Can You Guess Which Nation the UN Condemned for Women’s Rights Violations?

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

Can You Guess Which Nation the UN Condemned for Women’s Rights Violations?

Hint: It’s not Yemen.

The United Nation’s main women’s rights group, the Commission on the Status of Women, published a document on March 19 singling out one UN member nation for women’s rights violations.

It was not Saudi Arabia, where a strict view of sharia law says that women of all ages are dependents under the charge of a male relative. Any Saudi woman not attired in government-mandated clothing is subject to severe physical punishment. No woman can vote, drive a car, or go anywhere without a male chaperone.

Nor was it Somalia, which holds the world record for the percentage of girls and women who undergo genital mutilation—98 percent. In parts of Somalia, “[m]any women and girls … live in constant fear of rape,” according to Human Rights Watch. “The Somali government’s public commitments have not materialized into better protection for women and support for victims.”

The country was not Pakistan, where at least 1,000 women are killed by male relatives in “honor killings” each year. Only 42 percent of Pakistani women are literate, and girls and women are routinely gang-raped as punishment for the crimes of their male relatives.

In Mali, only a quarter of women ever learn to read. Sharia law allows men to marry multiple wives and easily divorce them, with no regard for the woman’s rights. If a woman’s husband dies, she is often forbidden to keep her children. But the new UN report didn’t mention Mali.

Nor did it condemn Syria, where, as a military tactic, government forces regularly rape and commit other sexual violence against women.

It wasn’t Afghanistan, where more than half of all brides are 15 years old or younger, and 87 percent of women suffer abuse by their husbands. Afghanistan is the only nation on the planet where more women commit suicide than men.

It was not Sudan, which has no minimum age for consensual sex, and no law against domestic violence. In Sudan, 88 percent of women under 50 have undergone genital mutilation.

The condemned country was not Chad, where a girl is more likely to die giving birth than she is to attend high school.

Nor was it Nigeria, where the terrorist group Boko Haram brags about the thousands of women it kidnaps, kills or displaces, and the government fears taking action against it.

The nation was not Yemen, which is “the world’s worst country for women,” according to the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Gender Gap Report. There is no minimum age for marriage in Yemen, and 14 percent of its girls are married before they reach age 15. By age 18, that figure reaches 52 percent. Only half of Yemeni women can read, and in recent years the number of women in the nation’s parliament has fallen from 11 to 1.

The report said nothing of these nations’ treatment of women.

Of all 193 UN member nations, the only one named and condemned in the document was Israel.

The UN document, called the “Situation of and Assistance to Palestinian Women,” does not mention that 27 of Israel’s 120 Knesset members are women. It doesn’t mention that women in Israel enjoy the same rights as those of any Western democracy, or that Israel was the third country in history to elect a female head of state. Nor does it acknowledge that the current Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme Court is a woman, or that Israeli women have been guaranteed gender equality since the nation’s establishment in 1948.

Instead, the report denounces Israel for causing “[h]igh levels of unemployment and poverty” among Palestinians, especially women. “Palestinian women and girls still face significant obstacles in accessing basic services, health care, psychosocial support, water and sanitation, justice institutions and economic opportunities,” the report states, blaming the Jews of Israel for it all.

The report does not mention the dozens of Palestinian women living in the West Bank and Gaza who are killed by Palestinian men every year in “honor killings” sanctioned by the Palestinian Authority. Nor does it discuss PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s 2012 statement, saying he had no plans to outlaw these barbaric killings. It doesn’t discuss the recent ban on Palestinian women riding motorbikes, the decision to forbid women from running in marathons, or the law that bans women from appearing in public without headscarves. Nor does it mention the law that hands down a six-year jail sentence to any Palestinian woman who has a baby out of wedlock.

The UN holds the Jews of Israel responsible for all problems Palestinian women face.

Rather than use its authority to work toward positive change, the UN childishly scapegoats one country—a country that should actually be upheld as a model of women’s rights. Meanwhile, the plight of millions of girls and women in wretched circumstances in numerous other countries remains ignored.

The report goes beyond the typical anti-Israel, anti-Semitic bias we have come to expect from the United Nations. It ventures past the UN’s typical absurdity and imbalance. It is an instance of saying black is white, and white is black.

It is not possible to overstate the corruption and ineptitude of the United Nations—yet world leaders continue to view it as a serious organization.

One analyst recognized from the beginning that the UN would be not only a total failure, but also a catalyst to global conflict. “Already I see the clouds of World War iii gathering at this conference,” educator Herbert W. Armstrong said as he attended the organization’s inaugural meeting in 1945. “I do not see peace being germinated here, but the seeds of the next war!”

The March 19 document shows that the UN has descended from a failure to a farce. It shows that mankind is further than ever from being able to solve its own problems. It shows that Mr. Armstrong’s analysis all those years ago was spot on.

To understand how Mr. Armstrong accurately identified the true nature of the United Nations even from its inception, request our free booklet He Was Right.