The United Nations: One Humongous Boondoggle

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

United Nations General Assembly. Photo by Mojnsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia

Would you believe a 13-year-old boy 66 years ago discovered the deep corruption in this institution?

This writer was that boy who had unusual permission to enter the United Nations headquarters glass tower in New York City which is otherwise off-limits to visitors and the general public. The tower is offices for various UN departments. Tourists can get a tour of the chambers of the General Assembly and Security Council, but not the tower.

In 1959, the world of hi-tech had yet to arrive. No photocopying machines, no Internet, no fax, no email. No desktop computers and printers. You wanted something printed? You had to patronize a printing company and in the city there were more than a hundred of them.

One of them was my father’s business and I began to work there during summer vacations.

In those days, if you wanted to print something in multiple copies, you typed it out on your typewriter, maybe making only one copy simultaneously by using messy carbon paper, and then had to send the text to a printing company. The U.N. had no in-house printing facilities. The different departments in the tower used different ones, and my father had clients in a few of them.

The printing companies employed “errand boys” whose job was picking up copy from a customer to return to the plant to be set in type, “proofed” and sent back via errand boy. I was one of them.

Ergo, I was allowed to enter the tower and pick up copy and return proofs to the different offices, and we errand boys learned never to arrive at the U.N, when staff ostensibly worked a normal 9-5 day, before 10 a.m., because before then, all the desks would be empty. Also, not to arrive between noon and 2, because the staffers were all out for a leisurely lunch. And, of course, not to arrive after 4.

These were people being paid by no profit-making enterprise but a bureaucracy that spends other peoples’ tax money with no concern for serious productivity. My father would also once a year treat the heads of the departments to a lunch in a classy Upper East Side restaurant, hypocrites who told him how much they enjoyed New York and America and did not look forward to the end of their term of employment and returning to their home countries — states that routinely voted against the U.S. in the U.N.

Now, fast-forward a decade, and yours trulyand also employed as the company’s truck driver, and in that capacity would deliver, for example, cardboard boxes containing, e.g. copies of a monograph produced by some academic commissioned to opine on such topics as “Desertification in Sub-Saharan Africa.” As the deliveryman, I would be asked to place the boxes on the shelves in the small storeroom, and when returning some weeks later with a new monograph be told, in order to make room for the new delivery, to throw the older boxes of reports on “Desertification” into the trash.

Ergo, what good news it was that President Trump published on January 7 a presidential memorandum that, following a review of U.N. and other “international organizations, agencies, commissions, conventions and treaties, the U.S. will withdraw support from 66 of them.”

Secretary of State Marc Rubio stated, “The Trump administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged unnecessary, wasteful poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas, contrary to our own or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms and general prosperity.”

The U.S. no longer will support the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, not to be confused with the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change and other “assorted environmental organizations. Last year, Trump announced that the U.S. would jettison the Paris climate accord supported by 195 states.

Also to be shut out will be the U.N. Population Fund that focuses on maternal and child welfare, and no less the office of a “special representative of the Secretary-General” for children and the sexual violence against them in armed conflict, which has for two years accused Israel of being a mass violator of children’s rights. This surely comfortably salaried “special representative” works under Secretary-General Guterres who has warned Israel it is in danger of appearing on this year’s blacklist of those who, in an armed conflict engage, in sexual violence.

Translation: The IDF in its war against the “victims of Zionism” includes sexual violence against children.

This is extraordinary as an example of psychological projection. Israel is accused of committing sexual crimes against the people who on Oct. 7 raped, mutilated and murdered more than a thousand Jews, Muslims likely never to wind up on a U.N. list of criminals. Said Rubio, President Trump is clear: “It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat and treasure of the American people, with little or nothing to show for it.”

Trump’s memo also called for defunding the Carbon Free Energy Compact, the United Nations’ University, the international Tropical Timber Organization, the Pan-Americans Institute for Geography and History and the international Lead and Zinc Study Group. Even before this Trump had called for shutting down UNRWA.

In general, the United Nations and other international NGOs are typically hot-air factories, like the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council, who produce nothing of value, starting with that great anti-Semitic fantasy of “climate change” that man can do something about.

And I say anti-Semitic because it contradicts the Torah which contains evidence that climate and other aspects of nature are in G-d’s hands. Even the ancient Greeks thought their high god Zeus was also the Weather G-d.

Meteorology is a science but a limited one. Normally, a scientist can conduct an experiment in, say, one part of the world and send the results to other scientists on the other side the world who can duplicate his work.

But meteorologists and climate specialists lack the luxury, aside from seeding clouds, of experimenting on the weather. Today, with satellites and hurricane-hunter airplanes they can find out a lot about hurricanes, but mankind remains as helpless as the ancient Greeks when it comes to controlling them, let alone destroying them before they do their worst.

The role of weather in the Torah is crucial. Abraham is commanded to go a distant country to initiate a new nation but when he gets there, builds an altar at Shechem, pitches his tent in Bethel and builds an altar there too, he then has to leave the Land of Canaan because there was a famine that propelled him, wife Sara and nephew Lot to abandon the Promised Land and descend into wanton Egypt for an important episode in the sexual education of man.

And what caused his grandson, 215 years later, the aged Jacob, to send ten sons down into Egypt? Also a famine, where they came face-to-face with the brother they had abandoned to slavery and acted out one of the most moving stories of fraternal love in human history.

G-d also used the wind in the Ten Plagues when He removed the locust swarm not by, so to speak, magically making them disappear, but made the winds blow them away.

He used the winds again blowing all night long to divide the Sea of Reeds so the Israelites could escape.

Israel these past few weeks has experienced a couple of powerful storms causing flooding and damage. There is nothing in the world more powerful than nature, so the thought of controlling the climate is sheer human hubris, which says something of the obsessive climate-change cultists.

Now, if Israel would also choose to reduce its presence in the U.N., expel the U.N. presence in Israel, even quit the organization all together, this would be great. What would the U.N. do without an Israel to kick around?

In 1945, the idea of the U.N., a new and improved version of the League of Nations, seemed like a good idea at the time, but when it admitted backward, Third World societies, Muslims and Communists, the die was cast for its miserable behavior.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.