The U.N. Is Making Trump’s Case on the Human Rights Council

By Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Few events as poignantly underscored the lamentable record of the United Nations on human rights as the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. And yet, Pillay, a dedicated antisemite whose Nobel was celebrated by Hamas, is an apt avatar for the U.N. Human Rights Council, an organization whose mission and work are regularly at odds.

 

No surprise, then, that a 2025 Trump executive order once again ended U.S. participation with the HRC, criticizing it for protecting “human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny.” This echoes more detailed criticism in 2018 when the U.S. similarly ceased its participation, citing anti-Israel bias, human rights violators regularly winning seats on the council, and willful inattention to “the misery inflicted by regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and China.”

 

Strangely, however, the European governments and U.N. bureaucrats that predictably condemned the American withdrawal have done precisely nothing to address U.S. criticisms, nor adopted any reforms to entice the U.S. to reconsider. Instead, they have chosen to tolerate and continue its dysfunction, ignoring some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises to focus disproportionately on one country: Israel.

 

The record of bias is plain. According to a database compiled by U.N. Watch, since it was founded in 2006, the Council has adopted 346 resolutions containing language condemning a country for human rights violations. Israel was the focus of 116 (34 percent) of those resolutions.

 

Alone among the world’s countries, Israel is subject to a separate human rights item: Agenda Item 7, titled “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every other country is examined under Agenda Item 4, titled “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention.”

 

In addition, the council currently has twelve “country mandates” that focus on human rights situations in individual countries, such as North Korea and Iran. All are subject to periodic renewal except for the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” that remains in place “until the end of the Israeli occupation.”

 

Instead of taking U.S. criticism to heart, since the U.S. disengaged, the council has adopted eight new resolutions condemning Israel, and its human rights experts and an “independent” Commission of Inquiry have accused it of genocide despite lacking evidence of intent and in the face of contravening evidence.

 

Meanwhile, countries with human rights records beside which Israel pales continue to be elected to the council. The current membership includes China, Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Vietnam, and other countries considered “not free” by Freedom House. Just this past week, Burundi and Kuwait, which are also considered “not free,” were elected to three-year terms starting in January.

 

How do they get elected? They game the system, making sure that only as many countries run for election as there are openings, thereby guaranteeing victory. Last year and this year, every election for a council seat was one of these “clean slate” elections. As Human Rights Watch accurately noted, “This uncompetitive vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election.’”

 

Historically, “not free” and “partly free” countries have jointly comprised a majority on the 47-member Human Rights Council. They have worked together to water down or block criticism of their abuses. This coordination explains why China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and others have never been condemned in a Human Rights Council resolution.

 

These problems are not new. The U.S. has consistently voiced concerns about these problems under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

 

As we argued several years ago, there is no way to make the council perfect. No reform can overcome or eliminate the hostility of many U.N. member states to Israel. If the council reflects the U.N. membership, disproportionate — and biased — attention will be focused on Israel.

 

But steps can be taken to address the most obvious flaws.

 

First, the U.N. General Assembly should ensure that Israel is treated like other nations institutionally and procedurally by eliminating Agenda Item 7 so that Israel’s human rights practices are examined under Agenda Item 4 as is the case for every other nation. It should also require country mandates and commissions of inquiry focused on Israel to be subject to periodic renewal, as is the case for other “special procedures” and investigations.

 

To address non-competitive “clean slate” elections, the General Assembly should amend the process to automatically list as candidates every state that is not currently serving on the council or is otherwise prohibited from running (such as having served two consecutive terms) and hold successive ballots eliminating the lowest half of vote recipients in each region until all the open seats are filled. The General Assembly could go further and increase the threshold for election to two-thirds (129 votes) of the General Assembly, as originally proposed, instead of a simple majority (97 votes).

 

Together, these changes would ensure that council elections are genuinely competitive and, by giving governments a wider pool of options, increase the odds for free countries to win seats on the council, which should make it more capable of fulfilling its claim as the premier human rights body in the U.N. system.

 

The Trump administration has been criticized for disengaging with the Human Rights Council. But Democratic and Republican administrations have both condemned council practices, although Democrats have been more willing to try and fix things from within. But U.S. reengagement alone will not fix things, as fundamental changes require support from most U.N. member states. So once again, the question presses: Do human rights really matter to the “international community”? Or is no incentive great enough to abandon the bias and omission that make the likes of Pillay proud?

At Turtle Bay, Trump Sinks Under His Own Weight

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Donald Trump, the retired game-show host who serves, incredibly enough, as president of these United States, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Tuesday, and, of course, he gave a second-rate rally speech that was daft and superficial and dishonest in all the ways Trump customarily is daft and superficial and dishonest. Dog bites man, if toothlessly.

 

The ladies and gentlemen of the United Nations, for their part, did what they do best, i.e., approximately nothing, although they did apparently undertake several separate inspections of the escalator Trump would use, hoping to avoid repeating last year’s fiasco in which a malfunction had the president fuming about being victimized by “sabotage” at the international body. This time around, the stalled equipment was Trump’s inferior (very) frontal gyrus, specifically the bit known as Broca’s area, which is the part of the brain responsible for accessing vocabulary and evidently experienced a glitch as the president raged against the “mutilization” of children under the influence of radical gender ideology.

 

Trump’s speech was intended for domestic rather than international consumption, and it contained no good news for Republicans—rather the opposite, in fact: Trump reiterated his insistence that he expects an Iranian peace deal and a rapid decline in gasoline and diesel prices after the midterms, which is Trump’s beef-witted way of saying that he expects no such developments before the midterms. Not unrelatedly, he made a point of reminding the room that he is not going to be on the ballot. Allow me to translate that into English from the original Low Chimpanzee: You Republicans are hosed, nothing is going to be done about the one big issue that most irritates the greater part of your voters, and my main concern here is that this could make me look bad, so I’m just going to pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Trump is getting ready to tell defeated Republicans “I never knew you,” words he himself might expect to hear in the near future in another context.

 

Indeed, much of the speech was given over to Trump’s rehearsing the emotional self-defense litany he will be chanting to himself (and to anyone who will listen) after Republicans get their asses handed to them at the polls and he gets to spend a lot more time answering questions about why it is that a family of supposed billionaires needs a Russian oligarch to pay for Uday’s ghastly wedding: greatest economy ever, strongest country ever, strongest military ever, etc.—an all-American bed of roses until those ungrateful MAGA rube voters Democrats came along and wrecked everything.

 

President Ronald Reagan gave seven addresses to the General Assembly in the closing days of the Cold War, which was in its closing days in no small part because of the efforts Reagan described in his U.N. speeches, which were themselves moral weapons wielded in that war to considerable effect. The first, second, and last of them together form a sort of essay on Reagan’s view of international relations in his time. Many Americans, particularly miseducated young people, will find those speeches enlightening, even shocking: Reagan, caricatured in our time as a warmonger and bigot, is remarkably conciliatory toward the Soviets, denounces South African apartheid and comparable moral blights on the second half of the 20^th century, presses for reduction in both conventional forces and nuclear weapons, quotes Mohandas Gandhi, etc. At the United Nations, Reagan the peacenik is on full display: You know—the man who wanted the United States to share anti-missile technology with the Soviets as a way to make nuclear missiles less strategically valuable.

