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Apr. 30, 2026
/ JNS
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Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chair of the Home International Affairs Committee, referred to a satirical web site and a Jewish actor recognized for spoof roles when explaining why he thinks the United Nations looks as if a parody.
“There’s hardly every week that goes by that we don’t learn some headline concerning the United Nations that reads prefer it’s one thing out of the Babylon Bee or Hollywood, like Sacha Baron Cohen,” he stated.
Mast decried the worldwide physique on Wednesday throughout a listening to of the panel’s subcommittee on oversight and intelligence titled “U.S. Accountability on the United Nations: Challenges and Alternatives for Reform.”
“What was this week’s headline?” Mast stated. “It was that the United Nations chosen Iran to serve on the Board of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. I can’t even say it with a straight face.”
Tehran was chosen earlier within the week as vp of a convention to overview the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, drawing Washington’s ire because of the Islamic Republic’s repeated, constant violations of nuclear safeguards and commitments.
Mast additionally denounced the 54-nation Financial and Social Council for choosing Iran earlier within the month for the U.N. Committee for Program and Coordination, which shapes coverage on ladies’s rights, human rights, disarmament and terrorism prevention.
“This is identical regime whose thought on ladies’s rights is implementing bodily assault or detention for ladies who’re caught and not using a hijab,” Mast stated. “How does that occur? That may be a rotten establishment.”
Peter Yeo, president of the Better World Campaign, part of the U.N. Foundation, told the House panel that its criticism is better directed at member states, not U.N. leadership.
“You should be calling the embassies of all the countries that sponsored their leadership role today and let them know how angry you are,” he said. “There was no U.N. official involved in any of these decisions.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), ranking member of the subcommittee, noted the rampant Jew-hatred “that exists at U.N. bodies and agencies having nothing to do with their feelings on Israel.”
He noted that Francesca Albanese, a U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians whom the United States has sanctioned, has made repeated, blatant antisemitic statements. (The global body considers rapporteurs to be independent “experts” and has said it won’t police their speech.)
“The U.N. still refuses to deal with her,” the congressman said. “We see the double, triple, quadruple standard when it comes to the war between Israel and Hamas, and we don’t see that from the U.N. on the war between Russia and Ukraine.”
“We don’t see that from the U.N. on what’s happened in Sudan. We don’t see that from the U.N. on what’s going on with Iran,” Moskowitz said. “Where was the U.N. when 30,000-plus people were killed in Iran for protesting?”
Two Christian charities are suing Albanese for defamation in U.S. court. She has said that diplomatic immunity shields her from having to answer the claims and from U.S. sanctions. Washington imposed the latter, it said, because she intimidated U.S. businesses and organizations with ties to Israel.
“U.N. employees have greater immunity than the president of the United States,” said Eugene Kontorovich, law professor at George Mason University and director of the international law department at the Jerusalem think tank Kohelet Policy Forum. (The House hearing listed a brand new position, senior authorized fellow at Advancing American Freedom.)
“The U.N. has higher immunity than overseas international locations,” Kontorovich informed the Home panel. “If a overseas nation, like North Korea or Iran, sponsors terrorism, you may sue them in U.S. courts.”
U.S. funding for the worldwide physique should be tied to the United Nations waiving its immunities, in accordance with Kontorovich.
“There isn’t any such textual allowance for lawsuits towards U.N. entities or different worldwide organizations that sponsor terror,” he stated.
Brett Schaefer, senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute, informed the panel that U.N. workers are being vetted much less because the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth, or USAID, was downsized and folded into the U.S. State Division.
USAID had contracts and circumstances in place for its help to U.N. businesses and nonprofits, which required them to vet their personnel, in accordance with Schaefer.
“We have to be sure that all these organizations enter into agreements with the USA that permit us to vet their workers,” he stated.
Schaefer cited a invoice rising from the subcommittee that may require such compliance and permit U.S. funding through contractors, subcontractors and different recipients to be tracked.
The U.N. Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs acquired a $2 billion “clean examine,” and “there’s no U.S. potential to direct the funds to sure organizations,” he informed the panel. He added that the U.N. Consolidated Sanctions Listing, which doesn’t embrace terror teams like Hamas and Hezbollah, is the lone vetter.
‘Vastly inefficient’
Much of the panel’s discussion with witnesses centered on the extent to which Washington should apply financial leverage to Turtle Bay, the global body’s headquarters in New York, and which of its programs and agencies should be scrapped.
Schaefer told the congressmen that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, should shutter.
“Not only is it corrupted by the presence of terrorists within the organization, but it’s also vastly inefficient,” he testified.
UNRWA spends $800 per Palestinian refugee, 20 times what the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees spends, $40 per refugee, on refugees in the rest of the world, according to Schaefer.
He told the panel that those elevated costs are due to UNRWA considering Palestinians refugees in perpetuity and funding their education, food and healthcare, among other services.
“These are services that should be provided by a government, which the Palestinians claim to be,” Schaefer said. “This is, frankly, discouraging the Palestinians from fulfilling the responsibilities of a government and allows them to instead focus their attention and their resources on places that it shouldn’t be, which is terrorism and support for extremism.”
Some subcommittee members advocated for a departure from the United Nations, or scaling back in a big way.
Moskowitz said he worried that doing so would leave a void, which China would fill.
Kontorovich testified that a United Nations without the United States wouldn’t bring major gains for Beijing. “It is not the same prize for China to take over without the United States in it,” he said.
Without U.S. funding, which accounts for around 25% of the U.N. budget, “it would be a fundamentally different organization,” the scholar said.
The suggestion that the United Nations is “too big to fail” is dangerous and limits Washington’s power to negotiate by removing the threat that it could leave, he said.
