeks to make an “updated” and more “inclusive,” “democratic” United Nations the center of anything touching on governance.
The General Assembly, where every member state has an equal vote, is already billed as the UN’s most “inclusive,” “democratic” body - presumably the model that globalists would like to use for multilateral bodies but with more teeth.
However, “inclusive” and “democratic” at the United Nations mean giving the world’s worst totalitarian states the same voting power as nations that respect the inalienable rights of its citizens, the rule of law, and self-government. Indeed, many UN member states are not considered free according to the Freedom House's Freedom in the World index.
In UN speak, “inclusive” and “democratic” also mean giving the Palestinians, who have only a non-member Observer State status at the UN, special privileges in the General Assembly to introduce their own draft resolution directly targeting a member state. The only other current non-member Observer State – the Holy See – has no such special privileges.
The General Assembly’s latest vote approving the Palestinian draft resolution by a vast majority has proven once again how irresponsible the UN’s most “inclusive” and “democratic” body has become.
Yet the Summit of the Future “consensus” outcome document aims at granting more governance power to this same contemptible General Assembly. It also seeks to enlarge and transform the Security Council into a more “inclusive,” “democratic” body with restrictions on the five permanent members’ use of their veto power. The result will be to move the Security Council towards resembling a smaller version of the disreputable General Assembly.
The first anniversary of the horrific Palestinian terrorists’ invasion of Israel and savage attacks on innocent civilians is approaching. But the UN General Assembly is now on record as being complicit with the Palestinian strategy to whitewash what happened on October 7th that precipitated the Gaza war and, instead, to demonize, delegitimize, discriminate against, and incapacitate Israel. It is complicit in calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the areas where their holiest sites are located.
Simply put, the UN’s most “inclusive,” “democratic” body is complicit in the manifest evil of anti-Semitism, which no Summit of the Future or other UN-sponsored gabfest will even try to fix.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.
