RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, went into the lion’s den known as the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday for the stated purpose of challenging the status quo. Sadly, the status quo won, at least for the time being. The UN’s human rights apparatus, including the Human Rights Council and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, continues to face no consequences for its blatant hypocrisy, anti-Israel bias, and even for its interference in the U.S. presidential election last year.

Ambassador Haley dutifully pointed out to the other Council members something that many of them are quite proud of and have no intention of changing – the anti-Israel bias so prevalent in the Human Rights Council as well as other UN forums. She also urged reforms that would preclude the worst human rights abusing countries such as Saudi Arabia from serving as members of the Council. However, she ducked completely the issue of the UN human rights chief’s interference in last year’s presidential election. And Ambassador Haley stopped short of turning her pleas for reforms into demands for action. She drew back from threatening to withdraw U.S. political and financial support for the Council and the whole UN human rights apparatus if serious changes were not forthcoming immediately.

Indeed, on the same day as Ambassador Haley delivered her remarks to the Human Rights Council, High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, signaled business as usual in his opening statement to the Council. After going through the motions of declaring that the Holocaust “has no parallel, no modern equal,” Zeid then immediately drew a parallel of his own to his version of the Palestinians’ situation today. “Yet it is also undeniable that today,” Zeid said, “the Palestinian people mark a half-century of deep suffering under an occupation imposed by military force. An occupation which has denied the Palestinians many of their most fundamental freedoms, and has often been brutal in the way it has been realized; an occupation whose violations of international law have been systematic, and have been condemned time and again by virtually all States.”

Aside from his regular Israel-bashing, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who hails from the decidedly non-democratic country of Jordan, decided to stick his nose into the U.S. presidential campaign last year. Moreover, he continues to offer his unsolicited opinions on matters directly impacting America’s national sovereignty, such as protection of its borders.

“If Donald Trump is elected, on the basis of what he has said already, and unless that changes, I think it’s without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view,” Zeid proclaimed to the press less than a month before the election.

Zeid’s decision to take sides in a U.S. presidential election constituted blatant interference by a senior UN official whose salary is funded more by the United States than by any other member state. Nevertheless, the Obama State Department spokesperson at the time, John Kirby, brushed Zeid’s interference aside. “I’m not going to weigh in one way or the other on that,” Kirby said.

On September 5, 2016, after pronouncing himself “the global voice on human rights, universal rights; elected by all governments,” Zeid claimed that Trump “shares with Da’esh” [another name for ISIS] the “scalpels of the arch propagandist.”

The Left’s obsession with alleged Russian interference in last year’s election is matched, if not exceeded, by the Left’s utter silence over the specter of a senior UN official trying to paint the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States as “dangerous” and equivalent in some respects to ISIS propagandists. The American people did not elect Jordanian Prince Zeid for anything, or ask him for his opinion on who should serve as the president of the United States. He should have kept his mouth shut, but Zeid did not stop his Trump bashing even after the presidential election was over and Trump won.

Zeid declared that President Trump’s policies on limiting the flow of refugees and migrants into the United States are “in breach of international law, if undertaken without due process guarantees, including individual assessment.” He even threatened to take the United States to court over President Trump’s immigration and refugee policies, which are aimed at nothing more than protecting American citizens from harm. Apparently, the UN Human Rights Commissioner and other Trump haters believe that foreigners from any country seeking to enter the United States for any reason, no matter whether they are from terrorist prone countries and are difficult to vet properly, should have an absolute right favoring their entry that overrides national security considerations. Sorry, but countries still get to decide how best to protect their citizens, not an unelected UN bureaucrat.

Donald Trump was right when he said last year that the “United Nations is not a friend of democracy. It’s not a friend even to the United States of America, where as all know, it has its home.”

President Trump should show he means business by delivering a message to all the globalists around the world that the United States will not be pushed around by UN bureaucrats who live high on the hog at American taxpayers’ expense.