We have posted many articles about the United Nations Organization and its corruption. (Put “United Nations UN” into our search slot to find them.) And we have routinely ended them with these words: The U.N. must be destroyed.

Is there a possibility that President Trump will fulfill our wish and banish the U.N. from Turtle Bay? It could find refuge in some dying European country or Third World hellhole, there to pant for a while on life-support, exuding its stink of corruption, until it finally expires, dissolving in its own putrescence.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Trump will present a set of wide-ranging reforms for the United Nations this week that will actually force the dysfunctional organization to begin living up to its lofty ideals. This may be the corrupt, badly disorganized U.N.’s final chance at survival.

Trump had harsh things to say about the U.N. during last year’s election. Sadly for the U.N., none of them was fake news or an exaggeration. The U.N. is corrupt. The U.N. is ineffective. The U.N. is wasting billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Trump — and his able ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley — have proposed a 10-point reform plan that could be the last chance for the U.N. to ditch its legacy of failure and actually become a responsible global organization. Right now, the U.S. is footing the bill for the U.N.’s ongoing extravaganza of waste and corruption. American taxpayers fork out 22% of the U.N.’s operating budget, and an estimated 28% of its peacekeeping tab. There are 193 members of the U.N., virtually all of the world’s nations. The U.S. spends more than 176 of them combined on the regular budget, and more than 185 on the peacekeeping budget.

The U.N.’s reliance on the U.S. must end. The U.N. likes to say its budget is just $9 billion or so. In fact, it’s vastly larger than that. As it admits in its own budget documents, in 2016 it spent nearly $49 billion, which represented a rise of $10 billion during the Obama years. The U.S. is putting up about $10 billion of the total. And what do you get for your money? Let’s just say that incompetence can be very expensive.

There are over 22,000 U.N. workers, most of whom get tax-free money, lavish benefits and such perks as immunity from parking tickets in New York. U.N. employee crimes are almost never prosecuted. The perpetrators are usually just sent home.

The average U.N. employee makes about a third more than others doing the same job. These are cushy positions, with virtually no accountability.

This theme shows up in how the U.N. does its own job. As has been noted elsewhere, the U.N.’s poor performance as an organization is well-documented. An academic study that looked at the best and worst practices by aid organizations ranked the U.N. near the bottom. OK, but how about the peacekeeping function, for which the U.N. often comes in for praise? To be polite, it’s not exactly keeping the peace. For instance, studies and audits have discovered rampant mismanagement, fraud and corruption in U.N. peacekeeping procurement. And in a study conducted by the U.N. itself, eight of nine peacekeeping operations charged with protecting civilians didn’t even respond to 406 of 570, or 80%, of incidents “where civilians were attacked”.

As Heritage Foundation Fellow Brett Schaefer, who has documented these and other U.N. excesses in damning detail, noted back in 2015: “U.N. personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation and abuse in Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. [See this appalling report from South Sudan dated April 2016 – ed] Recent news stories from the Central African Republic and Haiti indicate the problem is still far too common and the U.N. is more interested in concealing the issue than in confronting it.”

Given all this, it’s pretty clear this is not an aid organization. It more resembles a criminal enterprise.

It didn’t start this way. It began its institutional life with the highest of ideals and the loftiest of ambitions in the aftermath of World War II. But an organization is only as good as its members and its leadership. Given that many members of the U.N. are corrupt dictatorships, and that the body’s own top leadership has included both former Nazi war criminals and far-left apologists for terrorists, it should be no surprise that the U.N. is as bad as it is. In recent years, the U.N. has shown a bizarre fixation with condemning Israel, the only true democracy in the Mideast, as an impediment to peace. 

