This week, Canada backed a UN resolution calling for an unconditional “ceasefire” in Gaza that would effectively leave Hamas in place. Although pitched by Ottawa as merely a vote for a “sustainable ceasefire,” the resolution was drafted by a coalition of Arab states that have openly sided against Israel in the current conflict.
The document framed the entire conflict as an “illegal Israeli action,” did not condemn Hamas’s role in starting the war, and strenuously avoided any mention of the Oct. 7 massacres. In fact, when Austria attempted to insert an amendment putting the word “Hamas” in the resolution, it was voted down.
All of this may prompt reasonable people to wonder why Canada bothers showing up to the UN at all, not to mention being one of its largest funders.
There is certainly no mainstream push for Canada to leave the UN. Among Parliamentarians, the last time an MP seriously suggested a UN exit was when Tory backbencher Larry Miller made it an issue in 2012. And although 58,000 people have signed an official House of Commons petition calling for Canada’s “expeditious withdrawal from the UN,” it’s mainly focused on the allegation that the UN’s “Agenda 2030” is a subversive plan to destroy Canada.
The UN’s entire founding purpose was to prevent conflict and uphold human rights. But in just the last few years, whenever the planet has been hit by a destabilizing global crisis, the UN was usually there to make it worse. A few examples are below.
It played a decisive role in radicalizing Gaza
One of the most troubling revelations from the Oct. 7 massacres was how popular the violence proved among the Palestinian population. A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72 per cent of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank thought Hamas was “correct” to stage the attack.
What’s more, while the initial violence on Oct. 7 was perpetrated by trained Hamas members, some of that day’s civilian massacres were perpetrated by opportunistic Gaza civilians.
As to how anti-Israeli hate got so deeply ingrained among Palestinians, one clue may lie in the fact that any Palestinian under the age of 40 has likely attended a UN-supported school whose curriculum was utterly shot through with anti-Israel propaganda.
The main focus of the UNRWA is to operate 715 schools for Palestinian refugees. As has been documented in multiple studies of UNRWA schoolbooks and curricula, anti-Israeli hate is so deeply ingrained that it even shows up in math lessons (students were asked, for instance, to calculate the angle of a stone flung at a “Zionist occupier.”)
It’s for this reason (as well as the fact that Hamas rockets keep getting stored in UNRWA facilities) that countries such as Switzerland are now pulling backtheir funding for the agency. Not Canada, though; one of the first actions of the Trudeau government following its 2015 election was to restore UNRWA funding that had been cut off by the Conservatives.
The whole organization seems to hate Israel, in fact
Any cursory look at General Assembly resolutions or declarations made by the UN Human Rights Council reveals that the UN spends a wildly disproportionate amount of time condemning Israel. As in, more than three quarters of UN General Assembly resolutions calling out a member state for human rights violations are directed at Israel.
This is something that even the Trudeau government has deemed a problem. As they wrote in a Nov. 9 statement about Palestinian refugees, “we would like to underscore our long-standing concern that there are still too many resolutions related to the Arab-Israeli conflict being put forward at the UN General Assembly every year. And too many of these also unfairly single out Israel.”
Now, you can argue that it is generally irrelevant to Canada’s national interest how the UN treats Israel. But just because Israel receives the lion’s share of the organization’s misplaced priorities, doesn’t mean this hasn’t occasionally blown back on Canada. One of the most infamous examples being when the UN Human Rights Council ordered a “special rapporteur” to Canada to probe the state of the country’s “food security.”
Or, there was that time in 2020 when the Trudeau government was ignominiously denied a seat on the UN Security Council. There is evidence that Canada lost the seat because it was seen as a friend of Israel. The appointment went instead to the extremely anti-Israel Government of Ireland.
… while giving a free pass to all the other Middle Eastern wars
In contrast to the UN’s razor-sharp focus on anything done by Israel, it has conspicuously overlooked any number of other Middle Eastern wars, massacres or human rights violations.
Amnesty International has its own issues with Israel of late, but when Syria was staging a far more destructive and indiscriminate war in 2016, the human rights body released a detailed report calling out the UN’s apparent unwillingness to do anything about it.
Syria represented a “a systematic failure of the UN to fulfill its vital role in upholding rights and international law and ensuring accountability,” they wrote.
“How do you justify not taking action to intervene to save lives in situations where many, many people, possibly thousands of people, are going to be killed or hurt due to serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law?” Richard Bennett, head of Amnesty International’s UN office, told Newsweek at the time.
The World Health Organization helped obscure COVID’s origins and enable its spread
Just a couple months ago, the UN-affiliated World Health Organization began taking an unusually hard line on China, accusing Beijing of stonewalling efforts to probe the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
It was a notable turnaround for an organization that was conspicuously willing to accept the Chinese version of events during the critical early stages of the pandemic.
Accepting flawed Chinese reports, the WHO infamously declared on Jan. 14 of 2020 that there was “no clear evidence” of person-to-person transmission of the virus. The WHO was also a notable laggard in declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, waiting until the disease had already entrenched itself in basically every country on earth.
At the same time, the WHO blocked international efforts to investigate the virus’s origins, even releasing official reports saying that China’s transparency on the matter was “very impressive and beyond words.” By late 2020, The New York Times was saying that the WHO’s subservience had probably allowed Beijing to cover up the virus’s true origins, which could well have been the result of a lab leak from a Chinese biolab with notoriously poor security practices.
“As it praised Beijing, the World Health Organization concealed concessions to China and may have sacrificed the best chance to unravel the virus’s origins,” the Times reported.
It’s done nothing to help end the Russia-Ukraine War
As an organization founded specifically to prevent another Second World War, the UN has proved rather impotent to do anything about a nakedly expansionist war once again breaking out in Europe. In fact, given that Russia is a veto-holding permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UN has arguably served to assist that country’s attempted annexation of Ukraine.
Any time the Security Council has attempted to take action to assist Ukraine, it’s been vetoed by Russia. In an April 2022 address to the United Nations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy effectively asked the Security Council to consider why they bothered showing up to work.
Where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?… Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to close the UN? Do you think the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately,” he said.
IN OTHER NEWS
The UN Climate Change Conference closed out on Wednesday with an agreement under which the 200 nations present vaguely promised to stop using fossil fuels eventually. The 21-page final agreement saw countries commit to “accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.” Environment Minister Steven
Guilbeault praised the document as a triumph, and claimed that Canada was a disproportionate contributor. But critics note that, while it is the first agreement of its kind to mention an eventual future without fossil fuels, it’s pretty light on any details as to how that would happen. “It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from donuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes,” one climatologist told Agence France-Presse. As to the practicality of the entire planet getting to net-zero in just 26 years, let’s just say that Canada’s own plan is heavily dependent on what it calls “wild cards” – carbon-reducing technology that doesn’t exist yet.
