The UN is in bed with Iran's Islamic regime.
Or so it seems.
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How is it that the United Nations is so pro-Hamas?
Sure, you can hate Israel all you want, but isn’t beheading babies, sadism and rape, burning to death whole families, and mutilation a little beyond the pale?
Or is there something profoundly treacherous at play here?
In 2010, Qatar (a tiny desert state with less than three million residents) was chosen to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, defeating the United States in a runoff by a group of voters that had already been trimmed because two members were secretly filmed agreeing to sell their votes.
Then, after years of investigations and indictments, it came out that representatives working for Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cup in men’s football. The accusations were the latest in a years-long corruption case that produced convictions of numerous football officials and executives, as well as depositions from former leaders of FIFA.
If Qatar of all countries can bribe FIFA’s decision-makers to host the World Cup, what is the Islamic Republic of Iran capable of doing with, say, the UN? If FIFA’s leadership is comprised of proverbial “prostitutes” — that is, they all have a price — why would the UN’s leadership be any different?
It turns out, where there’s Iranian smoke, there’s a raging fire. Earlier this year, Iran was appointed to chair the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum — because Iran and human rights go together like oil and water, but I digress.
In 2020, the notorious UN Security Council resoundingly defeated a U.S. resolution to indefinitely extend the UN arms embargo on Iran. Diplomats from Russia, China, the UK, France, and Germany voiced concern that extending the arms embargo would lead Iran to exit the Iranian nuclear deal and speed up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, but who are they joking? Iran will gleefully pursue its nuclear ambitions regardless of any agreement, and you’d have to be an imbecile to believe otherwise.
In 2018, a UN envoy arrived in Tehran to praise the country’s progress against corruption. Interestingly, Iran’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index improved between 2013 to 2017 — when Iran became relatively more open to the outside world — but sunk sharply since. Several billion-dollar cases have demonstrated the extent of power networks of patronage within the Ayatollah’s regime and its various factions, often linked to high-level clergy.1
Some Iranians, presumably with the Ayatollah’s backing, blame the country’s ever-deepening corruption at the vast economic sanctions that have been imposed on Iran since its 1979 revolution. Sanctions do create economic distortions that are meant to disrupt normal economic activity, mostly through blocking trade and financial channels. However, according to Hashem Pesaran, a prominent Iranian economist, only 20 percent of the economic malaise over a 30-year period was caused by sanctions, and 80 percent is due to domestic policies. But certainly, these numbers are neither here nor there for the UN.
Iran’s Islamic regime is also the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, supporting all kinds of “proxies” in the Middle East, from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (Gaza), to Hezbollah (Lebanon) and the Houthis (Yemen), to at least four different militias in Syria and another three in Iraq.
Wherever there is turmoil in the region, you will instantly find Iran. As Syria and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars, and ISIS seized vast Iraqi and Syrian territories, there is one overriding culprit behind much of this chaos: the Iranians.
Unlike Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and other Arab countries which desire stability in the Middle East, Iran has no qualms about continuing to destabilize the region in pursuit of regional hegemony. And the UN seems perfectly aligned with it.
“The United Nations plays a suspicious role in Arab and Islamic issues,” according to journalist Khaled Batarfi.
Suspicious indeed. Last summer, after both a Koran and Torah were publicly burned in Sweden with the Swedish police’s protection, the UN Human Rights chief called for immediate action against the desecration of religious places and symbols worldwide, but made no mention of the Torah, only the Koran.
In Yemen, the UN’s presence is also cause for concern. Since the organization took over the Yemeni file, the situation in Yemen has gone from bad to worse. The Houthis overtook the capital, Sanaa, and then laid siege to the cities Taiz and Aden, while seizing the state’s civilian and military institutions with the former president’s help. If it wasn’t for Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni civil war, “they would have been able to take over all of Yemen and deliver it on a silver platter to Iran,” wrote Batarfi.2
Still, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Yemen has facilitated the travel of Houthi leaders and delegations outside Yemen by UN airplanes. He has also provided training courses for them to improve their image and defend the coup in global forums. International humanitarian assistance is given to the Houthis, knowing they give it only to their loyalists and sell the rest on the black market.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the United Nations itself found that the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was particularly vulnerable to “misappropriation, graft, and corruption” in its procurement, partner selection, food and cash distribution, hiring and promotions, and other areas.3 There have also been recent reports of:
UNRWA filling high-level positions with senior Hamas members
Hamas rockets being stored in UNRWA schools
Some of the members of the Nukhba Force (the elite Hamas unit that led the October 7th massacre) being UNRWA employees
Hamas terror tunnels fortified with — you guessed it — UNRWA cement bags
“Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. It manages UNRWA,” one Gazan resident recently told the Israel Defense Forces.4
There’s nothing normal about UNRWA’s existence and activities. The agency was established in 1949 after the Israeli War of Independence, in order to provide shelter, welfare, and health services for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. They refused to be absorbed into other neighboring countries, because they understood that this would mean they had lost the war against Israel, and they haven’t been willing to accept the defeat to this day.
