Fifty years ago, on November 10, 1975, the United Nations notoriously passed General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is racism.” Since then, the UN has become the ultimate cesspool of ferocious anti-Zionism, raw antisemitism, and rank anti-Americanism.

It is time for the United States to lead a global process of repentance and repair by defunding the UN all-together and replacing it with a series of professional bodies free of fecund hostility to Jews/Israelis and liberated from radical anti-American ideologies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations back in 1975, ripped into the infamous resolution, recognizing it was an attempt to demean America by demeaning its ally. He repudiated what he would later call the “Big Red Lie” as an assault on democracy and decency. And he warned that this libel would enter the international bloodstream.

Alas, he was right. With its perverse Soviet-orchestrated distortions of language, history, and reality, Resolution 3379 “reeked of the totalitarian mind, stank of the totalitarian state” – as Prof. Gil Troy reminds us in an important article this week in Commentary Magazine.

Troy: “With the bully’s instinctive genius, the haters understood what would hurt Israel’s reputation most—and what the world would swallow easily. They showed how to foist broadly-agreed-upon aversions—to racism, to genocide—onto the Jews.”

“Totalitarian anti-Zionism helped Western elites cast Palestinians as noble, oppressed, disenfranchised people of color and Israelis as ignoble, oppressive, racist whites. It helped progressives ignore the Palestinian national movement’s violence, Islamism, sexism, and homophobia. The Red-Green alliance united leftists with Islamists, and Moynihan’s ‘Big Red Lie’ became the ‘Big Red-Green Lie’ that refuses to die.”

Ben Cohen and David May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington detailed this week the extraordinary resources devoted by the UN to the demonization of Israel.

This begins with the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which drives the Israel-as-colonialist and Israel-as-an-apartheid-state narratives (over $3 million per year over 50 years).

It continues with the UN Palestine Committee and the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People; the Division for Palestinian Rights; the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which has been shown to be a close collaborator of Hamas; the UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees) special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories; and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices.
Even more absurd are UNHRC (Human Rights Council) Agenda Item 7, which requires the body to scrutinize Israel’s human rights record at every meeting it convenes (Israel is the only country subject to this treatment); the UN Register of Damages (since 2007 to assist Palestinians in collecting on claims of damages allegedly incurred by the construction of Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank); and so many other virulently hostile bodies.
Then there are the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Galant (on the basis of malevolent falsehoods and serial abuses of its own processes); and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which has falsely accused Israel of illegally occupying the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Grotesque accusations against Israel of genocide, apartheid, and crimes against humanity bounce around the UN, the ICJ, the ICC and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. They feed these claims into each other’s reports and then repeat and recycle them to create an infernal echo chamber of Israel demonization.

US SENATORS Mike Lee (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Rick Scott (R-FL) and Reps. Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced the DEFUND Act, which would initiate the United States’ withdrawal from the United Nations, citing in part the U.N.’s actions toward Israel.

But the UN offense is not just about Israel. As researchers Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, Edwin Black, and Claudia Rosett have shown the U.S. government provides more than $20 billion to the UN and related international organizations and multilateral entities – that are pugnaciously anti-American and radically woke too.

The Trump administration started in the right direction by ending US funding for UNRWA. The complete dismantling of UNRWA is the next challenge. Its $1.5 billion budget can much better be spent on real refugee settlement and peacemaking, perhaps through the new US-led stabilization administration for Gaza.

Trump also should reopen the 1947 agreement locating UN headquarters, tax free, in NY. And yes, defunding of the UN all-together may be warranted, at least for a while – as prophylactic treatment.

Personally, I don’t really believe that the UN can be reformed. It operates with no real accountability, no functional moral compass, and no mechanism for acquiring any such vital features. It has developed a tyrant-friendly, diplomatically immune, and collectively irresponsible DNA.

Worse still, as Melanie Phillipps has written, it is an “unstoppable geyser of moral and intellectual corruption. It teaches the West that lies about Israel are truths and truths are lies, and it has turned what the West tells itself is morality and conscience into an agenda of evil.”

It has ensured that the West can no longer distinguish more generally between victim and oppressor, reality and propaganda, right and wrong. Treating the UN and the ‘international law’ it has promoted as the moral arbiters of global order is not just a sick joke. It has made the world sick, too.

ALTHOUGH EVERYBODY knows that the UN is broken, it’s pretty much taboo to call for its shutdown. The usual defense of the UN is that “it may be imperfect,” but “it’s all we’ve got” – a refrain that tends to be accompanied by prescriptions for reforms that either won’t stick or won’t work at all.

The counter argument is this: Is the UN really the best we can do? Do we have to settle for a system that elects Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran to lead human rights councils, women’s rights agencies, and cultural bodies? If the UN is “all we’ve got,” and it can cavalierly disregard slaughters in Syria and Sudan while outrageously branding Israel a war criminal enterprise, then it is way past time to come up with something else!

Therefore, it is time to create alternatives to the UN, like a “Covenant of Democratic Nations,” an UN-successor entity limited to nations governed by democratic principles. This body could nullify crazy acts and nasty resolutions – such as UNESCO’s denial of Jewish Jerusalem. The Covenant also would seek to create a long-overdue new body of reformed and updated international law.

Claudia Rosett’s book What To Do About the UN demurs from this. She feels that the ideal of “world peace” led by democracies is an overreach. It is too driven by ideals that won’t translate easily into action. (Just how will democracy be defined for membership purposes?).

Her guiding principle for replacing the UN is competition, the establishment of professional agencies with no grandiose moral pretensions. Competition is what takes down monopolies, and the UN is the biggest monopoly of them all.

It is a mammoth helped along by immunities, privileges and lavish government contributions, and it is backed by legions of special interest NGOs around the globe that lobby for more.

As a result, Rosett writes, the UN has become like the failed collectivist experiments of the 20th century; those huge old Soviet state enterprises and gargantuan Chinese communist industries. It was and is very hard to shutter these behemoths since they are tied into every aspect of a dysfunctional economy plus their employees’ lives. They are a terrible drain.

You fix this by creating competition. So, Rosett proposes the establishment of several coalitions that are not so much pegged to ideals, but rather are mission-driven by countries with specific shared interests – like NATO during the Cold War.

As for the residual usefulness of some type of global “talking shop” in which even Iran can bluster and Russia can dissimulate – well, if at all, this should be a forum for exchange of views only; for blowing-off steam. Rosett: “It should be a General Assembly minus the votes and minus agencies with multi-billion-dollar budgets. It is not a joke to suggest that it would be better to be housed in a gymnasium somewhere in Iowa (or Siberia) than in a multi-billion-dollar gilded chamber in Manhattan.”

Thinkers and experts need to apply themselves diligently to this task. It is time for those with know-how, resources, and genuine goodwill toward future generations to take an in-depth and non-polemical look at the opportunity cost to the West of cleaving to the UN.

Published in The Jerusalem Post 24.10.2025.