 

In much the same way that civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were at their best and most influential when they indicted the United States for failing to live up to its national creed, Reagan put the United Nations on the spot by celebrating its ideals and idealism and pressing the body and its member states to live up to its own words. In his series of speeches, Reagan reiterates his belief that the two great mandates of the United Nations—the pursuit of international peace and the defense of fundamental human rights—are, in fact, the same mission:

 

If we would have peace, we must acknowledge the elementary rights of our fellow human beings. In our own land and in other lands, if we would have peace, the trampling of the human spirit must cease. Human rights is not for some, some of the time. Human rights, as the universal declaration of this Assembly adopted in 1948 proclaims, is “for all people and all nations,'” and for all time.

 

This regard for human rights as the foundation of peace is at the heart of the U.N. Those who starve in Ethiopia, those who die among the Kurds, those who face racial injustice in South Africa, those who still cannot write or speak freely in the Soviet Union, those who cannot worship in the Ukraine, those who struggle for life and freedom on boats in the South China Sea, those who cannot publish or assemble in Managua—all of this is more than just an agenda item on your calendar. It must be a first concern, an issue above others.

 

Trump, on the other hand ... well:

 

I have a big decision to make.

 

Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?

 

Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world.

 

Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?

 

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

 

But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to.

 

They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.

 

What they don’t realize is that I’m not running.

 

I did that already and won in a landslide.

 

We won in a giant landslide.

 

Trump also reiterated his favorite political slogan: “To the victor belong the spoils,” a slogan introduced into U.S. politics in the early 19^th century as a defense of the patronage and corruption of the “spoils system.” Its antonym is “Drain the swamp,” if anybody remembers that much-abused phrase.

 

Of course, it is embarrassing for Americans to be represented by such a man as Trump: ignorant, rage-addled, smeared in make-up applied with an artistry that falls somewhere between clown and hooker along with an evolving assortment of hair dyes, doddering, bloated. It is tempting to treat a pathetic figure such as Trump the way Trump would treat such a figure. But what afflicts Trump more than whatever causes his ankle swelling is a curse that might be best understood as a form of moral obesity, a suffocating excess of self that has the ironic effect of disfiguring the self—here I mean the moral self and the mind—rather than aggrandizing it and fortifying it. One can overdo the metaphor, but Trump is a man who seems to have suffered the spiritual equivalent of an ischemic stroke when he was about 27 and never to have recovered the full use of his faculties. It is not for nothing that he insists on traveling with the emotional equivalent of a nurse.

 

Perhaps Natalie Harp could be dispatched to represent U.S. interests at Turtle Bay. The United Nations is not what it used to be, and it is a very long way down to Ambassador Mike Waltz from George H. W. Bush, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Ball, or Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It remains a very high platform from which to speak and might prove useful for a man with something to say. But the American president is not that kind of man: He has nothing at all to say, beyond even if he does go on and on and on about it.

Why U.N. Agencies Can’t Police Themselves

By Danielle Pletka & Brett Schaefer

Monday, September 21, 2026

 

There will doubtless be much that President Trump will want to highlight when he addresses the United Nations tomorrow. The world is awash in troubles. But he should take time to alert the organization that the U.S. will not tolerate misuse or diversion of U.S. taxpayer dollars. New evidence of the troubling links between Hamas and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) continues to be exposed — including aid being diverted to make weapons, hostages being held in UNRWA facilities, and UNRWA employees engaging in terrorist attacks. But the failures that have plagued UNRWA are far from unique. They are replayed again and again in countries across the world, where humanitarian assistance intended to save innocent lives is being diverted by nefarious actors to take those lives instead.

 

Case in point: A new trove of documents uncovered by the Washington Post reveals that Sudan’s authoritarian regime built a secret stockpile of chemical weapons using chlorine that had been supplied to the country by UNICEF, CARE, and the Red Cross to provide safe drinking water for Sudanese civilians. Cellphone video taken by senior Sudanese officers shows weapons tests in the desert “producing plumes of green-yellow vapor,” and intercepted communications between regime officials indicate that the country’s security forces had stockpiled as many as 290 chemical munitions — some of which were reportedly used against rebel forces.

 

These cases, and dozens more, make clear that relying on organizations with interest in downplaying scandals is a recipe for U.S. taxpayer dollars to be wasted, stolen, diverted to unintended purposes — or, worse yet, used to harm Americans. Organizations that must stay in the good graces of a governing power cannot be relied on to police themselves. Oversight should sit with donors, and in the case of U.S. taxpayer funding, with the U.S. government. But right now, the American oversight system is being eroded from within.

 

Here’s how to fix it.

 

Proper oversight requires diligence on the part of policymakers. The Department of State Inspector General found in a recent audit that foreign assistance programs funded by the Department’s Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) bureau “did not develop and implement appropriate measures to mitigate risks” that selected PRM–funded activities could benefit terrorist groups.

 

This pattern of negligence also afflicts a massive $3.8 billion contribution of U.S. funding over the past nine months to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). We have argued that relying on OCHA to administer U.S. humanitarian assistance shifts control from the U.S. to the U.N. and defangs independent U.S. oversight.

 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration recently signed a memorandum of understanding with OCHA that grants the agency unprecedented deference on whether to report serious allegations of fraud, corruption, and terrorist diversion to U.S. authorities. Under the agreement, U.S. Inspectors General do not have direct access to information related to potential criminal activity involving U.S. funds as required by laws signed by President Trump. A July OCHA report simply labeled “resolved” well over a third of the 48 incidents of fraud, diversion, or sexual abuse involving U.S. funding without disclosing any findings, discipline, or law-enforcement referrals to the U.S. government.

 

This model based on “self-reporting” is unacceptable — leaving the U.S. and other donors unable to trace supplies, inspect records, or determine what actually happened. Independent investigations and U.S. oversight are imperative — so that we can ensure accountability and, when necessary, prosecution for criminal malfeasance.

 

When the U.S. government has access to information, it has acted to stop abuse of taxpayer dollars. In Syria, for example, a USAID investigation led to the suspension of a $44.6 million program after employees placed terrorist fighters on beneficiary lists and resulted in the prosecution of a terrorist linked to al-Qaeda. In Yemen, U.S. oversight prompted WFP to suspend assistance when Houthi authorities rejected controls. Oversight produced action.

 

This is why Congress enacted provisions in 2024 and again in 2026 requiring all multilateral entities receiving State Department funds to agree to global oversight access to U.S. inspectors general. But in Gaza, the State Department Inspector General found that the Office of the Legal Adviser was complicit in ignoring U.S. law and allowing U.S. funding to flow despite glaring information about UNRWA’s links to Hamas. (The online version of this report is redacted, but the original, the details of which were shared with us, lays out in detail the circumvention of congressional intent.)

