Guest post by Congressman Louie Gohmert
Some say we should kick the U.N. out of the U.S. or get out of the U.N. ourselves. President Trump was quite right to speak of the failed potential of the United Nations when he withdrew us from the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, and that he would also review American involvement in UNESCO. Those have particularly shown anti-American bias.
In 1945, fifty nations signed the original U.N. charter. Today, there are 193 member nations. Though it has grown, respect for individual liberties of the citizens in nations comprising the U.N. has not. Natan Sharansky cited a problem years ago that many members of the U.N. shrug off the rights we demand for our citizens by saying, “Our culture does not share the values of the West and its forms of democracy.” They use that as an excuse not to recognize their own human rights abuses by calling them part of their “culture.”
Unfortunately, the nations that do care about human rights in their own countries have allowed abusers equal or greater voices within the U.N. “Respect for all people begins with the respect for your own citizens. Appeasing regimes that do not value the lives and liberties of their subjects is a formula for war and aggression.” [Defending Identity, Natan Sharansky]
That allows the majority of the U.N. to vote to hold Israel or the U.S. to standards that they never provide within their own country without feeling a shred of hypocrisy at all. They do it because they can, and there are more that do not share “the values of the West,” than do. In fact, many have great contempt, particularly for the United States and Israel.
There are five nations that have veto power over actions of the U.N. Two of those nations are China and Russia. Does anyone actually think that China and Russia provide the same respect for human rights as the U.S. (not including the years of the Obama and Biden administration”s weaponization of the federal government against its own citizens)? When China and Russia are making deals with Iran and North Korea, can we expect them to vote as fair and impartial voters in the U.N. concerned solely with protecting the integrity of human rights from Iranian or North Korean abuses?
It is apparently no secret that over the years, there have been some nations that filled some of their positions at the U.N. with covert spies against the U.S. However, after the Snowden revelations, some nations actually wanted to move the U.N. out of the U.S.
While in Congress, I began to wonder if the U.S. could simply notify the U.N. that the lease on the property it is using would not be renewed. The U.N. would need to find another place for their international headquarters. It turns out, however, that the United States does not and did not own the land upon which the U.N. is sitting. It was purchased by the Rockefeller family and given to the United Nations. Additionally, there was also a right of reversion in the gift that if at any time the United Nations ever ceased to use the site as its main international headquarters, the land would revert back to the Rockefellers.
Unfortunately, since its origination, too many members of the U.N. have become bastions of antisemitic hate. If Israel gets attacked and it defends itself, then they believe it is time for sanctions on Israel without regard for the barbaric attacks upon Israel that caused Israel’s need of self-defense.
If the U.N. continues to be so anti-semitic and so oblivious to the massive abuses by some of their own member nations of their own citizens’ rights, while being hateful to us in the U.S., there is a remedy. The U.S. government does have control over who is allowed into our country and who is not. The U.S. government also has complete control over how long it takes to get credentials that delegates and their staffs need to get into the U.S. Obviously, that could force the issue of a need for another location.
There are places in Europe that would likely welcome the U.N. headquarters. Without the U.S. major contributions, however, its lifespan would be about as short as the League of Nations or shorter. Some in the U.N. have to know that.
To at least provide some sanity to the billions of dollars provided around the world by the U.S. individually and through the U.N., early in Congress I secured a list of the percentage of times countries voted against our interest in the U.N. who received money from us. I was shocked. It was then I began filing the U.N. Voting Accountability Act. It basically said that any nation that voted against the U.S. position in the U.N. more than half of the time would receive no assistance of any kind from the U.S. the following year. On one rare occasion when there were open amendments to an appropriations bill, I offered that as an amendment and it ALMOST passed.
My slogan for the bill for over twenty years has been, “You don’t have to pay people to hate us; they will do it for free!”
One thing is certain, nearly all of the nations comprising the U.N. have forgotten why there was such a crying need to provide the children of Israel with a nation after World War II and that there was no better place than the land to which the children of Israel themselves had the greatest right of prior possession. There were Israelis living there and Bible prophets had prophesied the returns of others would come from all over the world. Aerial photographs showed the area they would live in as being mostly brown and lifeless. The prophesies have been fulfilled that the Jewish people have returned to the promised land and that again the desert is blooming, grapes are growing and the aerial photographs show a beautiful living, vibrant country.
The U.N. has now had the vote to move toward recognition of an official state of Palestine, which could actually be deemed by Hamas as a reward for their October 7, 2023 massacre, mutilations, kidnappings, rapes, and other barbaric actions. It was a non-binding vote, but it was 142 for, 10 against, and 12 abstaining. France and Saudi Arabia were the co-sponsors of the resolution.
I recall years ago being in an area of central-eastern France, near Lake Geneva, where the people were kind and the countryside was just so lovely _ perhaps France could provide places of temporary residence for the Palestinians there. Then, when the Palestinian hate for Jews subsides, we might actually be able to get an agreement and bring them together in peace in the middle east. That would be immensely more helpful than what France, Saudi Arabia and the U.N. demanded in their vote.
Sadly, most anything the U.N. has done in recent years that had merit could possibly have been done cheaper by an individual country or a coalition of countries without the massive bureaucratic baggage that necessarily comes with the U.N. For the U.S. to continue paying so much for an organization that has developed strong biases against the U.S. so that it has a platform to abuse the U.S. and our closest allies needs to be reexamined. If needed, we now know there are remedies.
What do you think?
Louie Gohmert is a former U.S. Congressman and currently a Senior Fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center
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