President Biden has promised that “America is back.” At the United Nations, that means the United States is back to rolling over for the world’s worst human rights abusers and lending legitimacy to failed institutions.
This is what Biden is signaling by pledging to rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council. The U.S. rightfully pulled out of the UNHRC in 2018, refusing to legitimize the body by remaining a member. The UNHRC currently includes China, Russia, and other detestable regimes.
Not everyone on the 2021 U.N. Human Rights Council is a criminal.
But too many are.
?? Pakistan – persecutes Christians, Hindu, Ahmadis
?? China – herded 1 million Uighurs into camps
?? Venezuela – crimes against humanity
?? Russia – poisons dissidents
?? Cuba – police state pic.twitter.com/VnmnWbaCOq— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) January 1, 2021
Biden’s representation of the U.S. at the U.N. is already off to an inauspicious start. His nominee for U.N. ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, praised China’s actions and investments in Africa at Savannah State University’s branch of the Confucius Institute in 2019. As Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, pointed out, China’s actions were well documented in 2019, including the concerns about the Chinese state-funded Confucius Institute.
It’s good that Thomas-Greenfield was willing to admit her mistake at her confirmation hearing, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that she will hold China to account as she has promised. That’s especially true given that she answers to Biden, who is notoriously soft on China.
Biden is already letting China off the hook in another area of the U.N. — the World Health Organization. The WHO parroted Chinese propaganda repeatedly throughout the pandemic, leading President Donald Trump to cease all U.S. payments to the body. Biden has already reversed that and pledged to rejoin the WHO, with no preconditions.
Thomas-Greenfield also promised to defend Israel at the U.N., where the country has become the target of several obsessive U.N. bodies, including the Human Rights Council. It’s another promise that begets skepticism, given that the Obama administration, of which Biden was a part, threw Israel under the bus at the U.N.
All the Human Rights Council has been is a body where Israel is the major target of wrath, while the abuses of countries such as China, Iran, and North Korea are swept under the rug. The council has even targeted the U.S. with its rogues’ gallery of members raising more outrage for U.S. federal officers defending a courthouse in Portland, Oregon, than China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang.
The U.N. is little more than a series of bloated bureaucracies that take every available opportunity to defend the world’s worst governments, to the tune of billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers. The UNHRC and the WHO are two of the worst offenders, and promises aren’t going to change the fact that Biden is willing to roll over for both.