 

According to Congress, the same legal office signed off on the disastrous memorandum of understanding with OCHA undermining U.S. oversight and control — and is now seeking to restrict the USAID Inspector General from accessing information on misconduct affecting new programs funded by State.

 

Humanitarian crises rarely arise where the rule of law prevails. So, when evidence establishes that U.S. funds were unlawfully diverted, it is the responsibility of the U.S. government to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute the offending parties. Deferring to U.N. agencies to police themselves will lead to more support for terrorism, more corruption, more diversion — and ultimately more American deaths.

The U.N.’s Double Standard on Israel

By Zlatko Zigic

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

Having worked for more than 20 years in senior management positions at the United Nations, I learned to navigate the complex realities of international diplomacy. Yet even for a seasoned insider, the U.N.’s treatment of Yahav Lichner is a damning display of targeting and selective enforcement.

 

Lichner, a respected senior international civil servant at UNICEF, is the target of a setup. He has been placed on administrative leave following the publication of allegations based on decade-old emails obtained through an Iranian state-backed cyber operation. His alleged “crime”? Sharing routine organizational context and deliberation notes with Israeli diplomats, dating back to 2014–15.

 

Earlier this month, Drop Site — a publication frequently hostile toward Israel — ran an article titled “Israel’s Mole,” emphasizing Lichner’s Israeli background and drawing from an Iranian-linked hack that fit a narrative aimed at discrediting Israel.

 

The article itself acknowledges that there is no evidence that the conduct described continued after 2015. Yet a decade of subsequent humanitarian and diplomatic service, including in support of the Palestinian people, is being overshadowed by hacked and manipulated emails.

 

The author of the piece, Murtaza Hussain, and elements within the U.N. are using common informal information-sharing practices to advance a broader anti-Israel narrative, blowing them out of proportion to set up Lichner and, indirectly, target and tarnish the reputation of Israelis and Jews working at the U.N.

 

The speed of Lichner’s placement on leave stands in stark contrast to the U.N.’s handling of terror within its ranks. When United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff participated in the October 7 massacres, the U.N. defaulted to bureaucratic paralysis, claiming it could not “independently authenticate” battlefield evidence captured from Hamas. By setting an impossible evidentiary bar, the U.N. shielded terror-linked operatives from accountability.

 

Where terror-linked personnel received every procedural benefit of the doubt, a highly respected senior Israeli civil servant faced instant condemnation over unverified, decade-old materials weaponized by an enemy cyber-warfare unit.

 

This hypocrisy also ignores a basic reality of U.N. culture: International civil servants routinely maintain robust and informal channels with many governments, including their own. Informal reporting is far more widespread throughout the U.N. than most people realize. This is simply how the organization functions. Senior directors and officials routinely brief even the main donors of major projects and programs on an off-the-record basis. Donors, for example, often expect and require this kind of ongoing informal reporting, and it happens constantly on complex programs, quite apart from the formal reports and analysis.

 

Lichner, with a track record of leadership on humanitarian causes, disclosed no operational security data; he engaged in the kind of routine networking and diplomacy that hundreds of U.N. officials perform daily. Yet merely because of his nationality, he was targeted and his alleged communications were weaponized into a scandal.

 

This double standard thrives in an environment notoriously hostile to Israelis and Jewish people working at the U.N. Many even hide their identity when they go to work. Israelis represent a tiny fraction of the U.N. workforce, and the organization has never appointed an Israeli as an assistant or undersecretary-general. For some, it now appears, even one senior Israeli within the U.N. system is one too many.

 

When the U.N. ignores mountains of evidence regarding actual terrorists on its payroll while dropping the hammer on an Israeli civil servant over decade-old, doubtful hacked emails, its moral authority is shattered. True international civil service requires impartial integrity, not selective prosecution to appease political blocs.

No One Who Bought the Gaza Starvation Narrative Deserves to Be Taken Seriously

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold published a bombshell report this week:

 

At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC, a U.N.–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.

 

Today, U.N. functionaries are encountering a very different problem in Gaza: “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5.” And that is to say nothing of the clearly well-fed adult Gazans who miraculously resurface only after the latest round of fighting with Israel has concluded.

 

“A researcher who has overseen teams collecting malnutrition data in the Horn of Africa remarked that she had ‘never seen’ the emergence of obesity and excess weight in a place that was declared only a year earlier to be suffering from famine,” Reingold continued. “How did Gaza go from being officially classified as famine-stricken to having—in less than a year—one of the region’s lowest levels of severe child malnutrition? Humanitarian agencies have failed so far to answer that fundamental question, and one major organization is still fundraising on the claim that starvation rages on in Gaza.”

 

We’re confronted with one of two possibilities: Either Israel has pulled off the greatest disappearing act in human history or the famine we were supposed to obsess ourselves with in the spring of 2025 never happened.

 

It is impossible to summon any sympathy for those who were surprised by UNICEF’s findings. They are either hopelessly gullible or were so committed to their alternative version of reality that they refused to acknowledge any other. After all, the falseness of the allegation against Israel was obvious at the time.

 

Discerning news consumers might have noticed the discrepancy in the international press’s coverage of “food-starved Gaza,” in which residents were forced to eat “lentils, pasta, and rice.” They might have asked themselves why self-described humanitarian organizations resorted to proving the existence of a famine by promoting pictures of children — and it was only ever children — who suffered from emaciating genetic disorders or preexisting conditions. They could have just applied elementary logic to claims like the one issued by the BBC alleging that there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours” unless U.N. functionaries could reach them. That one depended as much on the audience’s innumeracy as their indifference to the truth.

 

Much of the public’s confusion is attributable to the United Nations itself. The United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) insisted a famine was afoot in the first place. The organization was incensed when Israel limited its access to the Gaza Strip after it was revealed that Hamas was raiding U.N. convoys and rationing food aid to the Gazan people — that is, when it wasn’t working directly with the U.N. Israel and the US established an alternative aid-distribution mechanism in the form of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but that charity was swiftly accused of deliberately starving the Gazan people. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is engineered scarcity.”

 

If the U.N. wasn’t overseeing its distribution, there might as well have been no food aid at all. That’s what Democratic politicians in the U.S. appeared to believe. Or, at least, those were the shibboleths the activist class expected them to mouth. Far too many Democratic politicians dutifully obliged.

 

“Hunger and malnutrition are widespread, and, alarmingly, deaths due to starvation, especially among children, are increasing,” read an open letter signed by 40 Democratic lawmakers. Senator Peter Welch (Vt.) accused Israel of executing a “war crime,” using “starvation” to advance the “government’s strategy of forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land.” Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii) correctly intuited that it was “not at all credible” to think that the Israeli military was incapable of providing aid to the Gazan people, but he rejected the logic of his own conclusion.

