Avi Benlolo: Trump administration takes a courageous stand against the UN

Jeff Bartos, the U.S. representative to the United Nations for management and reform. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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The Trump administration’s efforts to call out United Nations bodies that have been co-opted by anti-western interests shows that the tide might be turning against a global machine that for decades has been working to undermine Israel and the United States — countries that have become the world’s leading purveyors of morality, freedom and democracy, the antithesis of the far left and radical Islam.

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Global institutions and political movements have been weaponized to destroy democracies from the inside. This week, Jeff Bartos, U.S. ambassador to the UN for management and reform, told the Security Council that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its proponents seek a “standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach.

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“The ICC is constantly seeking to aggrandize its own power, falsely asserting so-called jurisdiction beyond its mandate, including over nations who never consented to its authority. The ICC’s perverse attempts to encroach on the sovereignty of states, including some on this council, must be defeated. So long as this decades-old concern remains unaddressed, we will continue to take steps, as needed, to protect U.S. interests.”

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Likewise, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued this week that, “The ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”

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As Rubia said, “The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist non-government organizations, smug globalists and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.” As an example, he cited the case of the U.S.-based group Democracy for the Arab World Now, which called on Iran to grant the ICC jurisdiction over alleged “war crimes” committed in its territory by the United States.

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As with the U.S., Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and therefore provides no legal jurisdiction to the ICC. The ICC overstepped its power and was weaponized by Israel’s enemies to issue standing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. To deploy these false allegations, the ICC decided it has legal authority over Israel because in the alternate universe it created, the non-existent “Palestine” is a member state.

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The global machine is working overtime to undermine the West, but as former U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” The Board of Peace, an international body slated to take over Gaza, says that Hamas must disarm. More significantly, the board recently announced that, “UNRWA has no place in the new Gaza. We are turning the page on the complex of perpetual aid dependency & conflict. The people of Gaza deserve better.”

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They certainly do. In conversation this week with economist Emily Brearley, author of “Aid Inferno,” she recounted to me her own experience while working in Gaza. “The UNRWA issue is one that I did a 180,” she said. “I was raised in quite an antisemitic household. I was wearing a Keffiyeh at 12, 13 years old to school and I was very anti-Israel.”