This shouldn’t, and can’t, go on. That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Along with greeting world leaders and delivering a much-anticipated speech to the U.N. on Tuesday, he’s meeting behind the scenes with leaders on his 10-point reform plan. Among other things, the plan seeks to end the needless duplication of various U.N. functions by others, while pushing more action away from the U.N. itself and into the field. It will also give U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres authority to reform and streamline the U.N.’s bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House also has let it be known that it would like the fiscal burden to be spread more evenly among members. The U.S. can’t be the world’s Sugar Daddy forever. Maybe it’s a positive sign that more than 100 of the U.N.’s 193 members have signed on to Trump’s reforms. Maybe they too see this as a last chance. Maybe. And if nothing happens? In the past, Trump has suggested that, absent action by the U.N. to reform, he might cut U.S. contributions sharply. Carrot and stick. Whether this will work or not isn’t clear. Anne Bayefsky, a longtime critic of the U.N., is skeptical. At Fox News she wrote: “It’s an old U.N. game trotted out whenever Americans get fed up with throwing money down the U.N. drain or paying for a global platform used to trash the USA’s best interests and spew anti-Semitism. It goes by the name of ‘U.N. reform’.  And President Trump appears to have taken the bait — hook, line and sinker.”

Perhaps so. But Trump says he wants to “make the U.N. great”. He’s giving the U.N. the chance to reform.

If it refuses — or goes back to its anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western ways — don’t be surprised to see Trump defunding the U.N. and asking it politely to leave.

What a splendid surprise it would be! And although the U.N. does not deserve politeness, smiles and waves would be fine just so long as the filthy thing keeps moving away over the far horizon.

The U.N. must be destroyed.

The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):

• It does no good to anyone
• It does much harm to many
• It is unreformable
• It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
• It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans

A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.

The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)

UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …

Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.

In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)

Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …

The  film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping …  anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.

We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.

In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.

They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers”  have actually used their arms.

But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.

The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …

Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.  

Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …

Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …

The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.

Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.

The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.

Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.

He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.

When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. …  Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”

Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …

At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.

Please watch the film!

Iran, the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, recently held an international “anti-terrorism” conference – under the flag of the United Nations.

Caroline Glick writes at Townhall:

Speaking at the conference, Iran’s supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the September 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

The UN has never been able to agree on a definition of terrorism. It seems to be all one to the Secretary General of that demonic institution whether it is exemplified by “measures taken by the US and Israel to defend themselves” or “Muslims flying planes into New York buildings”.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military – participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy. According to Iran’s Fars news agency, “In a written message… read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah, [Ban] Kimoon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference.”

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had “approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years, and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions.”

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary-General’s Office defended its position. Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, “If we’re reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it.”

So as far as the UN’s highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran’s “counterterror” conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

That’s the Butcher of Dafur to most of us.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

Iran, it should be noted, now occupies the vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

And North Korea, whose tyrant spends the meager resources of his impoverished country on making nuclear weapons while the people starve, heads the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

The new General Assembly vice president is not merely the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran’s UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation’s fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatened nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the “international community” is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US- and Western-funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left’s kneejerk obeisance to it?

Caroline Glick does not answer her own question.

The answer is that the Left is wholly and completely corrupt and morally bankrupt.

And it forms the present government of the United States of America. Which accounts for the economic and political ruin engulfing the world.

The ideals enshrined in the Constitution – liberty above all – are considered obsolete by the Left.

This clowning at the UN; this calling of  things by the names of their opposites; this political and diplomatic sarcasm practiced in concert by dozens of vicious little powers; this mockery of civilized values by the international Left, is nihilism – and it is winning.

P.S. The UN must be destroyed.

Even skeptics might acknowledge that the world would be better without the United Nations.

Is a start being made on demolishing the UN, or at least a wing of it?

News comes from The Hill:

A key House Republican is quickly pressing forward with her goals to scale back U.S. funding for the United Nations.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Hill that oversight would be a key function of the panel, particularly funding to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) that is “a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“I’d like to make sure that we once and for all kill all U.S. funding for that beast,” she said last month. “Because I don’t think that it advances U.S. interests, I don’t think that that’s a pro-democracy group, it’s a rogue’s gallery, pariah states, they belong there because they don’t want to be sanctioned.”

Lovers of all things UN – leftists, the State Department, Obama and his shills, global warmists, world-government advocates, anti-Semites – have an argument for supporting the HRC which sounds ever so diplomatic, clever and subtle, as if they were cunningly manipulating the loathsome tyrannies that dominate the  organization, when in fact they are trying to deceive its honest and indignant critics.

Supporters of continued U.S. support of and participation on the HRC say that it’s essential that Washington have leverage on the panel, renowned for including countries that have their own records of human-rights violations [to put it very mildly – JB].