 

Israel’s “blocking all food and emergency aid” ensured that “tens of thousands of children” would face “imminent starvation,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) concluded. “Half a million Palestinians are now at serious risk of famine,” said the equally emotive appeal of Senator Chris Murphy (Ct.), “and every day that food and medicine are kept from starving families, more children suffer, and more innocent lives are lost.” To Senator Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the “burgeoning famine” in Gaza amounted to “collective punishment that is clearly illegal under international law.”

 

“This man-made famine and genocide must end,” wrote Representative Summer Lee (Pa.). “Over 2 million people are being intentionally deprived of food, water, medicine, and baby formula,” Representative Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) concurred. None of them could beat Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib’s dramatic crescendo: “This is the final stage of their genocide,” she declared.

 

Some of these heedless politicians and their credulous followers might convince themselves that the epochal famine they warned of last year has since been mitigated. After all, high-intensity ground operations inside Gaza concluded ten months ago. But that is not an evasion that is available to those who continue to accuse Israel of engineering a “genocide” inside Gaza even today. Nor would an appeal to that kind of illogic absolve those who subordinated their powers of critical thinking to their desire to participate in a moral panic.

 

The most you could say for those who fell in line is that they deferred to the U.N.’s authority. After all, it was that body that sounded the alarms in the first place. But when Reingold went looking for the data that informed the U.N.’s conclusions, she found that the folders to which she’d been granted access “containing recent presentations and meeting minutes” were “gone.” They’d been offline for about a week before Reingold discovered it, only for them to be “restored about 11 hours later.” Suddenly, the IPC’s website showed that malnutrition rates in Gaza had precipitously declined.

 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” one Israeli government consultant told Reingold. That isn’t just true of the United Nations. The global anti-Israel movement rests on a reliable and durable foundation of incuriosity. But that is an explanation, not an excuse. At the very least, we should expect those who allowed themselves to be taken in by this flimsy lie to explain why we should ever take them seriously again.

The UN Would Rather Historical Sites Be Destroyed Than Be in Jewish Hands

By Seth Mandel

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon is an unforgettable landmark to Israelis and to the general public. For the latter, a reasonably well-preserved Crusader fortress is a rare and memorable sight. For Israelis, however, Beaufort’s other uniqueness comes into play: It remains, 900 years after its construction, a strategically useful fort.

 

Built in the 12th century above the Litani River, the fort spent its early decades changing hands between the Franks and Muslim forces. In the modern era, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinian terrorists, and the Iranian occupation forces of Hezbollah have taken turns.

 

When Israel fought the Palestine Liberation Organization in South Lebanon in 1982, taking the castle was the source of some controversy. Its necessity was in question and its cost in casualties was higher than expected. Each time Israel withdrew from Lebanon, which it did again in 2000 under Ehud Barak, Beaufort was among the last places evacuated.

 

For decades, then, Beaufort Castle was a place from which terrorists attacked Lebanon’s sovereign next-door neighbor, Israel. Doing so was an act of recklessness, though neither the Palestinians nor the Iranians have ever shown hesitation in putting historical sites at risk. And yet it was only last week that UNESCO, the United Nations cultural arm, moved to put Beaufort on its historic register.

 

The reason? To undermine the Israel-Lebanon peace process.

 

In taking this step, the UN made the destruction of historic sites (one in Lebanon and one in Judea and Samaria) far more likely. It’s clear now that, somehow, the world is going to need to protect historic sites from the United Nations.

 

Beaufort’s addition to this list is among the most hypocritical acts the UN has ever taken—and the UN engages in a lifetime’s worth of hypocrisy every year.

 

In fact, it’s much worse even than it looks. On the surface, those who launch rockets from the Beaufort area and who draw war to its doorstep are obviously the ones putting the fortress in danger. But Hezbollah does so much more than that.

 

Just two weeks ago, Israel showed journalists what lies beneath Beaufort thanks to the Iranians and their allies. Hezbollah built a sprawling tunnel system in the ground under and around the fortress, which lies on a ridge two-thousand feet above sea level.

 

The IDF took journalists into one of the tunnels, which has an exit facing the northern Israeli town of Metula, making clear that Hezbollah’s presence in the ridge has one purpose: war.

 

With the cease-fire, however, Israel is held back from fully chasing Hezbollah terrorists out of ridge tunnels. The pause has enabled the Iranian proxy to fortify other positions, move weapons and personnel around, and create the conditions for more all-out war from the castle and the other tunnel systems it has built in the South.

 

The UN has thus moved to preserve, rather than remove, the biggest threat to Beaufort Castle.

 

In Samaria, meanwhile, Palestinians rejoiced at the inclusion of Sebastia on the heritage list. Sebastia is an ancient Jewish historical site next to an Arab village, and the Palestinians have looted and destroyed parts of the site while preventing additional archaeological excavations.

 

Israel has moved to expropriate a piece land next to the site, located within Area C, which is under Israeli control. It would do much to prevent the further intentional destruction of Jewish (and Roman) history. What hasn’t been looted has been appropriated: The Palestinians submitted the site to the UN heritage list while omitting any Jewish connection to it. (I think some used to call that “cultural genocide.”)

 

Thus the approval of the application is itself a formal erasure of history designed to prevent its protection from further destruction. The UN is doing this solely because it shares the Palestinian application’s hatred of Jews and dedication to the political looting of other people’s history.

 

The UN has turned UNESCO into an agency of destruction. It should be kept far from anything the world wants preserved.

Rubio’s Strong Case Against the ICC

National Review Online

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

In one of the first acts of Donald Trump’s second term, the president imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for, among other offenses, attempting to subject the U.S. and its allies to its jurisdiction with or without their consent.

 

The ICC didn’t take the hint. So, this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the U.S. would take things a step further. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal,” he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

Trump’s chief diplomat makes a sound case for the administration’s opposition to the ICC. He observed that one of the court’s prosecutors has called America’s activities in Afghanistan “war crimes,” to establish the predicate for the prosecution of U.S. soldiers and political officials. More than that, Rubio noted that the ICC’s prosecutors have attempted to thwart our deportations solely because these expulsions involve other nations, as any deportation program would. And when America’s elected officials complain about the court’s power grabs, Rubio observed, they, too, are accused of crimes.

 

“It is only a matter of time before the ICC begins making good on these threats,” Rubio wrote. The left-leaning European press scoffed at his worry that the ICC would seek to criminalize the domestic enforcement of U.S. immigration law — concocting “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” as The Guardian put it. But why is that so hard to believe? The ICC invents flimsy pretexts to justify its intervention into the affairs of nonmember states all the time.

 

Take Israel, for example. Because the ICC wanted to prosecute Israeli officials for the conduct of Jerusalem’s post–October 7 war on its terrorist enemies, it erected a dubious rationale to justify its intervention in that conflict. In ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s words, the court was engaged in the oversight of a war that was being conducted inside “the state of Palestine.” No internationally recognized legal entity goes by that name, of course. But pretending the Palestinians have a state justifies the ICC’s desire to prosecute Israelis on their behalf.

