The Israeli flag flies near the Western Wall in front of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem’s old city. (Reinhard Krause/Reuters)

The U.N. Human Rights Council disproportionately focuses on Israel.

The depraved totalitarians, nefarious barbarians, two-bit gangsters, odious scoundrels, and bigoted scum who run the United Nations recently set up a new “database” to help anti-Semites around the world target Jewish businesses in the disputed territories of Judaea and Samaria — businesses that offer economic opportunities for Palestinians that pay higher than most other jobs in the West Bank.


In no other international dispute — and there are hundreds of them — does the United Nations target peaceful civilians or institutions. Certainly in no place do they work to destroy the businesses of noncombatants based on their ethnicity or religion. The 112 companies on the U.N.’s list are run and staffed, no doubt, by people with diverse viewpoints, at least some of whom likely support the creation of a Palestinian state. All of them create jobs, products, and services that foster cooperation.

None of this matters to the U.N. The “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) campaign, now supported by the U.N., is a coordinated international effort committed to the elimination of the Jewish state, bringing together dictators, theocrats, terrorist organizations, Communists, the “international community,” and at least one of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s top surrogates. The movement targets Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism, which remains the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East.

The United Nations, of course, has long been ahead of the curve in this effort, from its infamous 1975 Resolution 3379, which declared that Zionism was a “form of racism and racial discrimination,” to its 2006 creation of the Human Rights Council (current members include such sparkling examples of tolerance as Afghanistan, Angola, Qatar, Somalia, and Bangladesh).


Even those with good-faith criticisms of Israel’s actions in the West Bank would probably concede that United Nations has shown the Jewish state a highly curious amount of special attention and opprobrium.


Since its unfortunate inception, the Human Rights Council has condemned Israel about as many times as it has every other country in the world combined. According to the Washington Post, Israel’s human-rights record is discussed at literally every meeting of the Human Rights Council.

In 2018, while the Bashar al-Assad regime was gassing its own women and children and thousands of civilians were dying in a vicious civil war, the Human Rights Council passed only two condemnations directed at the Syrian regime but five directed at the Jewish state. Incidentally, Israel was delivering aid to refugees of that conflict at the time.

The only other countries to receive even one condemnation in 2018 were South Sudan, Myanmar, Iran, and the slave state of North Korea. The United Nations has drafted so many anti-Israel resolutions that I’ve noticed people have given up on entering them into Wikipedia.


No other country that oversees a minority population — populations who often have far stronger cases for autonomy — is afforded even slither of the attention from the world. Not even the Communist Chinese, who have imprisoned upwards of a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in internment camps for “reeducation,” will catch the attention of alleged human-rights champions at the United Nations.


Nor does the Palestinian Authority, which recently arrested the only Palestinian brave enough to attend the Trump administration’s international peace-seeking economic conference in Bahrain (he’s lucky the ending wasn’t more macabre), which subsidizes anti-Israeli terrorism with a “Martyrs’ Fund” and which doesn’t even bother having elections. Rather, it gets big checks from the international community — often underwritten by the United States — to prop up its corrupt regime.

What really irks the U.N., though, are Israeli efforts at economic cooperation. The U.N. deputy executive director for advocacy, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, says: “The long awaited release of the U.N. settlement business database should put all companies on notice: to do business with illegal settlements is to aid in the commission of war crimes.”


War crimes? Hiring talented Palestinians for software-engineer jobs at tech startups is aiding in the commission of war crimes? Allowing Palestinians to see Jews as coworkers rather than the enemy is aiding in the commission of war crimes? Offering Palestinians work rather than keeping them in a perpetual state of aggrievement and anger, as do the authoritarian leaders who reject one peace plan after the next from the comfort of their mansions, is aiding in the commission of war crimes? Allowing them to work for international companies such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and Motorola is aiding in the commission of war crimes?

It’s a tragedy that those who work for the United Nations, people such as Stago, would rather that Palestinians remain victims in perpetuity than see a single Jewish person in the West Bank.

But it’s not surprising.