Along with ISIS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram, Israel will be put on a UN blacklist
According to Hebrew language media, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is soon to embark on a path previously unheard of: He plans to blacklist a member state’s security forces. Israeli media report that Guterres will include Israel, a democratic member state, on a UN blacklist along with ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram.
How low can a UN Secretary General go?
Clearly Guterres is exploring new depths.
As part of the UN’s continued efforts to discredit Israel’s security forces during a hot war against genocidal terrorists who have committed to repeat the attack of October 7, 2023 “over and over and over” again, Guterres’s Special Representative on Children in Conflict areas, Virginia Gamba, will release a report next week in which Israel is accused of murdering thousands of children. Sunday is National Children’s Day.
While Gamba’s report will acknowledge October 7, it will sidestep the ways in which the UN and various UN agencies have sidestepped international norms in an attempt to guarantee Israel’s loss of the war. It will pass over Hamas’s use of child soldiers, of embedding in schools, hospitals, and mosques, of digging a tunnel network thousands of miles long from which to plan and wage war as well as to hold hostages captive, and of using civilians (and hostages) as human shields. The report will single out Israeli security forces that are committed to removing Hamas as a terrorist threat and to securing the release of over 100 hostages held by terrorists. Oddly, instead of the report adding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the blacklist, it will accuse Israel of using children as human shields - as if the fact that a person was a child stopped Hamas terrorists from burning him or her alive in their homes on October 7. The report’s draft will blame Israel for bombing schools and hospitals, thereby injuring children. How odd, again, that there is no mention that UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are not called to task for allowing their schools, hospitals, and service agencies to be used as staging grounds for Hamas to launch missile attacks into Israel and, indeed, to plan the October 7 pogrom and for hiding kidnapped Israeli hostages.
Guterres has gone so far as to tell some of the UN agencies he oversees, notably the World Food Programme (WFP) that it should not deliver any food assistance to Gaza and that this must be handled only by UNRWA. He has directly threatened to cut WFP funding for food distribution in other parts of the world where people are actually starving should WFP or its affiliates aid in the distribution of humanitarian relief in Gaza. He stands by his demand that only UNRWA may carry out this work. How odd, then, that UNRWA and its Gazan employees have been show, to be complicit with Hamas in its October 7 terror spree, including having actively participated in the torture, murder, kidnapping, and hostage-holding of Israelis.
When international donors, led by the United States, cut all funding to UNRWA in January, Guterres quickly dispatched his UNRWA chief, the widely-discredited Philippe Lazzarini, on a begging tour of European capitals to restore aid. He also established a UN review committee to issue a whitewashed report on UNRWA’s complicity with terror. Not surprisingly, the clearly fictionalized review showed that Lazzarini and his corrupt network is doing its best and wouldn’t dream of being corrupt or complicit. UNRWA’s former spokesman (and current shill), Chris Gunness, said the report was designed to give foreign donors the cover they need to continue funding the corrupt UN organization.
Guterres presides over a fundamentally corrupt global bureaucracy. His sole aim is to keep feeding the beast with support dependent entirely on member states and donor countries. The UN is unable to declare any of its efforts to be successful - it can only continue if it can feed the beast. It can only feed the beast through its reports of beastly atrocities.
The fact that Guterres has singled out a member state, a democracy, for special sanction is notable. It is a sign of how far the moral compass of global leaders has gone off-kilter. He should, perhaps consider facts.
Fact: Israel was attacked on October 7 by Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians in the most brutal single-day attack against Jews since the Nazi Holocaust. Thousands of Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, raped, tortured, injured, displaced, and terrorized.
Fact: Hamas continues to hold over 100 Israeli and foreign nationals hostage, including eight American citizens.
Fact: Israel declared war, not on civilians, but on Hamas and its terror army.
Fact: Hamas embeds in civilian areas (schools, homes, hospitals, mosques).
Fact: Israel has taken more measures to protect civilians in urban warfare than any other nation in the history of war as documented by U.S. Army Colonel John Spencer.
Facts be damned. Antonio Guterres is on a jihad himself, a holy war to paint Israel as the aggressor in its just, defensive war. He has undertaken this crusade in order to divert international attention from the rot that infests the foundations of his own organization. Perhaps he’d be better advised to sanction some of the heads of his own agencies before striking out at Israel’s security forces. The performance of the heads of UNRWA, UN Women, WHO, the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians to name a few should be scrutinized for their behavior in the Gaza War and in other deployments they have undertaken. Guterres should take a look inward before spewing his venom outward onto a democracy like Israel.
Medice, cura te ipsum. Physician, heal thyself.
Bonnie Glick is the former Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the US Agency for International Development. She is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.