 

Khan, who was sanctioned by name by Trump in February 2025, just made up this legal fiction so that he could violate Israeli sovereignty. Why wouldn’t these same malleable standards be applied to the United States?

 

Trump’s Democratic predecessors, by the way, could look askance at the court. President Barack Obama did not seek the Senate’s consent to join the court. Indeed, he unilaterally declared that U.S. soldiers engaged in peacekeeping operations abroad operate “without risk of criminal prosecution or other assertion of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court.”

 

President Joe Biden lashed out at the court when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” he said in a statement. “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in 2024 that he was open to sanctions on the ICC.

 

The activist and academic left accused both presidents of hypocrisy — praising the ICC and using it to advance U.S. interests when it suited them, but undermining the court when it threatened U.S. sovereignty and that of its allies. Well, yeah. Welcome to the world of statecraft.

 

“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio concluded. “To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.” Indeed, no supranational entity should have a veto power over U.S. security priorities as defined by America’s elected leaders and, ultimately, its voters. Let the dismantling begin.

The ICC Deserves ‘Dismantling’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

 

The Guardian probably didn’t set out to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s point when it critiqued the secretary of state’s searing condemnation of the International Criminal Court, but it did.

 

The progressive venue scoffed at Rubio’s invocation of “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” which Trump’s chief diplomat warned the ICC “now claims the power to do.”

 

“The ICC is not claiming jurisdiction over conduct in the United States,” Human Rights Watch’s onetime executive director Kenneth Roth explained. Rubio not only misstated the court’s role, but he’s also “dressing up his quest for impunity for American war crimes,” Roth added. “Trump wants to be able to commit war crimes on the territory of countries that have accepted the court’s jurisdiction — that’s what this is about.”

 

But CBP and ICE do, on occasion, operate on foreign soil in investigative, screening, security roles. And the ICC does claim the authority to prosecute alleged violations of human rights and war crimes conducted inside the territory of member states, even when the accused is a non-member. That’s one of the foremost reasons why the United States did not ratify the Rome Statute that established the ICC in the first place — because it was foreseeable that someone, somewhere would try to prosecute Americans for lawfully executing orders designed to preserve its security and that of its allies.

 

That’s exactly what has happened, as Rubio himself explained:

 

Americans found themselves in the crosshairs anyway: In 2020 the ICC launched an investigation into what chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of Gambia described as “war crimes by members of the United States armed forces” in Afghanistan, declaring that the U.S. government hadn’t prosecuted enough American soldiers to satisfy the court. In effect, Ms. Bensouda was anointing herself the final judge of U.S. military policy and the entire U.S. justice system.

 

For this, and many other valid reasons, the U.S. will use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to “dismantle the ICC,” Rubio declared, “brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

The reality is that the ICC has never strictly observed its jurisdictional limitations. Indeed, its members are more inclined to test their parameters and invent fantastical alternative realities that justify their meddlesome impulses.

 

Take, for example, “the situation in the State of Palestine.” That’s how the ICC opened its report announcing its intention to seek warrants for the arrest of government officials within the “territory of Israel.” These linguistic fictions were necessary for the court to fabricate the existence of an “international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine.” That was the necessary pretext to legitimize the ICC’s efforts to intervene in Israel’s post-10/7 war on Hamas’s behalf, after all.

 

That useful fairy tale was spearheaded by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. He was specifically named in an annex to Trump’s 2025 executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC, and events have subsequently proven the White House’s wisdom. In June, the U.K. Bar Standards Board suspended Khan after a two-year investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct involving a female aide. That preliminary suspension was upheld this week in advance of disciplinary proceedings. As it debates whether to remove Khan from office, the ICC’s Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties determined that Khan’s denials were “devoid of credibility.” Indeed, Khan’s credibility is a depreciating asset across the board.

 

The ICC, an arm of the United Nations, benefited from the Biden administration’s reflexive deference to international talk shops. Biden’s successor withdrew that toleration. From the outset, Trump 2.0 took aim at the UN’s most corrupt bodies — including the U.N. Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and UNWRA. The administration’s turn against the ICC is neither a departure from the Trump administration’s approach to the UN nor inconsistent with U.S. policy under Trump’s predecessors.

 

Trump’s 2025 executive order sanctioning the ICC for the “dangerous precedent” it set under Khan accused him and his agency of “directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest.”

 

That statement is entirely consistent with the rationale that has led presidents from both parties over the last quarter century to refuse to observe, much less seek the Senate’s approval for, the Rome Statute.

 

“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio wrote. “To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.” Not only that, but it would be to surrender American sovereignty to a supranational body that is corruptly managed, morally blinkered, and power-hungry. The European left seems to think that is a controversial position for the Trump administration to take. It’s unlikely that most Americans would agree.

Yet Again, the U.N. Is Treating Hamas Lies as Fact

By Brett Schaefer

Sunday, July 05, 2026

 

In June, an Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a lengthy conference-room paper accusing Israel of “deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian children” and other crimes in its war against Hamas after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Israel and the United States rejected the report as another example of bias from the commission for failing to address the complicity of Hamas in civilian deaths. Others criticized the report for relying on one-sided allegations lacking in evidentiary support.

 

What has been less noticed, however, is the paper’s heavy reliance on flawed or disproven claims, allegations, and reporting from U.N. humanitarian agencies.

 

The litany of crimes alleged by the COI paper is extensive, including, but not limited to, use of torture, sexual violence, deliberate killing of children, targeting of civilian infrastructure including hospitals and schools, and an imposition of conditions — such as preventing access to adequate food — leading to excessive morbidity of children. These allegations, if substantiated, would constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

 

However, there are reasons to doubt that the allegations, which are presented as fact, are fully substantiated through investigation and concrete evidence.

 

First is the record of bias against Israel in the Human Rights Council and among some past and current members of the commission who have a record of antisemitic statements and support for sanctions against Israel. While not dispositive, it does speak to the objectivity of the COI.

 

Most important, however, is the lack of uncontrivable proof of the charges. The report alleges the deliberate targeting of children and civilians by Israel with no purpose other than killing or harming Palestinian children. As explained in the methodology section, for evidence, the paper relies on open-source reporting and information gleaned from interviews with children, parents, health-care workers, academics, and journalists. Such input, often based on secondhand or anonymous reports, is insufficient to prove intent or guilt. Physical evidence is often absent and, when available, chain of custody is generally broken. The report often dismisses or fails to consider important information about circumstances relevant to intent, such as whether combat was occurring nearby or the fact that Hamas habitually placed arms and command centers near, in, and under civilian buildings, hospitals, and schools. Additionally, the report classifies a child as anyone under 18 years old ignoring the fact that Hamas regularly recruits teenagers into its ranks.