But staunchly the admirable Ros-Lehtinen is sticking to her resolution:

On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen will host a panel of U.N. critics and advocates … The 10 a.m. briefing before the full committee is titled, “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.”

Fans of the UN and the shills for the HRC will appear before it to put their cunning (but transparent) argument:

One of those scheduled to testify, Peter Yeo, represents the United Nations Foundation/Better World Campaign, which at the start of President Obama’s term urged the commander in chief to “mount a campaign” to secure a place on the HRC, which the Bush administration had boycotted.

“Support of our UN commitments is more than an obligation, it is a smart investment in America’s strategic, economic and political interests,” Yeo told The Hill. “Continued American engagement and diplomacy at the UN will only advance our goals for democracy, human rights and world prosperity.”

Weasel words!

But there will be others who are fully aware of the evil the UN does, and some who have nobly exposed it.

U.N. critics set to appear include Claudia Rosett, who unveiled the oil-for-food scandal in 2004 and 2005 in The Wall Street Journal; Brett Schaefer, who regularly takes on the U.N. at the conservative Heritage Foundation; and Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which monitors the controversial HRC. …

Neuer [said] of Obama’s initiative to place a U.S. representative on the council with the intention of reforming from within that it was “naive for anyone to have thought it would change significantly.”

Or at all, since changing it is not Obama’s real intention – unless into a seat of world government.

Neuer probably knows this. He certainly knows how iniquitous the UN and the HRC really are. He has pointed out that 35 of the 45 resolutions produced by the HRC over the last five years have been “one-sided measures against Israel.” And he has lamented (The Hill reports) that “the U.S. and allied nations haven’t pulled together to trigger emergency sessions on crises such as the crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Iran or abuses against Tibetans or Uighurs by China.”

Another Republican who wants to “take on the UN” through control of the purse-strings, is Rep. Cliff Stearns:

The first bill in this Congress taking on the U.N., introduced on the first day the House was in session, came from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) [who] introduced a measure to ensure that no federal funds may be used for the “design, renovation, construction, or rental of any headquarters for the United Nations in any location in the United States” unless Obama “transmits to Congress a certification that the United Nations has adopted internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement.”

“During the Bush administration, it was learned from internal U.N. auditors that 43 percent of $1.4 billion in procurement contracts investigated involved fraud,” Stearns said in a statement to The Hill.

“In addition, U.N. peacekeeping operations are plagued with numerous cases of abuse and sexual exploitation,” he added. “The U.N. is in desperate need of reform from top to bottom, and my bill is designed to have the world body take the simple step of adopting internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement, which includes taking the bid representing the best value.”

But the UN is not reformable. The UN (like its predecessor the League of Nations) was a bad idea to start with. After the Second World War the victors sat down together on the UN Security Council where the West and the Soviets, and later Communist China, glared at each other for the the duration of the Cold War – and still do; while in the General Assembly an overwhelming majority of despotisms vented their envy and spite against the West and especially Israel – and still do; and the bureaucrats who ran it, or at least some of them, corruptly enriched themselves at the expense of helplessly subjugated peoples (as in the oil-for-food scandal when they conspired with Saddam Hussein to line their own pockets and rob the oppressed Iraqis) – and still do.

The US sustains it. The US could destroy it at a stroke. Just not giving it the billions it does ($6.347 billion was the amount of American tax-payers’ money handed over to the UN in 2009) would crash the whole institution.

The Republicans are not apparently planning to be so radical as to bring down the edifice. Or not immediately anyway. We might hope that it is in their minds as an eventual aim. At present they’re ready only to chip away at its corners: 

The U.N. is also included in a broad-reaching budget-slashing bill by Ways and Means Committee member Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

The Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011, introduced Jan. 7, calls for a 10 percent reduction in voluntary contributions to the United Nations — monies the U.S. is not required to give by law — for fiscal year 2011. …

“America can fulfill its generous financial obligations to the U.N., but will set priorities within the voluntary funding areas,” he said. “A financially and economically sound United States is in the U.N.’s best interest.”

A politically wise United States would see that abolishing the UN would be in the world’s best interest.  A movement to achieve its abolition would be a real “Better World Campaign”.

The Republicans need to throw away the chisel and lay the explosive, because the UN must be destroyed.