The UN Human Rights Council—a body that includes representatives of Cuba, Afghanistan, and Qatar—convened last week and issued five anti-Israel resolutions, one of which preposterously demanded that the Golan Heights be returned to Bashar Assad’s Syria. Meanwhile, Iran, North Korea, and Syria merited one resolution each. Such all-too-typical anti-Israel obsessions are only part of the United Nations’ many flaws, which John Bolton—the newly appointed American national security adviser—has frequently called to public attention. Bret Stephens writes:

The UN is a never-ending scandal disguised as an everlasting hope. The hope is that dialogue can overcome distrust and collective security can be made to work in the interests of humanity. Reality says otherwise. Trust is established by deeds, not words. Collective security is a recipe for international paralysis or worse. Just ask the people of Aleppo.

As for the scandals—where to start? UN peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti that so far has taken 10,000 lives. Yet it took UN headquarters six years to acknowledge responsibility. An Associated Press investigation found “nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world” over a twelve-year period, including 300 allegations involving children. “But only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.” . . .

And then there are comparatively lesser scandals. Like Oil for Food, the multibillion-dollar program intended to feed hungry Iraqi children and used by Saddam Hussein in a kickback scheme involving a rogue’s gallery of international enablers. Or the use of UN schools in Gaza to store weapons aimed at Israel. Or the 2016 admission by a UN oversight body that some UN agencies “continue to remain in a state of near-denial with regard to fraud.” . . .

The UN adopted what were supposed to be landmark reforms more than a decade ago. Yet the mismanagement, corruption, abuses, and moral perversities remain. Iran sits on the executive board of the Commission on the Status of Women. The Syrian regime is represented on the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization, dedicated to “respect for self-determination of all peoples.” . . .

“Imagine if the UN was going to the United States and raping children and bringing cholera,” Mario Joseph, a Haitian lawyer seeking compensation for the UN’s victims, told the Associated Press. . . . I agree with Bolton about some things and disagree about others. But on the UN he’s been right all along. If his presence in the White House helps to scare the organization into real reform, so much the better.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.