 

As noted by researcher Salo Aizenberg, “In each case, the COI constructs an entire narrative of intentional killing through stacked assumptions rather than verified facts, transforming uncorroborated allegations into definitive findings of criminal conduct.”

 

The COI paper states that “at least 20,179 children were killed and 44,143 children were injured as a direct result of the hostilities in Gaza, constituting 30 percent of those killed and 26 percent of those injured” in the first two years of the conflict. Tragically, children have died in the conflict. But deaths of noncombatants in urban warfare is not proof of intentional targeting. Indeed, John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, has argued, “Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm.”

 

Beyond intent, there are reasons to question the data. The paper cites U.N. organizations, including the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Ultimately, however, each of these organizations derives its Gaza casualty data from the government entities in Gaza operating under the political direction of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The appearance of being broadly sourced is an illusion.

 

Hamas has every incentive to distort deaths for political advantage. In fact, early claims from the Hamas government media office proved so unreliable that OCHA stopped reporting them in May 2024 and sharply revised downward its estimates of women and children killed using Gaza Health Ministry data. The OCHA revisions are welcome, but explanations and public corrections were lacking. UNICEF, WFP, FAO, and WHO have failed entirely to publicly and directly correct the record.

 

The Gaza Health Ministry is more reliable but also flawed in that it does not provide complete verification of identity for every claimed death. Nor does the ministry differentiate between civilians or combatants, which is critical to the COI investigation. Analysis of deaths by age and sex indicate that men and teenage boys are heavily overrepresented among verified deaths, while women, girls, and young boys are significantly underrepresented. This analysis is evidence against deliberate targeting of noncombatants.

 

Likewise, the COI devotes five pages of its report to starvation and malnutrition, relying heavily on U.N. organizations, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). But the record involves two separate evidentiary failures: the May 2024 FEWS NET claim that famine may already have existed in northern Gaza, which the IPC’s own Famine Review Committee considered flawed and declined to endorse; and the August 2025 IPC famine declaration, which relied on contested malnutrition data, later addenda, discounted Israeli food-flow figures, and Hamas-administered health inputs. As with casualty data, these claims of famine were amplified by U.N. organizations without formal correction, retraction, or independent audit after they were shown to be flawed. The COI cites the disputed famine findings as settled fact.

 

In alleging such serious crimes, the COI hopes to advance international legal proceedings against Israel and Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. The report also expressly calls for additional UN Security Council sanctions on Israel and urges governments to prohibit sale of arms and other goods in its recommendations. This is troubling as international courts and many governments have proven willing to accept U.N. reports as impartial, verified, and corroborated. This is not the case with the COI paper nor many of the claims of U.N. humanitarian organizations it relies upon.

 

Repeatedly, U.N. humanitarian organizations receiving U.S. funding have promulgated biased data and narratives regarding Israel and, when disproven, failed to publicly correct the record. A humanitarian system that cannot correct its own errors or resist politization undermines its credibility. The U.S. must demand accountability and public retractions. Otherwise, our tax dollars will be funding the next anti-Israel slander based on Hamas lies.

The UN’s ‘War Crimes’ Recycling Op

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

About a third of the way through the latest UN-associated report accusing Israel of genocide, I realized why it felt like I’d read this before. It wasn’t just because of the subject, though such reports are by now a dime a dozen. It was because I was reading an already-debunked accusation from a prior report.

 

In other words, I had already read this.

 

The report was a lazy remix presented to the UN as an independent document by experts. Sure, they added a new unfounded accusation here and there, but the conclusion was predetermined and based to a large degree on other people’s previous lies about Israel.

 

I’ll explain. The report is focused on “Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children” as proof that the Jewish state is committing the “crime of genocide.”

 

Which means it sets out to do two things: to show that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children because they are children, and to argue that this targeting itself amounts to genocide.

 

Now, because genocide requires intent, the conclusion of the report never gets off the ground. So even by its own “standards” (to use that term very, very loosely) it unintentionally absolves Israel of genocide while merely claiming to do otherwise.

 

What we’re left with, then, is a list of unsubstantiated Israeli crimes. A representative case: Parents of an injured girl inside a tent claimed she was shot by a quadcopter outside the tent, and to substantiate the accusation, the commission looked at “images” of what they were told was the bullet. The shooting and the victim were intentional because, they said, no one else was shot.

 

The great risk faced by the authors, then, was that someone might actually read the report and realize just how flimsy the methodology was. As long as absolutely no one read beyond the headline, the commission members’ reputations could plausibly survive it.

 

What’s even the point of putting out a report like this? When I saw the Washington Post story about the new genocide claim, I understood why the report was issued: headlines that generate other headlines for the public to ingest and then move on. We are living in a time of Idiocracy-style institutional embarrassment. Democracy, as you may have heard, dies in darkness.

 

Had the reporters (another term one must use loosely here, I’m afraid) read the report thoroughly, they would have noticed a couple of things.

 

First, the repetition of debunked claims: “In a previous report published in March 2025, the Commission concluded that Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare, including the destruction of the Al-Basma In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) Centre.”

 

As Salo Aizenberg has explained at length, the case of Al-Basma has become a trigger for the genocide accusation despite the fact that “no forensic analysis was undertaken, no fragments recovered or examined, no trajectory studies performed, no experts dispatched, and no effort made to reconstruct the events of that day. Even the UN report concedes it is not actually certain how the clinic was damaged, stating it was ‘most probably’ an Israeli shell.”

 

Most telling of all was the fact that the initial claim was that Al-Basma was the most damaged structure in the area, supposedly proving that it was therefore intentionally targeted. But wire photos show that, right next to the clinic, a multi-story building had been left with a gaping hole, which, as Aizenberg notes, means that building and not the fertility clinic was almost certainly the target of any strike.

 

The Al-Basma story is relevant for another reason: it is an example of genuinely tragic loss—tanks of frozen embryos were destroyed—but not evidence of genocide.

 

This theme reappears throughout the report. “The Commission applied an integrated child rights analysis in preparing this report to examine holistically all aspects of Palestinian children’s lives and development, including the harm caused by Israeli attacks on their physical, emotional, social and cognitive well-being,” the authors write.

 

There has indeed been trauma experienced by the people of Gaza, very much including children. The trauma of war for children, however, gets eclipsed when bad actors mix truth and fiction, and when those bad actors manipulate people’s stories into false accusations of genocide.

 

For example: The report claims that Israeli attacks hit Gaza schools and therefore prove an intention to deprive Gaza’s younger generations of a future. Presto: genocide. But the report itself even admits that Gaza’s schools were closed soon after Hamas initiated the war. Those buildings—again, as the report itself notes—were then repurposed. Twisting that into a deliberate destruction of Gazan “education” is not only obviously false but a cheapening of the impact of war. And that is without even pointing out that Hamas fighters used these buildings and in many cases turned them into legitimate targets, making Hamas solely responsible for the deaths caused by its human shield strategy.

