Editors at National Review Online explain their concerns about the United Nations’ entire operation.
The leadership of the U.N. bureaucracy used to benefit from a thin fig leaf of deniability, insulating it from the blatantly antisemitic dealings of a membership of which many consistently singled out Israel while all too frequently ignoring the misdeeds of the world’s authoritarians and butchers. To the extent this was ever plausible, it’s now undeniable that the rot in the organization’s thoroughly corrupt “human rights” system and its bureaucracy goes up to the top.
Addressing the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres blew through the equivocations that normally protect officials like him from accusations that they don’t care about fighting terrorism.
Guterres said it was important to “recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
The comment was sandwiched between a condemnation of Hamas and a statement that Palestinian grievances “cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas.” But Guterres’s comments are an excuse for terrorism, and they echo Hamas rhetoric that Israel had this attack coming.
There is no “context” that has to be considered in condemning the unspeakable atrocities of Hamas. According to audio released this week by the Israeli government, one of the terrorists called his father from the phone of a woman he killed and said that he’d sent him pictures of the defenseless people he murdered. He excitedly reported, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” He boasted that he slaughtered ten Jews.
