A storied French couplet goes:
Cet animal est très méchant
Si on l’attaque, il se défend.
In English, that would be:
This animal is very wicked,
Just see what happens when you kick it.
And that is what Israel has been doing: hitting back at those who attempt to mass-murder its people. It’s no more complicated than that. The Houthis in Yemen have been sending missiles and drones toward Israel in ever-increasing numbers in the last two months. Many of those missiles and drones have been intercepted, but others have managed to reach Haifa and Tel Aviv. Finally, after an entire week of attacks from the Houthis, the IDF launched retaliatory strikes at Houthi targets in Yemen on December 26. The Israeli airstrikes hit the main Yemeni port of Hodeidah, where Iranian ships deliver weapon to the Houthis, as well as two other ports at Al-Salif and Qantab, the international airport in Sanaa, along with power stations in the same capita city. The IDF asserts that the airport and the three ports were used to smuggle in Iranian weapons and used for the entry of senior Iranian officials.
And what did the UN do? It denounced the IDF for its retaliatory strike, choosing to ignore the continual Houthi attacks that had prompted that Israeli response. The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, ought to use that French couplet quoted above in his next scathing intervention at the General Assembly. More on the UN kangaroo court’s latest condemnation of Israel can be found here.
The UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had not previously condemned the Houthis for their constant attacks on Israel; nor did he do so in his latest statement, merely alluding to “intensified escalation in Yemen and Israel,” and then going on to discuss only the Israeli airstrikes on Yemen.
The obsessive insistence on condemning Israel at every turn, so that it has in the last year been condemned by the General Assembly more often than all the other 192 countries combined, surely bespeaks not just anti-Israel animus, but antisemitism, a charge which, of course, Antonio Guterres would angrily dismiss. But what else can explain this manic obsession with Israel, these wild and nauseating charges thrown at the Jewish state at every session of the General Assembly, and the UN Human Rights Commission, and the UN Security Council?
What can be done about the UN? An appeal to decency, to the facts, to history, to the truth, won’t work. There is only one thing that might make a deep impression, might have an effect on that organization that has become a source of such anguish and outrage. And that one thing is money, and the threat that it will be withheld from the UN by its largest contributor. President Trump should address the scandalous anti-Israel record of the UN, devoting an entire speech to pointing out how often Israel is condemned at the UN (more than all the other 192 countries put together), how often grotesque and easily refuted charges of “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide” are made against the tiny Jewish state. He should quote West Point professor John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare, who has noted that “Israel is being measured by double and triple standards” in its fighting in Gaza, a standard “that does not exist anywhere in the world” and has further noted that in Gaza, “Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history.” Trump should list all the ways that the IDF warns civilians to leave sites about to be targeted — the millions upon millions of leaflets dropped, text messages sent, and robocalls made — and the total so far of each kind of warning. He should explain that while the UN has declared that in all the wars fought since 1945, the average civilian-to-combatant death ratio has been 9:1. In Afghanistan the Americans brought own that ratio to 5:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But no military has managed to achieve what the IDF did in Gaza, with a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of roughly 7:10.
Having provided the American public with those necessary facts and figures, Trump should declare that the United States, recognizing the “deep anti-Israel animus” at the UN that has “played a major part in encouraging antisemitism worldwide, will no longer contribute nearly $20 billion a year to the UN, but only $5 billion, and none of it can go to support UNRWA,” which the American President must insist, “should be shut down because so many members of its staff in Gaza were found to have been members of the terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Such a ringing declaration should get the UN’s attention — its initial outrage will then be followed by the glum recognition that the UN has no way to force the Americans to pay what it has been paying; some in the organization will begin to reconsider and have to admit that perhaps the American President has a point; we really ought to make some changes.
Among the changes that President Trump should call for are these: 1) the firing outright of the antisemitic Francesca Albanese 2) pressuring Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whose term ends in December 2026, to cease his anti-Israel rhetoric; 3) removing “Agenda item 7: Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories” from mandatory consideration at every session of the UN Human Rights Council; 4) discuss treating “Palestinian refugees” just as all other refugees are treated, their status becoming non-inheritable rather than, as the “Palestinians” have been allowed to date, as an inheritable trait.
That’s not all the American government should demand of the UN, but it’s what I’d call a good start.