Our Israeli tour guide, Dina, a feisty, middle-aged woman, was originally from Egypt. Her family had a thousand year history there, but was forced to leave in 1951 with just the clothes on their backs, like the Jews of Syria, Iraq, Libya and the other Arab countries. For them there was no UNRWA.

Dina makes us laugh every time she refers to the U.N. as the “United Nothing.” As our bus traverses Israel, we see U.N. bureaucrats buzzing around in little white U.N. cars, far from the rockets being fired from Gaza. Meanwhile, at U.N. headquarters in New York, Israel is being censored.

More than $30 billion dollars is spent every year by the U.N. and its subsidiaries, but, even the U.N. admits there is no exact accounting of where the money goes.

UNRWA’s budget is around 2 billion dollars. Hamas, the ruling power in Gaza, benefits from that money. It is ironic that, in Gaza, millions go to the families of terrorists who kill or attempt to kill Israeli men, women, and children, millions are spent tunnelling into Israel, and more is spent on thousands of rockets to shoot into Israel, yet there isn’t enough for food, schools or hospitals. They are all, conveniently, provided by UNRWA.

An organisation dedicated to alleviate suffering shouldn’t be the cause of it, but the U.N. has a history of wreaking havoc, and preying on the people it was sent to protect.

If it didn’t make me so angry, it would be laughable that:

• In Haiti, after the 2011 earthquake, the U.N.’s team from Nepal brought it’s own strain of cholera which killed 8,000 Haitians. The “United Nothing” walked away from its’ responsibility and the cholera epidemic;

• The world-wide U.N. sex abuse scandal has been going on for fifteen years, with no recompense for the victims or retribution for the rapists. In Congo, the epicenter of the scandal, the U.N.’s Pakistani ‘peace-keepers’ raped girls as young as eleven. 700 of 2,000 verified cases occurred there, and the girls, with their ‘peace-keeper’ babies, are shunned by their own people. Peter Gallo, a former investigator at the U.N., said ”The U.N. is essentially protecting the perpetrators of these crimes.”

• The former U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who recently died, got such laudatory obituaries even though the worst genocides of recent times, Rwanda and Srebenica, occurred during his watch. He blamed Israel for the war in Lebanon, and, not surprisingly, when he left the U.N., he was hired by the Arab League. Ironically, Annan is one of the better “United Nothing” leaders, but when compared to men like the former Nazi, two time Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, that’s damning with faint praise;

• The Six-Day War was dubbed “U Thant’s War,” not to honor the Secretary General, but to ridicule him. On May 17, 1967, Nasser asked the U.N. peacekeeping forces, in Sinai since 1954, to leave immediately. U Thant complied, thus precipitating the Six-Day War. Abba Eban compared it to carrying an umbrella every day, only to discard it when rain threatens. The “United Nothing,” rather than admitting its mistake, established the “U Thant Peace Award.”

• Nicholas Maduro was elected Secretary General of the U.N.’s 120 member N.A.M.(non-aligned nations.) That honour goes to the ruler of Venezuela, a former bus driver who plunged his oil rich country into chaos, where murder and kidnapping are rampant, starving people riot for food, and babies die in incubators with no electricity;

• The newly declared Palestinian ‘observer state’ is the head of the U.N.’s G-77 bloc of underdeveloped nations. Only member states can have the position, but the corrupt U.N. ignores its own rules, especially when it comes to Israel;

• The “United Nothing” has censored Israel more than any country in the world. Indeed it has passed as many resolutions against Israel as it has for the whole rest of the world!

The U.N. is a failure, riddled with corruption and criminality which make its’ self-importance and hypocrisy laughable. In time-honoured fashion, it uses the Jews as a scapegoat, but with the lessons of history in mind, and the growth of anti-semitism in Europe, the way the “United Nothing” demonises Israel is not a laughing matter.

Article by Author/s
Helen Applebaum
Helen Applebaum is an artist, writer, and teacher who has lived in New York City for most of her life. Her artwork is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York. Her articles have appeared in Women in the Arts newsletters, Art Times Journal, and Salt Magazine. She has visited Australia six times and plans to relocate there soon.

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