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The United Nations Has Run Out Of Alibis

Zero Rss
2 weeks 1 day ago
The United Nations Has Run Out Of Alibis

Authored by Pierre Rehov via The Epoch Times,

Institutions built to prevent atrocities eventually face the question of what they actually protect. For the United Nations, voting patterns, internal investigations and its own decisions this year no longer support the fiction of neutrality. An UNRWA school in Gaza sat above a Hamas tunnel shaft and three anti-tank positions, and its own principal was on the payroll of both institutions at once - a fact that American investigators, not the UN, brought to light.

Israeli soldiers inspect the entrance to a Hamas terror tunnel directly outside an UNRWA compound in Gaza City on Feb. 8, 2024. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

The pattern is old: during the oil-for-food scandal, a mid-level program director faced US prosecution while the officials who managed the program from above kept their positions. When UN failures surface, line staff absorb the exposure. The people who set the policy rarely do.

The arithmetic alone dismantles the pretense of balance. In 2025 the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted 15 resolutions targeting Israel, and only 11 addressing the rest of the planet combined - a tally covering North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and the United States together. From 2015 through 2024, the total reached 173 resolutions against Israel, compared to 80 for all other member states combined. The UN Human Rights Council has run comparable numbers since 2006, adopting 112 resolutions against Israel compared to 45 against Syria, despite a civil war there that killed hundreds of thousands.

On Nov. 20, 2025, the UNGA's Fourth Committee passed six resolutions condemning Israel while producing not a single resolution on Sudan, where fighting has killed more than 150,000 people and driven 12 million from their homes. The bloc that commands the UNGA's automatic majority sets these priorities; the scale of actual human suffering has nothing to do with it.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) supplies the starkest illustration. After October 7, the agency's own internal review found that nine employees may have taken part in the massacre - a figure that American investigators have since made look negligible. According to USAID:

"The USAID Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG), a statutorily independent law enforcement and oversight entity, has referred for suspension/debarment consideration the names of 101 current or former staff at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for participation in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and/or affiliation with the military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) of Hamas. Among the individuals referred were UNRWA school principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counselors, and medical professionals, including:

- A deputy school principal serving as an al-Qassam deputy company commander in the Ain Gallout/5th infantry battalion.
- A deputy school principal serving as squad leader for the Khan Younis Brigade/2nd infantry battalion.
- A teacher serving as squad leader in Hamas' military security department/intelligence unit who tracked assignment of explosive devices.
- A teacher serving as a platoon commander of the Central Brigade/Al Quds 2nd Battalion.
- A math & computer teacher with ties to an al-Qassam intelligence squad.
- A teacher with expertise as a sniper for Hamas.
- A teacher and Hamas soldier with orders to bring two anti-tank missiles to a prescribed location during the October 7 terror attacks.
- A deputy school principal serving as a platoon commander in Hamas' Nuseirat battalion with communications responsibilities on October 7th.
- A school principal assigned to the chemical department of a Hamas military manufacturing unit whose school had three anti-tank positions and a tunnel shaft located under the facility."

One of those referred, Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, coordinated with fellow operatives during the Oct. 7 massacre while running an UNRWA school, and became the first person affiliated with a UN humanitarian agency ever debarred by the US government for terrorism. Under mounting pressure, UNRWA itself dismissed 70 staff linked to terrorist organizations in Gaza in the weeks before the referral was published, an admission that followed the release of evidence rather than the agency's own vetting. Groups tracking UNRWA's personnel put the true scale of Hamas penetration considerably higher, closer to 1,500 employees still drawing a UN salary.

The reckoning caught up with the agency in public on July 1, 2026, when the "Board of Peace," the body now overseeing Gaza's postwar administration, announced that UNRWA "has no place in the new Gaza" and described continued dependence on the agency as an obstacle to recovery rather than a form of relief.

Washington's ambassador for UN reform, Jeff Bartos, told the annual pledging conference the same day that member states funding UNRWA had spent years choosing incitement, terrorism and stagnation over an alternative, and warned that history would remember the choice. Within hours, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League rejected the announcement and insisted that UNRWA's mandate cannot be dissolved by an administrative statement.

Whatever the outcome of this dispute, an institution long marketed as irreplaceable is being dismantled in real time by the very coalition managing the territory it was built to serve.

