At the United Nations, Saudi Money Trumps Rights Criticism
The Washington Post’s “U.S. forces to stay longer in Yemen to fight al-Qaeda” (July 18, 2016) included a paragraph which revealed much about how the United Nations really works.
The article, by reporters Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Missy Ryan, detailed how the U.S. military is planning to keep advisers in Yemen on a counterterrorism mission against al-Qaeda, the U.S.-designated terror group responsible for the Sept. 1, 2001 attacks. Gibbons-Neff and Ryan said that the U.S. also was assisting Saudi Arabia in its fight against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels that are at war with the Yemeni government.
The Post pointed out that U.S. support for Saudi Arabia was “complicated” by criticism of “high civilian casualties in the conflict in Yemen.” However, the paper then noted the kingdom’s revealing response:
“Last month, the United Nations put Saudi Arabia on a list of countries responsible for violating children’s rights in armed conflict after determining that the Saudi-led coalition was responsible for the deaths of 60 percent of the 1,953 children reported killed since the start of the conflict. Saudi Arabia has since been removed from the list after threatening to cut its support for U.N. peacekeeping programs [emphasis added].”
As CAMERA has frequently noted, U.N. bodies often unfairly single out and malign Israel (for a partial list of examples, see here). Yet, many in the U.S. news media often fail to point out the U.N.’s anti-Israel record; treating the organization, instead, as an unbiased actor.
In an article on U.S. intervention in Yemen, The Post—even if unintentionally—briefly highlighted how the U.N. really works, or perhaps more precisely, doesn’t work. U.S. news media outlets would do well to note it in the future.
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