In 1950, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was established to handle all of the world’s refugees. However, following pressure from Arab countries, the Palestinian refugees remained the sole responsibility of UNRWA — which to this day remains the world’s only refugee agency dedicated to a specific population.
Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, the current president of the International Red Cross, previously served as a senior adviser for UNRWA, which might explain why her organization has effectively sided with Hamas (a tentacle of the Iranian octopus) during the current war, but that’s a different point for a different essay.
The main point, an incredibly bothersome one, is that the UN seems to be in bed with the Islamic Republic of Iran, giving the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism a dangerous platform, which was made even worse by U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration going out of its way to reinstate the woeful Iranian nuclear deal that his predecessor cancelled.
What is worrisome about Iran is not its genocidal ideology, but that so many Western countries and leaders are becoming more sympathetic to it. Influential left-wing politicians and diplomats socialize with their Iranian counterparts and come away suckered into thinking they are something other than an ideological enemy and a geopolitical mega-threat that makes the UN feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
There was a moment after 9/11 when some sort of détente seemed possible between Iran and the West, if not recognition then a peaceful coexistence of sorts, stressing the social and cultural ties.
But such tentative steps came to a crashing halt with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Ahmadinejad’s revolutionary purism, Holocaust denial, and conviction that Israel would soon be “wiped from the pages of history” all ensured that any remaining ambiguity about Iran’s position had been banished. All this took on a more ominous tone in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Pro-Ayatollah supporters openly spoke about the “fantasy” of the Holocaust, which had been invented to justify the establishment of Israel, while Revolutionary Guards paraded missiles brandished with flags saying Israel must be destroyed.
As the regime became more fanatical in its antipathy towards Israel, Iranians themselves became uneasy, reflecting wider disaffection with the Islamic Republic itself. The new mood was first voiced during the Green Movement in 2009. Protestors began to chant, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” The authorities were horrified at this apparent change in sentiment and even more moderate Iranian politicians pretended it had been misheard.
As Iran’s political and economic situation has declined, so too the popular criticism of revolutionary indulgence — be it in Syria, Gaza, or Iraq — has intensified. Attendance at the annual Jerusalem Day demonstrations in support of the Palestinians has declined dramatically in recent years. The more radical the regime has become, the more Iranian society has pushed back, all this according to Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
In stark contrast to Western capitals, there were no popular protests in Iran’s cities to support the Palestinians following Hamas’ October 7th attacks. A small government sponsored demonstration was ridiculed by onlookers.
“One of the great ironies of our present predicament is that, as the regime pursues the logic of its revolutionary ideology, it does so without the support of wider Iranian society,” wrote Ansari. “Iranians are focused on problems closer to home. They know who their enemy is, and it’s not Israel.”5
“Corruption reigns supreme in Iran—and it’s getting worse.” Atlantic Council.
“UN dubious role in Muslim world.” Saudi Gazette.
“U.N.’s Own Audit Found UNRWA Vulnerable to ‘Graft and Corruption.’” UN Watch.
Israel Defense Forces on X
“Iranians know who their enemy is, and it’s not Israel.” Engelsberg Ideas
There is no doubt the UN has been in bed with fundamentalist Muslim states like Iran for decades. The question is: why did the United States, Canada and other Western countries allow it? It's not enough to say the unholy alliance between Islamic powers and the far-left Western elite had a role to play in this. What about Western conservatives? They held power too. What role did they - and their cohorts - play in the mass immigration of Muslim immigrants to Western countries, in the sanctioning of genocides committed by Islamic states against Christians and fellow Muslims? In the constant focus on Israel as the villain against a bunch of bloodthirsty Muslim orcs that call themselves Palestinians? How did it happen? Will free people rise up to change it - or is the Islamization of the world an inevitability - with or without the UN?
There is also a love of Iran by the American progressives. Amy Goodman did a ten minute report on the conflict between Yemen (Hothis) and Saudi Arabia and never once mentioned Iran. He opinion was that big bad Saudi Arabia was terrorizing Yemen and commiting genocide. Sound familiar? I really don't understand that world view.