The UN’s toxic obsession with Israel

The United Nations has taken its unhealthy obsession with Israel to a new extreme, with the claim by an independent UN commission that it deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza. This update on the ancient anti-Semitic trope of Jews murdering babies is now endorsed by the UN’s so-called Commission of Inquiry in their latest report. A cursory glance at their findings reveals a striking absence of empirical evidence to substantiate their most explosive claims. Instead, they appear to rely on anecdotes elevated into proof, inference transformed into certainty, and allegations repeated so often they masquerade as facts.

The Commission points to the number of Palestinian children killed during the war and assumes intent. It cites the use of large munitions in densely populated areas apparently as proof that children were the target, rather than acknowledging the reality that Hamas deliberately embedded itself within civilian areas in order to use the people of Gaza, including children, as human shields. As has been the practice in much Western media coverage throughout the conflict that Hamas initiated with the Oct 7 massacre, the BBC breathlessly reported it, without mentioning until paragraph eight that the body’s three-person panel “does not officially speak for the UN”.

The report claims that Israel targeted Palestinian children in Gaza directly by shooting at their vital organs. And yet, the evidence that is actually provided for such bold claims is extraordinarily thin. Of course, for the usual suspects, this is enough: there’s nothing so devilish about the Jewish state that they won’t swallow it. The tragedy is that, while the UN has rightly attracted condemnation from informed critics, it has somehow retained an almost sacrosanct halo among much of the wider public. To many, the UN remains the ultimate authority in international affairs. That reverence allows weak evidence, activist assumptions and ideological predispositions to be laundered into accepted wisdom.