Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist

The UN’s Inglorious 75th Anniversary Year

The United Nations was planning a grand celebration of its 75th anniversary to kick off the annual high-level UN General Assembly Week last September. Instead, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN had to settle for a mostly virtual event. There really wasn’t much to celebrate anyway. The UN system overall continued its pattern during 2020 of a bloated bureaucracy attempting to establish its relevancy with meaningless resolutions, pronouncements and expensive programs.

Biden Likely to Support Vile Anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334

On December 23, 2016, the Obama administration broke with the longstanding practice of both Democratic and Republican administrations to protect Israel from one-sided United Nations resolutions. The Obama administration abstained, rather than veto, UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared that the establishment of settlements by Israel has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution demanded that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” When it came to the resolution’s call to prevent “acts of terror” and “to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric,” the resolution referred elliptically to “both parties.” Resolution 2334 remains in effect to this day. However, despite what the resolution’s supporters continuously assert, it is not legally binding under the UN Charter because it was not passed under the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter. The resolution is not self-enforcing and would require a further resolution to impose sanctions or other punitive measures, which the Trump administration would surely have vetoed.

Biden Picks His UN Ambassador From Same Old Foreign Policy Establishment

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat, is the presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Ms. Greenfield has a lengthy record of foreign service experience. Her long in-depth involvement in African affairs will help her in her new job as U.S. ambassador to the UN, where African issues constitute a significant part of the Security Council’s agenda. However, Greenfield will also bring with her a bureaucratic foreign policy establishment mindset.

Globalist Joe Biden Expected to Bow a Knee to the United Nations

A Joe Biden presidency will mark the return to an America that leads from behind. Vowing to have the United States rejoin the deeply flawed Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office, for example, Biden is signaling his deference to the globalist ideology carried out under the auspices of the United Nations.

UN Condemns Cartoons Offensive to Muslims

A statement released on October 28th by the office of the High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) claimed that the republication in France of satirical caricatures depicting Prophet Muhammed was responsible for provoking “acts of violence against innocent civilians who were attacked for their sheer religion, belief or ethnicity.” The UNAOC statement went on to say that “insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarization and fragmentation of the society.” This statement, which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has endorsed, was issued 12 days after a jihadist beheaded a French teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his students the Muhammed caricatures.

De Blasio Snubs UN General Assembly President

New York City’s failed leftwing Mayor Bill de Blasio has managed to pick a fight with the current president of the United Nations General Assembly, Volkan Bozkir. Bozkir requested an in-person meeting with the mayor of the UN’s host city to discuss the impact of the coronavirus on conditions in the city where UN personnel and diplomats live and work, as well as to discuss other topics of mutual interest. De Blasio’s office flatly turned down the request without offering any reason for the snub.

China’s Election to the UN Human Rights Council

October 13, 2020 was “a black day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the Geneva-based non-governmental human rights organization. Mr. Neuer was lamenting the fact that the United Nations General Assembly was preparing to vote to elect some of the world’s worst serial human rights abusing regimes to membership on the UN Human Rights Council.

Presidents Trump and Xi Deliver Dueling UN Speeches by Video

The United Nations’ annual General Assembly high level debate week is usually a very big deal on the diplomatic calendar. World leaders assemble in New York with their entourages, deliver their perspectives on the state of the world in long-winded speeches, and conduct numerous conferences and bilateral side meetings on a variety of global issues. Of course, the world leaders are also busy attending a multitude of fancy receptions. This year, however, is very different due to the coronavirus pandemic.

UN Secretary General Speaks to the Press Before 75th UNGA Meeting

The member states of the United Nations plan to adopt a declaration next week marking the 75th anniversary of the United Nations and committing to a reinvigorated multilateralism, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. They will also invite the Secretary General “to report on our common agenda for the future,” Mr. Guterres told reporters at a press conference in which reporters participated both in person and virtually. “This will be an important process of reflection and I will report back with analysis and recommendations.”

U.S. Tightens The Noose By Initiating Snapback of UN Sanctions Against Iran

The United Nations Security Council disgracefully rejected the U.S. initiative to extend the UN arms embargo against the Iranian regime beyond its current expiration this October. As the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft said at the time on August 14th, “the United States stands sickened – but not surprised – as the clear majority of Council members gave the green light to Iran to buy and sell all manner of conventional weapons.

China’s Exploitation of Globalism and Intrusive Technologies

China’s one-party communist regime has played the West since China's professed opening of its economy to global trade and investments. It wants to replace the current rules-based international system with one dominated by China’s authoritarian model. To that end, the regime is deftly exploiting multilateral institutions from the World Trade Organization to the World Health Organization to the United Nations itself. Thus, China has managed to get away with retaining a “developing country” status within the World Trade Organization, which gives it unfair preferences. China has the second largest Gross Domestic Product in the world, surpassed only by the United States. It does not deserve any preferential treatment. But China still gets it.

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.

Russia and China Veto Key Means to Deliver Life-Saving Relief to Syrian Civilians

This past week, Russia and China vetoed United Nations Security Council draft resolutions that would have authorized the renewal of a cross-border mechanism enabling the UN and its partners to deliver vital humanitarian aid into Syria via the country’s border with Turkey. The 13 other members of the Security Council voted for the draft resolutions. The draft resolutions were offered as a compromise to address certain concerns raised by Russia, but Russia and China vetoed them anyway in order to protect President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous Syrian regime.

Latest Progressive Anti-Israel Campaign in Congress

With the wind at her back following her recent primary victory, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is taking the lead in challenging Israel’s possible extension of sovereignty over certain areas within the West Bank. She authored a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warning that any move by Israel to extend its sovereignty into such areas would jeopardize continued U.S. military aid to the Jewish state. Senator Bernie Sanders signed AOC’s letter along with 11 other Democrat House members, including AOC’s fellow “Squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Anti-Semitic organizations that back the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel are also in AOC’s corner.

Hypocritical UN Human Rights Council Members Exploit George Floyd Killing

The dysfunctional United Nations Human Rights Council, which the United States exited for good reason two years ago, is exploiting the tragic killing of George Floyd. The Council decided to hold a U.S. bashing fest entitled “Urgent debate on systemic racism and police brutality in the United States.” The debate, which concluded on June 18th, followed on the heels of a harsh anti-American statement issued by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. That statement denounced the United States for alleged “systemic and structural discrimination” which “disproportionately promotes racial disparities against African Americans.” It called for the United States to make what would amount to a public confession of the alleged “existence of structural racial discrimination” in American society.

UN Human Rights 'Monitors' Lecture the United States

A large group of United Nations human rights “monitors” decided to exploit the horrific killing of George Floyd at the hands of a former policeman by accusing the United States of “systemic racism that produces state-sponsored racial violence, and licenses impunity for this violence.”

China’s Hollow Complaints About Late U.S. Payments to the UN

China has criticized the United States for being behind in paying its assessments for the United Nations’ regular and peacekeeping budgets. China claimed that the U.S. owed about $1.16 billion to the UN’s regular budget and $1.3 billion to the UN’s peacekeeping budget.

Guterres Focuses Only on Supporting Green Jobs in the Midst of Pandemic Crisis

“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.

Trump Threatens to Cut U.S. Funding to Flawed World Health Organization

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.

Globalist Senators Want UN Security Council Mandates on Coronavirus Crisis

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.”