Global institutions can no longer hide their anti-Western malignancy

As the example of UNRWA so painfully illustrates, we can’t depend on the post-war framework anymore to keep us safe

At the end of the Second World War, with civilisation still reeling from its exertions in defeating Fascist barbarism, far-sighted statesmen from around the world came together to build institutions which would try to ensure that the legacy of that war would be peace, justice and decency. 
Those institutions are what are meant by “the rules-based international order”, which is being increasingly threatened by the rise of the Axis of Ill-Will of China, Russia, Iran and their satellites.
For decades, the post-war institutions were strong enough to resist the battering that came from totalitarian powers from the outside, but in recent years a far more insidious danger has corrupted and wrecked many of them: the threat from within, posed by woke and Leftist ideology and hugely aided by a lack of self-belief in the institutions themselves.
This phenomenon is exemplified by the apparent nomination of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, UNRWA. The organisation whose staff members were directly involved in the October 7 atrocities. The body that Britain and the United States cut funding to, temporarily in our case, because of acts 12 months ago which many considered foully anti-Semitic.
No fewer than seven current and former top UNRWA officials are currently being sued in a federal court in Manhattan, accused of knowing that Hamas siphoned off more than $1 billion from UNRWA to pay for, among other things, tunnelling equipment and weapons. More than 100 Israeli plaintiffs include at least one who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, as well as others who survived the attack, and the families of people murdered on October 7.
Meanwhile, the UN has refused to designate Hamas a “terrorist organisation”, and its women’s rights committee took around eight weeks to condemn the terrorists’ use of rape as a weapon of war.
Franklin D Roosevelt came up with the phrase United Nations, which Winston Churchill approved as it reminded him of a line from Byron. The text of its declaration was drawn up by those two and Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins on December 29, 1941, only three weeks after Pearl Harbor. 
Today’s organisation is a bastardisation of their noble dreams.
Yet the United Nations is only one of a number of global organisations that have been taken over and tarnished from the inside. The World Health Organization (WHO), part of the UN, behaved disgracefully during the Covid pandemic, acting almost as a wholly-owned sub-section of the propaganda arm of the People’s Republic of China.
The utter refusal of the WHO to investigate and publicise the facts about what had happened in Wuhan led to flights from China continuing for weeks after they should have been stopped, with a correspondingly high death rate first in Italy and then across Europe.
One might expect President Xi to be perfectly relaxed about the spiralling mortalities outside China – he is a totalitarian tyrant whose sole consideration was Chinese national interests, after all – but it was the duty of the WHO not to comply with Chinese bullying over hiding the truth about the origins of the pandemic, a duty they badly failed to fulfill. And still do.
The European Court of Human Rights, which was originally designed, by Churchill among others, to protect Europeans from the persecution of totalitarian powers, is today undermining the efforts of Western governments to protect their borders from illegal migrants.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was a body that tried and incarcerated some of the worst monsters responsible for the war crimes there. It had notable successes when it imprisoned Slobodan Milosevic (the first sitting head of state ever to be indicted), Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic and 87 others. Similarly, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda caught and indicted 93 individuals who committed horrific crimes against humanity.
Disgracefully, however, the process of lawfare has now been taken over and perverted by the Left to the extent that democratically elected leaders fighting for their country’s existence in the face of multi-pronged assaults by vicious terrorists have become the victims of international courts. 
Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant are allies of the West who since October 7 have been fighting a ferociously difficult war under the most appalling circumstances imaginable. Their feat has been hugely complicated by Hamas’s use of hundreds of miles of tunnels in which dozens of hostages are being kept in hideous conditions.
Instead of supporting these statesmen as they take on the sworn enemies of the West, terrorists whose stated aim is to kill Jews wherever they find them – including in Britain – the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted Netanyahu and Gallant, thereby preventing them from travelling to allied countries for fear of being arrested. 
In a gross inversion of what they should be doing, the court is appearing to be taking the side of the terrorists against the victims, despite the Israel Defence Forces fighting as ethical a campaign as is humanly possible under the monstrous conditions. Genuine mistakes are occasionally made, as in southern Lebanon yesterday, but that is sadly true of all wars.
The Labour Government’s recent surrender of British sovereignty over Diego Garcia, in which we have paid Mauritius for the privilege of no longer owning the islands, was also the result of our being outvoted on another international body – the International Court of Justice (ICJ)– that we helped to set up. 
Because a group of foreign judges want the Chagos Archipelago, which has belonged to Britain since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to no longer be ours, Labour rolled over and gave the islands away. That was the same court where South Africa sought to indict Israel of war crimes.
Where is the sheer outrage at UNWRA reportedly being nominated for any kind of award, let alone the Nobel Peace Prize? Where is the fury at the WHO being suborned by China, or the ICC by anti-Israel campaigners? Where is the gumption to ignore the ICJ when it puts the security and strategic interests of the West below the interests of Mauritius and a small group of former residents of a place which they left in 1967?
These institutions are no longer protecting the liberal order that triumphed in 1945; they are threatening it. In an ever more dangerous world, Western governments need to wake up and recognise that they cannot depend on these compromised bodies to keep us safe.