 

Dishonest activists posing as “experts” will always be trying to con the public. The media should ask itself whether it really wants to continue being complicit in this shameful game.

The Psychological Projection of Israel’s Enemies

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

One emerging, seemingly iron rule about understanding the motivations of Israel’s enemies: If you know the when, you’ll figure out the why.

 

Here are four recent noteworthy items:

 

On May 11, the New York Times published Nick Kristof’s wild accusations that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian inmates, along with uncorroborated allegations of state-sanctioned abuse.

 

On May 12, a major commission on Hamas crimes released the results of a meticulous two-year investigation using photos, videos, and corroborated eyewitness testimony. The result was a massive catalogue of proof that Hamas used rape and sexual torture as a key tenet of its military strategy on October 7 and after. Suddenly the timing of the shockingly unethical Times piece, in preempting the results of an actual investigation into Hamas, became clear.

 

On May 28, the United Nations leaked word that its forthcoming annual sexual-violence blacklist would now include Israel. Though this was obviously unmerited, the UN had finally added Hamas to the blacklist a year earlier, and it was clear that the world body’s policy of false equivalence had to be applied even to this subject. But why release this nonsense now?

 

On June 8, it was announced that International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who had been pursuing cases against Israeli figures outside the court’s jurisdiction and at the behest of Hamas-aligned states, was being suspended. An investigation into Khan’s alleged sexual misconduct had found cause to remove him. Yet again, Israel’s accusers appear to be in preemption mode.

 

From Reuters:

 

A diplomatic source briefed on the decision told Reuters the court’s governing body’s executive bureau has ruled that Khan, 56, had committed serious misconduct. This followed an 18-month-long probe into accusations that the prosecutor had non-consensual sexual interactions with a female aide in his office. The source added that the bureau has recommended that the prosecutor be removed from office.

 

The ICC’s governing body will send its conclusion to all 125 ICC member states, which will vote on Khan’s fate in a special session. His removal will require a majority in a secret ballot, with sixty-three countries needing to support a measure to remove him.

 

So his job can still be saved, but the investigation is over. The ICC appears to have found that Khan, who is married, had “non-consensual sexual interactions” with his aide. That verdict has been delivered to the member states of the court. It is up to those states to decide whether the type of sexual coercion described in the investigation warrants losing his job or whether the hundred-plus countries in the ICC still want Khan to represent them.

 

Unless there is reason to fault the investigation, the sexual misconduct findings are likely to be enough to taint the “work” Khan was doing at the time, even if ICC member countries don’t think it warrants Khan’s removal. It’s important to remember that Khan’s alleged misbehavior was directly related to his frivolous prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

 

Since Israel isn’t part of the ICC, Khan had no jurisdiction to go after the Jewish state’s leaders in the first place. Compounding that lawlessness was the weakness of the case. When Khan issued requests for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, he had done so after canceling key investigatory trips to Israel.

 

What was the rush? It turned out, as the Wall Street Journal revealed last year, that Khan had been accused by a subordinate of sexual misconduct. According to court records, Khan was using his prosecution of Israelis to pressure his accuser to stay quiet. The Journal also reported that Qatar, Hamas’s financial and political patron, had encouraged Khan to push through the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant and suggested Doha would have his back if any trouble arose.

 

The whole thing appears to have been hopelessly corrupt from the get-go. Worse, court testimony paints the picture of a rogue and abusive prosecutor using his illegitimate prosecution of Israelis to shield himself from allegations of sexual assault.

 

Serious criminal accusations against Israel are not random. They are indications that Israel’s enemies have been found to have engaged in monstrous behavior that will soon be made public. It didn’t seem possible for Hamas’s defenders and enablers to be even further discredited, but here we are. Pay attention to the when, and you’ll figure out the why.

No, Foreign Officials Do Not Get First Amendment Immunity from U.S. Sanctions

By Mark Goldfeder

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

Yesterday, the Trump administration removed Francesca Albanese from the U.S. sanctions list after a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement on First Amendment grounds. That may have been a tactical decision, but it was not a legal concession, and it should not be treated as one. The injunction remains in effect, meaning the government cannot relist her without immediately running into the same order. The only way out is through the D.C. Circuit, and the administration should appeal — not to punish Albanese, but because the opinion is entirely wrong and its logic, left unchallenged, threatens the legal foundation of the entire U.S. sanctions architecture.

 

Albanese, an Italian citizen living abroad, was sanctioned after the government concluded that she had assisted or supported International Criminal Court efforts to prosecute U.S. and Israeli nationals. She did not bring the lawsuit herself. Her Italian husband and U.S.-citizen daughter sued instead, arguing that the sanctions harmed their property, travel, family, and constitutional interests.

 

Those harms may be real. But the court went much further than protecting the family’s rights. It used their injuries as a bridge to constitutionalize Albanese’s own foreign sanctionable conduct, and that core mistake runs through every part of the opinion.

 

Albanese is not a U.S. citizen, nor a lawful permanent resident. She is not presently in the United States. The sanctioned conduct occurred abroad, in her claimed role as a U.N. Special Rapporteur. The court acknowledged the general rule that foreign nationals outside U.S. territory do not possess U.S. constitutional rights, but then treated Albanese’s former D.C. residence, mortgage, tax payments, American child, past university affiliations, and prior travel as enough to give her “at least some” First Amendment protection. That was wrong. The “substantial connections” doctrine stretches to due process protections for foreign persons whose property is being adjudicated by the United States. It does not establish that a foreign official abroad has a First Amendment right to assist in coercive foreign legal action against U.S. or allied nationals. Owning a condo in Washington may give a foreign national some process rights before the government freezes it; it does not give her a constitutional right, from abroad, to use a U.N. mandate to assist ICC prosecutions of Americans then claim immunity from sanctions for doing so.

 

The standing analysis compounds the error. Third-party standing allows a plaintiff to assert another person’s existing rights. It cannot manufacture rights the third party does not have. The court found that Albanese’s husband and daughter suffered real injuries, then allowed them to assert her First Amendment rights on the theory that they are close family members. But that only works if she has actual First Amendment rights to assert. Again, the court never squarely held that she does, just that she might have “some” protection. Either she has First Amendment rights, in which case the court should have said so directly and explained why a foreign official abroad qualifies, or she does not, in which case the case ends at standing. The opinion assumes the answer to the hard question in order to avoid asking it.

 

Even setting aside jurisdiction, the merits analysis fails. The judge treated the designation as punishment for “speech” and leaned on the finding that Albanese made only “non-binding recommendations” with no formal power over the ICC. But sanctions law routinely reaches communicative conduct: coordination, advice, targeting letters, strategic guidance, organized pressure campaigns, etc. None of those are binding, and the First Amendment does not automatically immunize those acts when they are part of a foreign sanctions-triggering course of conduct.

