The UN Should Be Dismantled

By DMITRI SHUFUTINSKY
Updated: SEPTEMBER 9, 2016 13:25
 In the aftermath of World War Two, and on the ashes of the Holocaust, the United Nations was founded. Although the League of Nations had emerged after the First World War, it ultimately proved impotent, and had to be replaced with a stronger entity that would fight for peace, justice, and human rights. Initially, it seemed as if the UN was following through with this. A coalition of armies assembled under the UN umbrella invaded the Korean Peninsula to keep the communist North from overrunning the South. Although the Korean War wasn't successful in "liberating" the North, mainly due to Chinese intervention, it was successful in ensuring that the South didn't also become a communist regime. The UN donated millions of dollars to humanitarian causes, such as women's liberation movements, ending famine, medical research, and infrastructure development. The "blue helmet" peacekeepers were often deployed to war zones to protect the innocent and maintain peace, and the UN has had a big hand in drawing up ceasefires or negotiations to end conflicts. However, in recent decades, the UN has lost its way. A once pro-democracy organization looks the other way as autocrats in China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba commit human rights violations. Saudi Arabia has a representative that chairs the renowned Human Rights Council. Many other Islamist regimes have a lot of influence in UN decision-making, especially in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, despite the fact that in these countries, LGBT people are executed if they're outed, women are stoned to death for "adultery" if they are raped, and Asian and African migrant workers are mistreated and subject to racism. The UN instead focuses its energy on singling out and demonizing Israel, the one democracy and stable nation in the Middle East. If the UN didn't have so much influence over the opinions and policy-making strategies of NGOs and governments, this would be laughable. But since it does, it's time to consider dismantling the organization. 
The UN has become a radical hotbed of terrorist-advocacy, prejudice, and hypocrisy over the past 40 years. One need look no further than its sick and racist obsession with the world's only Jewish country, Israel. Despite its location in the largest city of Israel's most important ally, the UN funds, supports, and gives a platform for anti-Semitic voices that call for Israel's destruction. Even though the Arab-Israel Conflict is one of the least-bloody conflicts in the Near East, an inappropriate amount of attention is paid to it, while more dangerous or immoral wars or violations (genocide in Sudan, the Syrian Civil War, lynching of gays in Iran) are virtually ignored. Forty years ago, when Israel launched a successful raid to save Israeli and Jewish victims of a hijacking of an airplane in Entebbe (by leftist German and Palestinian terrorists), UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim chose to condemn Israel for "violating Uganda's sovereignty", rather than condemn the brutal Ugandan government and the terrorists who started the incident in the first place. The UN continues to allow the use of racist curriculum towards Jews to be used in its schools in the Gaza Strip, and denies the more peaceful national liberation movements of Kurds, Tibetans, and Turkish-Armenians the voice given to the more violent Palestinian "national liberation movements".  It would be one thing if the UN merely disagreed on settlement building, or pressured Israel to legalize gay marriage or improve the treatment of Jews from the former USSR, Ethiopia, or Asia, but to allow anti-Semitic incitement even on the floor of the General Assembly (perhaps most notably the now-rescinded UN Resolution that said "Zionism is racism") while ignoring the extremism and human rights violations in Palestinian society--or blaming them on "the occupation"--is immoral and shameful. Moreover, while the UN says it is against "occupation", it focuses, again, singularly on Israel's "occupation" of Judea & Samaria/the West Bank, yet does nothing about Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, Turkish occupation of Kurdistan and northern Cyprus (or the Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian occupations of Kurdistan, for that matter), or the Chinese occupation of Tibet. It ignores the history and genetics that proves Jews are the aboriginal people of the Land of Israel (including Judea & Samaria) and tries to rewrite history to abide by the false Palestinian narrative that denies Jewish history in Jerusalem and anywhere else in "historic Palestine". The UN is also a disappointment beyond Israel and the Middle East. Its Assistance Mission for Rwanda from 1993-1996 is often regarded as a dismal failure. Many UN forces were evacuated around the time the infamous genocide began, or stood by as the killing went on. No true effort was made to stop the violence and slaughter of civilians. The UN similarly failed its missions in Bosnia, where yet another genocide occurred, and Somalia, which is still plagued by civil war and has become a breeding ground for jihadists like al-Qaeda's offshoot, The Shabaab. And then there's the sickening sexual abuse of children by "peacekeepers" in some countries, such as the Central African Republic. No country or organization is perfect, but with such a track record, how can anyone conclude that the UN has succeeded in its mission to spread freedom and justice throughout the world?
The second UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammerskjold, said that the UN "was created not to lead mankind into heaven, but to save humanity from hell." And yet the very institution that helped re-establish Israel as a Jewish state after 2,000 years of colonization by outsiders now gives voice to rabid anti-Semites who call for Israel's destruction. The same organization that is based out of New York City finds itself ignoring the blatant atrocities and evil agendas perpetrated by anti-American terrorist organizations and regimes, whether Iran's missile testing, Syria's bombing of civilians, or Somalia's harboring of al-Qaeda terrorists. It gives anti-democratic regimes in Moscow, Riyadh, and Beijing a larger voice than they deserve in a body that's dedicated, supposedly, to the equal rights of all peoples. Like the European Union and many NGOs, the UN has been hijacked by radical, corrupt, and often racist individuals or coalitions that make a mockery out of what the organization used to stand for and what its founders believed in. It proves what some figures in the 2016 election cycle in the USA have been saying: no organization is too big to fail. Rather than countries wasting billions of dollars on the UN, which accomplishes nothing nowadays but sowing discord, the organization should be dismantled step-by-step. The billions of dollars spent on the UN could be spent domestically in developing countries like China and India to better the lives of their citizens; in the USA to improve the lives of  communities of color that remain impoverished and lag behind Whites in many aspects of life; and in Israel to bolster its military. Some smaller branches of the UN, like UNICEF, can be transformed into individual NGOs and can receive donations that otherwise would've gone to the United Nations. UNICEF and similar branches do a lot of good and often have very little, if anything, to do with the corrupt agendas espoused and given a platform in the General Assembly. Often we hear in American politics the argument of "big government vs small government". In this case, the "big government" of the UN has failed and become corrupt and bigoted; a "small government" approach by more regional-specific or case-specific organizations like UNICEF, or a certain body that focuses on infrastructure development in rural Latin America, for example, would probably be a better approach.