This state of affairs is not new behavior wearing new language. The UN's largest financial scandal, the oil-for-food program, saw then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein extract $1.8 billion in kickbacks starting in 1996, with help from more than 2,000 companies, while the Volcker inquiry found that weak UN oversight and Security Council paralysis had made the scheme possible. The program's own director was later indicted in the United States for bribery; senior UN officials mostly walked away untouched.

UN peacekeeping missions have produced a smaller, steadier version of the same pattern: a procurement task force documented more than $630 million in tainted contracts and two dozen confirmed corruption schemes, only to be shut down in 2008 after member states with implicated nationals refused to renew its mandate.

Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers followed an identical script, with nearly 2,000 allegations accumulated over 12 years and only a fraction of the accused ever serving prison time.

The historical ledger is worse than the bureaucratic one. In 1994, UN representatives and peacekeepers watched as more than 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda over roughly 100 days, while its own commander in the field begged for reinforcements and was refused. A year later, the UN declared the Bosnian town of Srebrenica a protected zone, then denied the air support its peacekeepers requested as 8,000 men and boys were murdered under the UN flag. In Haiti, UN peacekeepers introduced cholera into a country that had been free of the disease for a century; nearly 10,000 people died before the organization admitted any responsibility - six years after the outbreak began. The zero-tolerance policies announced afterward changed little about how missions were run or how misconduct was punished.

Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti and Gaza share the same organizational reflex: investigate quietly, discipline the lowest-ranking staff available, and leave the people who set policy in place.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council after October 7 that the Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum," a formulation he has since echoed on UNRWA's failures - careful language built to avoid naming the agency's own culpability.

The United Nations was founded to make atrocities costly for those who commit or enable them. It has instead built a machine that absorbs those costs internally, so long as the people responsible sit inside the institution or represent the states that control its votes.

Even the coalition now running Gaza's transition has concluded that one of the UN's flagship agencies does not belong there. This verdict came from the "Board of Peace," the body tasked with cleaning up what the war left behind - not from Jerusalem or from Washington's harshest critics of the UN. The record speaks plainly enough on its own. What remains open is how much longer the rest of the world intends to keep paying for it.

Originally published by the Gatestone Institute. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 23:20
Tyler Durden

Platner's Replacement May Not Be Eligible For Nomination

Zero Rss
2 weeks 1 day ago
Platner's Replacement May Not Be Eligible For Nomination

Maine Democrats gathered in Bangor on Saturday to select a replacement for Graham Platner, whose Senate campaign collapsed under allegations of sexual assault - which he denied - that surfaced after his June primary win. Former Senate President Troy Jackson formally won the nomination. He will face Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the nation's most closely watched Senate races, a race that Democrats have deemed critical if they hope to win the majority in the Senate.

Troy Jackson at a candidate debate earlier this month in Portland, Maine. Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

However, one inconvenient detail threatens to complicate Jackson's coronation: a Republican state lawmaker says Jackson may not be legally eligible to accept the nomination at all.

State Rep. James White (R-Guilford) sent a letter to Secretary of State Shenna Bellows asking her office to determine whether Jackson, or any candidate who lost a primary for a different federal, state or county office in June, qualifies as a replacement nominee under Maine law. White wanted the question settled before Bellows certifies whatever comes out of Saturday's convention, but that didn't happen, which could be a problem.

Rep. James White has sent a letter to Shenna Bellows suggesting that Troy Jackson is not legally allowed to become the Senate nominee:

"The apparent justification for Mr. Jackson's eligibility depends entirely on treating the June primary and November general election as… pic.twitter.com/NnTS3bSxFp

— The Maine Wire (@TheMaineWire) July 24, 2026

According to White, Jackson's own ballot history might make him legally ineligible. Jackson ran for governor earlier this year, lost that Democratic primary in June, and became his party's Senate nominee through a replacement process rather than a primary vote of his own.

Under Title 21-A, Section 331 of Maine election law, "a person may not file, whether by primary election or nomination petition, as a candidate for more than one federal, state or county office at any election." He also points to Section 351, which imposes similar restrictions, and Section 363, which requires that a political committee filling a nomination vacancy "shall choose a qualified person to fill the vacancy."

Whether Jackson still counts as a "qualified person" after losing a statewide primary is the crux of White's argument. "The Department should resolve this question before accepting or certifying any replacement nomination," he wrote.