 

The opinion’s treatment of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project illustrates the problem of the court’s sleight of hand. The Supreme Court there upheld restrictions on coordinated “speech” that assisted foreign terrorist organizations, explaining that coordinated assistance to a foreign entity can be regulated as conduct even when it takes the form of words. The judge here quoted Holder for the line that “independently advocating for a cause is different from providing a service,” then assumed the very conclusion in dispute (i.e., that Albanese was merely independently advocating). The government’s theory was not that she criticized Israel or held an anti-American viewpoint. It was that she engaged with ICC efforts to prosecute protected persons. Her recommendations were not op-ed commentary; they were coordinated participation in a foreign coercive legal campaign, which is precisely the distinction Holder drew. A sanctions regime targeting that assistance is not viewpoint discrimination. Sanctioning someone for saying “I support Palestine” would raise serious First Amendment problems. Sanctioning someone for materially assisting an international tribunal’s unauthorized effort to prosecute Americans is a foreign affairs and national security judgment.

 

The broader implications are serious. Treasury has sanctioned Russian and Iranian actors for election-interference operations run through fake media fronts and disinformation campaigns; RT executives and proxy websites for malign-influence networks; militia figures for incitement; and Bosnian actors whose secessionist rhetoric was part of a destabilization campaign. Abstract opinions are not sanctionable, but coordination, targeting, strategic advice, and organized pressure campaigns do not become constitutionally protected just because they travel through speech. If foreign nationals abroad can invoke the First Amendment whenever sanctions touch recommendations, reports, or advocacy directed at a foreign enforcement body, much of the U.S. sanctions architecture is suddenly vulnerable: terror-finance, cyber, corruption, foreign-interference, human-rights sanctions all often turn on communications. That is not what the First Amendment provides, and it is why the administration should appeal.

 

The appeal should not focus on whether Francesca Albanese is awful. She is. It should focus on whether a district judge can constitutionalize a foreign official’s campaign against American nationals simply because she calls it advocacy, and whether the United States must keep its financial system open to those who materially assist an international campaign targeting U.S. citizens and allies for prosecution in a tribunal with no legitimate jurisdiction over them. The answers are no.

With Iran, the U.N. Prioritizes Procedure over Principle

By Brett D. Schaefer

Monday, March 09, 2026

 

Although the United Nations Charter entrusts the U.N. Security Council with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” the U.N. was barely, if at all, consulted about the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. And why should it have been? From Russia’s war on Ukraine to Iran’s war on its own people, the United Nations has proven itself to be impotent and irrelevant on most serious matters of global importance.

 

Almost immediately after the Iran strikes began, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres condemned the military action and demanded “an immediate cessation of hostilities and de-escalation” on the grounds that the actions violated the U.N. Charter. U.N. General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock declared that “concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear program, regional activities, and human rights violations must be addressed in accordance with the U.N. Charter and international law.” U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk called for de-escalation and a return to negotiations. Russia and China condemned the violation of Iran’s “sovereignty, security and territorial integrity” in the Security Council, calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the resumption of negotiations.

 

This reaction is predictable, reflexive, and wholly disingenuous. The United Nations has become, on most matters of war and peace, a performative organization, where the niceties and processes take priority over accountability and just consequences.

 

Guterres never condemned Iran for violating international law or the U.N. Charter after it rejected the reimposition of U.N. sanctions when the European parties to the Iran nuclear deal implemented the snapback mechanism. Furthermore, Guterres reacted to the regime’s slaughter of thousands of Iranian protesters via an attributed statement urging “maximum restraint” and the avoidance of “unnecessary or disproportionate use of force.” A few weeks later, he sent a letter to the same Iranian government that had just killed thousands of its own citizens congratulating it on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and, when criticized, cited protocol.

 

Baerbock did not comment when the General Assembly elected Iran as the vice-chair of the U.N. Charter Committee charged with examining proposals “concerning the question of the maintenance of international peace and security.” Nor did she intervene when Iran was elected vice-chair of the U.N. Committee for Social Development, charged with “advancing social integration,” during its recent brutal crackdown.

 

The United Nations Human Rights Council condemned Iran in a special session over the same crackdown, then welcomed an Iranian official to address the opening of the Human Rights Council a few weeks later.

 

In the Security Council, Russia and China cynically condemned the U.S. and its allies for violating Iranian territorial integrity, with no intent to occupy the country, while they seek to conquer, respectively, an unwilling Ukraine and Taiwan.

 

And this is just Iran. The U.N. regularly issues strong condemnations of Israel for supposedly violating international law and human rights norms while downplaying the responsibility of Hamas and other terrorist groups for instigating the crises the Jewish state is attempting to address. U.N. officials are conspicuously silent about Chinese human rights violations and Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea. The U.N. is quick to condemn the U.S. for blocking oil shipments to Cuba, but it rarely comments on the Cuban government’s repression of its people.

 

Pick any major threat to international peace and security, and if the U.N.’s leadership isn’t affirmatively on the wrong side, the organization will be largely impotent. Russia and Ukraine? The U.N. is not involved in negotiations. Terrorism? The U.N. does not consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization. Nuclear proliferation? The U.N. is trying desperately to preserve the Iranian regime. Pandemics? The World Health Organization made a hash of Covid. Economic development? The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals are unrealistic, off-track, and largely irrelevant to development. Climate? The U.N. distorts data and presents unrealistic solutions.

 

Ironically, it is the U.S., condemned by U.N. officials, that is doing the most to enforce the organization’s principles.

 

Donald Trump is unorthodox, but he is indisputably eager to resolve conflicts, whether between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, or Morocco and the Western Sahara. The U.N. has six peacekeeping operations that have been in place for decades but have made little progress. At some point, patience with the peace process turns into enabling intransigence.

 

Will the Board of Peace usher in peace to Gaza or elsewhere? Maybe not. But the U.N. has failed to resolve these conflicts. Trying something different, even if it leaves the U.N. sidelined, is hardly outlandish.

 

The U.N. organization and the principles outlined in the U.N. Charter are not the same. The organization’s principles can be supported and defended without the procedural blessing of U.N. bodies — particularly because U.N. processes seldom uphold the principles they were designed to champion.

 

The current military action in Iran is far from a violation of the U.N.’s principles. In defending U.S. military action in Iran, Ambassador Mike Waltz pointed to extreme violence against and repression of Iranian civilians; multiple direct and indirect attacks by Iran in the territory of foreign states, which together have resulted in hundreds of deaths; the holding of civilians hostage; and multiple violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The U.S.-Israeli attack occurred only after months of negotiations failed because of Iran’s obstinacy.

 

What truly offends the U.N. is that the U.S. is exposing this pretense. America decided to act in defense of the self-determination of the Iranian people and to confront a decades-long threat to international peace and security. It is this difference — the idolatry of bureaucratic process, reflexive moral equivalence, and a persistent opposition to American leadership — that explains why the U.N. is held increasingly in contempt. And deservedly so.