The United Nations has betrayed its founding principles

This week the UN General Assembly met in New York. Born out of the Second World War, and the determination to prevent another all-consuming catastrophe, for almost 80 years the UN has carried the hopes of the world.

With its avowed good intentions for the 193 member states, to the ordinary man in the street it enjoys a virtuous cachet reserved in earlier generations only for saints.

Sadly, the reality is a deeply corrupt and irrevocably flawed organisation, defined at every turn by the lowest moral common denominator, thanks to the very worst of those member states being given a platform and authority.

Far from preventing war, the United Nations has become an enabler of conflict that empowers autocracies and allows its various subsidiary bodies to foment hate. Nothing embodies this failure more than the long sorry saga of the UN and Israel.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the perversity of the General Assembly’s repeated attempt to deny the right of the state of Israel to exist, in the 80 years since the holocaust.

In 2001, the World Conference Against Racism was held under UN auspices in Durban, South Africa.

It quickly descended into nothing more than a thinly veiled hate-fest, with delegates banding together to brand Israel a “racist apartheid state” that committed “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing”.

Outside the conference, copies of the notorious antisemitic screed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed. Placards read: “If only Hitler had won.” Thus was proclaimed the utter moral turpitude of an organisation founded in the ashes of the war that vanquished the Nazis.

The decades since have confirmed this hatred of Israel has become institutionally systemic – not a bug but a feature of the UN.

In 2022, as war in Ukraine raged, and while the people of Iran, Myanmar, Syria and Venezuela suffered untold oppression and human rights violations, the UN General Assembly targeted 15 resolutions at Israel, while there were just 13 resolutions for the entire rest of the world.

And that was before the war against Hamas in Gaza.

The genocidal massacre committed against the people of Israel on October 7 saw barely a pause in the legitimisation of hate by the UN.

With scant lip service to condemn the slaughter of more than 1,200 men, women and children, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was still unable to recognise Israel’s right to defend itself.

In Gaza itself, evidence has shown that hundreds of staff members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) took part in the October 7 massacre.

The evidence was too strong even for the UN officials to entirely deny, even if only a paltry nine workers were eventually sacked.

Now, as conflict escalates against Hezbollah following many months of the terror militia launching unprovoked attacks against Israel, once again the UN has betrayed its peacekeeping role.

In 2006 UN Security Council Resolution 1701 called for the withdrawal of forces threatening Israel to the north of the Litani River, and demanded that Hezbollah disarm.

Needless to say, the resolution has been entirely ignored. Instead, a vast Hezbollah arsenal menaces the people of northern Israel from that territory.

It is even reported that the blue-helmeted UN peacekeeping troops are used effectively as human shields by Hezbollah, which places their launch sites close to the UN camps.

This year the United Kingdom gave more than £100m to the United Nations budget. The good intentions of the founders in 1945 have been irreparably betrayed. British taxpayers and the people of the world deserve a better deal.