White reaches back to 1974 for precedent, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Storer v. Brown, which described primary elections as "an integral part of the entire election process." His argument is that treating June's primary and November's general election as two separate contests cuts against both the Court's reasoning and the Legislature's stated intent to keep candidates from seeking more than one office "at any election." White's letter frames this as standard sore loser logic. Laws of this type exist across the country to stop a candidate who loses one race from reaching the general election through a side door.

Maine has no explicit sore loser statute on the books, unlike several other states that spell out the prohibition in plain language. White's position is that the existing patchwork of Title 21-A provisions accomplishes the same result even without a dedicated clause. Maine law does allow parties to replace nominees who withdraw after winning a primary, which is how Democrats find themselves in this position following Platner's exit, but the statute never quite addresses what happens when the proposed replacement lost a separate statewide primary of his own.

Reasonable election law observers could land on either side of this question, and if a legal challenge follows Jackson's nomination, according to The Maine Wire, a court may end up settling the matter, and depending on how that plays out, could put Democrats in a real bind.

The Secretary of State's office did not issue a public response to White's letter before the convention, and it remains unclear whether Bellows intends to produce a formal legal opinion. And Bellows is no neutral arbiter here: she was herself a candidate in this very Senate race, one of the contenders who dropped out and cleared the path for Jackson in the days before the convention. Regardless, Bellows, a Democrat, wouldn't rule against her own party's interest anyway, but clearing Jackson's candidacy, especially now, won't end the matter, since a court challenge could still follow.

If such a challenge were to proceed, and in the unlikely event it were to prevail, disqualifying Jackson would upend the Democratic Party's effort to field any candidate against Collins with barely four months remaining before Election Day, a scramble that could pave the way for Collins to win in November easily.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 22:45
Tyler Durden

Beijing Blacklists 14 EU Firms After Brussels Targets Chinese Companies In Latest Russia Sanctions Package

Zero Rss
2 weeks 1 day ago
Beijing Blacklists 14 EU Firms After Brussels Targets Chinese Companies In Latest Russia Sanctions Package

Via The Cradle

Beijing prohibited 14 EU companies from obtaining Chinese dual-use goods on Friday, targeting Europe's defense industry shortly after the EU included 14 Chinese and Hong Kong firms in its 21st sanctions package against Russia.

Announcing the measures with immediate effect, the Chinese Commerce Ministry called the bloc's conduct "egregious" and demanded the EU "immediately correct its wrongdoing, eliminate the egregious impact, and safeguard the overall interests of China–EU relations with concrete actions."

AFP/Getty Images

The restrictions cover dual-use items, goods, software, and technology with both civilian and military applications, including rare earth elements used to build drones and chips. 

Parties outside China are also barred from transferring Chinese-origin dual-use goods to any listed entity, though exporters may request permission in exceptional cases or when a shipment is deemed "truly necessary."

Rheinmetall leads the list, alongside Polish electronics producer Vigo Photonics, Italian electric motor manufacturer Lafert, French drone developer Cavok UAS, Czech truckmaker Tatra, Dutch naval engineering firm IHC Merwede, and several optics and laser companies. 

Germany and France each have three entries, Italy and Poland each have two, and the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania each have one.

China's mission to the EU lodged a formal protest, voicing "strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition" to the measures and rejecting attempts by the bloc to place responsibility for the war in Ukraine on Beijing. It added that China "firmly opposes the EU's unwarranted listing and sanctioning of Chinese companies and citizens."

The 21st package subjected 51 entities to tighter export curbs on dual-use goods and technologies over their support for Russia's military and industrial complex. Companies based in India, Turkey, and the UAE were listed alongside those from mainland China and Hong Kong.

Brussels targeted small trade and logistics operators in port cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dalian, while Beijing focused on Europe's defense industry.

🇨🇳🇪🇺 China just blacklisted the companies arming Europe.

14 EU firms lost access to Chinese dual-use exports overnight, payback for the EU's latest sanctions over Russia.

The list hits artillery makers, drone builders, targeting systems, military trucks and lasers.

All of them… pic.twitter.com/EpKTSoqnTj

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 24, 2026

Cui Hongjian, a former diplomat who heads European studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the disparity does not make the response any less reciprocal from Beijing's perspective, noting that successive EU packages have named far more Chinese firms overall than China has named in return. 

"Since this whole episode arose from the Russia-Ukraine war, I think it's understandable that China is now pointing its retaliation at Rheinmetall," Cui said. "From Beijing's point of view, if it's going to retaliate, the retaliation has to bite."

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 22:10
Tyler Durden

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