RUTHFULLY YOURS

Peter Beinart, the newly minted contributing New York Times columnist, recently argued in an op-ed at the paper that Israel should be dissolved, its inhabitants thrown to the mercy of terror organizations such as Hamas and the PLO. Apparently, he has something comparable in mind for the United States.

Calling on the past examples of racist authoritarian Woodrow Wilson, the unapologetic Communist Paul Robeson, Malcom X, Black Panthers, and others, Beinart contends that Democrats might have to summon the U.N. Human Rights Council, a world body teeming with dictators and theocrats, to intervene in what he imagines is America’s “chronic racist disenfranchisement.” Alas, this is the kind of feverish wish-casting that passes for intellectual discourse these days.Here is a sampling of nations Beinart believes should be tasked with overseeing the impartiality of American elections (in no particular order of nefariousness): Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Eritrea, Somalia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Angola, the Congo, Ukraine, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Qatar, and Pakistan.

Russia and China, incidentally, will be added as new members of the U.N. Human Rights Council for the next term, just in time to arbitrate the American election. Or, in other words, Beinart argues that we have a moral obligation to ask the Russians to interfere in the American election — and not through some puerile Facebook ads but as empowered observers here at the bequest of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

As my colleague Jimmy Quinn points out, Beinart already confuses the U.N. Human Rights Council, founded in 2006, with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which it replaced. The first iteration of the organization featured an even more pernicious den of odious characters, if you can imagine such a thing.

Now, I suppose the first thing any patriotic American might ask when confronted with a proposal such as “We’ll oversee your elections” is, “You and what army?” The second, would be to wonder how anyone professing to be a liberal believes that a committee of nations that regularly torture, murder, and imprison political dissidents has any moral or legal standing over American affairs.

As with Beinart, the primary concern of the U.N. is the end of the Jewish homeland. In 2018, while the Bashar al-Assad regime was gassing women and children, the Human Rights Council passed only two condemnations directed at the Syrian regime, but five of the Jewish state. It has censured Israel nearly as many times as it has every other country in the world combined. The council has a separate agenda item just for Israel, which it discusses every meeting no matter how many genocides, coups, political poisonings, or mass executions are underway elsewhere in the world.

The council has never in its history voted to condemn China, Cuba, or Russia.

The council’s second biggest concern is the United States. This summer, it held an emergency session on race relations in the United States. While the representatives of Venezuela (one of the leading places from which people seek asylum to the United States) and Syria (ditto) decried the injustices in the United States, the highlight was hearing the ambassador from North Korea (there are not many asylum seekers from the world’s largest prison) calling American racism “the world’s hottest human-rights issue.”

After the United States mercifully quit the Human Rights council in 2008, CNN asked, “What message does it send to the world?” One hopes it sends the message that the odious scoundrels and bigoted scum who populate these councils have zero moral or legal standing to lecture the United States. Like most pieces, though, CNN portrayed the council as the “UN equivalent to international human rights groups,” which is true in the same way it is true that Antifa fights “fascism” or North Korea is a “republic.”

The notion that the United States, which has a biracial vice-presidential candidate, a popular former black president, and the most ethnically and racially diverse governing body in the history of mankind needs any help from China is obscene — completely devoid of even the most rudimentary understanding of history. As we speak, the Chinese government is running the world’s most robust concentration-camp system.

By every practical and idealistic standard, America — though imperfect in many ways — is the least bigoted place in the world. Unfortunately, our political discourse, infected with unserious authoritarians, has lost sight of that reality.

Indeed, the same editorial-page staff that has collective meltdown reading a sitting senator arguing for government intervention to stop riots is fine with an op-ed asking Nicolás Maduro and Bashar al-Assad to oversee an American election. The Times edit page isn’t just celebrating the salubrious sex lives of women living under Communism, it is shilling for the Chicoms on Hong Kong and world governance. Walter Duranty would be proud.