The calendar lists today as UN Day, commemorating and celebrating the day the UN Charter that began the international organization in 1945.
This day makes me very sad.

I have always been intrigued by politics, foreign relations, and the like. I sat on Model Congresses, mock juries, visited heritage sites. I loved the United Nations; the name alone said it all – nations across the world united. Unfortunately, in the last three years, the veil has slipped to reveal a bloated, overgrown, hypocritical, and sadly racist organization.

Three years ago, on October 7th, the terrorist group, Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of all Jewish people invaded Israel from Gaza, killing over 1200 men, women, and children, animals, burning houses and gardens and people, torturing, sexually assaulting men, women, and children both while alive and dead, and taking nearly 300 hostage, the youngest of whom was nine months old.

On October 8th, the UN was already calling for a ceasefire from Israel who didn’t respond to this invasion and act of war until October 27, nineteen days after the UN chastised them for the war.

The UN continued to lie about casualties, refused to insist on humanitarian aid and Red Cross visits to the hostages, and provided material support to the terrorists through UNWRA, who trained terrorists, provided cover for them in everyday jobs like doctors and journalists, shopkeepers and other while at the same time hiding hostages in their buildings. Every time Hamas blew up their own schools and hospitals, the UN was right there blaming Israel and in my opinion, they are largely responsible for the rise in antisemitism across the globe.

Had they put aside their anti-Israel bias and called for the release of the hostages with no equivocations, the world may have called on Hamas to deescalate, disarm, and release the hostages.

Instead some hostages were held for over four hundred days. Some hostages were taken alive and killed in captivity. That nine-month old I mentioned was strangled to death along with his five year old brother, then beaten to make it look like they’d been killed in an airstrike rather than strangled with bare hands, not by militants, but by regular Gazan citizens.

The UN lied about famine, bolstered by photos of chronically ill children from other countries. They lied about a “genocide” happening when clearly there wasn’t one. How does a population grow in a genocide? Does the perpetrator of a genocide drop leaflets and call civilians to warn them of impending fighting in their area?

There was no mention of the Israeli government ceasing their war effort to enter Gaza and vaccinate Palestinian children against polio.

They continue to promote the occupation lie when Israel removed every Jewish person from Gaza in 2005 including the dead and already buried. They refuse to condemn the Palestinians calling for the eradication of the Jewish people and continuing to call Israel itself an occupied land despite the Jewish people being indigenous to the land and the Arabs who are citizens live just as freely and in peace as the Jewish Israelis do.

I don’t think I will ever get over this breach of trust from the United Nations. I will never look at them again in the same light that I did for decades. I’m sad that that part of my worldview has been destroyed.

So, on this UN Day, I ask how can we change the UN to be what they claimed to be? How can we get to a point where they are on the actual side of peace and on the side of the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

The League of Nations didn’t work out, and I am afraid that the United Nations is not working out the way we hoped it would either. It’s too bad that it took this long to see it for what it was.