It’s bad for Israel when the US has a dim view of itself

Returning to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was one of many moves made by the administration of US President Joe Biden to reverse the policies of its predecessor.

Almost three years to the date of former president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the UNHRC – over its repeated singling out of Israel for condemnation and unwarranted criticism of the United States – America’s top diplomat performed a feat that can only be described as a horrifying form of groveling at the feet of the international body.

On July 13, the last day of the UNHRC’s 47th session, Secretary of State Antony Blinken published a statement expressing Washington’s intent “to issue a formal, standing invitation to all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human-rights issues.”

Blinken said that the impetus for the invitation – extended first to the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the UN special rapporteur on minority issues – was a UN Human Rights Office report “on racism and police brutality against Africans and people of African descent at the hands of law enforcement around the world, which includes examination of such cases in the United States.”

He also welcomed the UNHRC’s adoption of a resolution to put the report’s recommendations into practice, saying that he “look[s] forward to engaging with the new mechanism to advance racial justice and equity.”

Proudly, he declared that “as [Biden] has repeatedly made clear, great nations such as ours do not hide from our shortcomings; they acknowledge them openly and strive to improve with transparency. In so doing, we not only work to set the standard for national responses to these challenges, we also strengthen our democracy, and give new hope and motivation to human rights defenders across the globe.”

Compare this attitude to that displayed in mid-June 2018 by then-US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. Explaining Trump’s reason for shunning the UNHRC, she said, “If the Human Rights Council is going to attack countries that uphold human rights and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility.”

The contrast is stunning, but doesn’t come as a surprise. Biden served for eight years as vice president to Barack Obama, and his team is comprised of many of the same people active in or around the White House and State Department during the period before Trump took the reins.

HEREIN LIES the real problem for the new Israeli government, which has reiterated that it will “repair” relations with the Democrats and “restore” the bipartisan support for the Jewish state that former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ostensibly eroded. Though Biden and Blinken don’t really espouse the radical and antisemitic positions of the progressive wing of their party, they have been adopting the language of the “woke.”

Do they really believe that the country they serve is guilty of “systemic racism?” Are they actually buying the nonsense that America is as in need of reform as such UNHRC members as China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Senegal?

It’s both impossible to tell and completely irrelevant. Once the big guns in Washington tell the world that the US requires “transparency” and “monitoring,” they’ve already conceded to the far Left at home and despots abroad.

Israelis across the political spectrum often miss this point.

The Left’s claim that Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and war on Hamas in Gaza are behind anti-Israel sentiment or policies is wishful thinking, at best. If there was any truth to the assertion, Israel would have been lauded far and wide for its endless peace overtures and territorial compromises to the Palestinian Authority.

The Right also tends to get it wrong. Though antisemitism is, indeed, being mainstreamed in America by such groups as Black Lives Matter and Students for Justice in Palestine – backed by the highly ignorant and equally vocal “Squad” in Congress – the phenomenon is a symptom of societal sickness, not the root of its ability to metastasize.

Just as antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine” that bodes ill for the rest of a country’s populace, its emergence comes in a context. The increasingly crazy cultural climate in the United States served as the perfect Petri dish.

Backlash on the part of middle America led to Trump’s election in the first place. But the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and the havoc that lockdowns wreaked on the booming economy, enabled the spread of a worse virus than COVID-19. Biden, the far-left Democrats’ straw man, ended up being the beneficiary.

THIS BRINGS us back to his former boss. Unlike Biden today, Obama wasn’t ever a puppet in need of or subject to manipulation. On the contrary, he had a clear ideological agenda, which he proceeded to implement from the minute that he stepped foot in the Oval Office: to apply with the power vested in him the teachings of his late mentor Saul Alinsky.

In his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Alinsky detailed his methodology for “those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.”

“The Prince,” he said, “was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

He wrote that the way to accomplish this was for the “organizer” (an apt description of Obama during his three-year stint in the 1980s as director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago) to establish credibility.

Since the purpose of this “organizer,” according to Alinsky, is to undo the existing order, he has to work within the system that he’s trying to destroy. And through a combination of seduction and resentment-fanning, he can create a “mass army” to carry out the task.

Michelle Obama’s announcement at a campaign rally in Milwaukee in February 2008 that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” gave a glimpse into the lurking Alinskyism that would come into play nine months later, when her husband was elected by the nation for which he had not-so-disguised disdain.

Though mostly conservative Jews and Israelis zeroed in with horror on his antisemitic pastor, Jeremiah Wright, they would have done better to smell the greater danger ahead. As it would become apparent, if anything posed a genuine threat to Israel and the rest of the West at the time, it was Obama’s low opinion of American power and exceptionalism.

Ironically, had the organizer-in-chief not worked so tirelessly to unravel all that makes the United States great – with the help of the “mass army” of idiotic intersectional extremists whom he enlisted to fulfill Alinsky’s mission – Trump might never have gotten the chance to become his successor.

BLINKEN’S REQUEST for a body that makes a mockery of the very concept of “human rights” to hold his own country accountable for imaginary crimes is not only appalling; it’s an example of just how deeply embedded Alinskyism is in the Democratic Party.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid either doesn’t realize this or care.

“In the past few years, mistakes were made,” he told Blinken last month, when the two met in Rome to “reset” US-Israel relations in the aftermath of Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership. “Israel’s bipartisan standing was hurt. We will fix those mistakes together.”

Lapid further pointed out that he had recently “reminded Democrats and Republicans that we share America’s most basic, basic values: freedom, democracy, free markets and a constant search for peace.”

It’s a wonder that Blinken managed to keep a straight face. Perhaps his mind was wandering to the ongoing UNHRC meetings where the US was being bashed. Maybe he was already busy crafting his “mea culpa” statement and honing his plea to the world to cling to as dim a view of the United States as the administration running it does.

Either way, Lapid and his fellow coalitionists are kidding themselves if they imagine that any of the above can possibly be good for Israel, or that there’s some tactic they can employ to rectify it. That’s up to the American people to do in 2024.