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As Israel’s leaders pursue an unrelenting genocidal war in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of peace and anti- war protestors gathered and marched in the capital and smaller cities around the world, including Kuala Lumpur, to condemn Israel’s war crimes and killings of over 40,000 innocent civilians.

To this number we have to add more casualties including many women and children in Lebanon where a new killing field has been opened up by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Whilst Netanyahu’s hardline ”take no prisoner” position and insistence on “total victory” in the conflict is unprecedented and is condemned even by conservative Zionist circles, it is no surprise in the United Nations system where Israel has been a serial transgressor of the UN Charter during war and peace.

The evidence for this can be clearly seen from a study of the extent to which member countries of the UN are adhering to the true – and not western defined rule-based international order – trumpeted by American leaders, and still slavishly echoed by its diminishing number of allies in the UN and other arenas of geo-political conflict.

Who is Sitting at the Bottom of UN Supportive Countries

Together with Israel at the bottom of a newly devised monitoring index developed to examine and measure the extent to which countries are conforming with the UN Charter as well as its goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals – the latter, a key challenge which all member countries have embraced – is the United States. They are in the company of what they routinely condemn as the most repressive and authoritarian nations in the world.

Such a positioning may appear surprising to readers of western media fed with daily propaganda of how the US and its Western allies are the most fervent protectors of human rights, freedoms and the international rules-based order.

Not only are the positions of the US and Israel revealing of the extent to which the two countries have failed to uphold the UN Charter and support the UN in its mission of peace and security, the index also highlights the low ranking of some of the most developed countries of the west in adherence to the principles and values of the UN Charter; and in supporting the development of the less developed countries of the world.

What is important to emphasise about this index – cancelled or almost totally absent in western media coverage – is that it is not the work of the think tanks or other information agencies that have proliferated during this new cold war period that the UN member countries find themselves in.

Think Tanks Feeding Frenzy

The so-called independent think tanks regularly called upon and quoted by western media and allies are entrenched with an ideological agenda to ensure the hegemony of the US and allies in the world system. They cherry pick and provide commentaries and ‘quotable’ quotes on various political and other narrowly defined ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ issues, developments and indicators so that the US and its allies appear as the defenders of a free, open, equal and prosperous world.

Sustained by copious external funding, think tanks such as the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rand Corporation, Australia’s Lowry Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute and others exist mainly as self interested and opportunistic agents of western political bias and manipulation. The most recent tranche of US financial support passed to support anti China propaganda – US$1.6 billion during the next five years – will ensure that this propaganda machine goes into overdrive to provide more  pro-west ‘scholarly’ research and narratives to justify their existence.

These US State Department funded establishments should emulate the UN team in its work on the multilateralism index and other UN mandated concerns and priorities if only to provide a fig leaf to distract from or conceal their partisan body of work.

The UN Multilateralism Index: Model For Emulation

Focusing on six rigorous and neutral indicators – ratification of major UN treaties; percentage of votes aligned with the international majority at the UN General Assembly (UNGA); participation in selected UN organisations and agencies; participation in conflicts and militarization; the use of unilateral coercive measures (UCMs); and contribution to the UN budget and international solidarity – the report on the index and its findings is a model of completeness, uniqueness, timeliness, accuracy, and most important of all, in respect of the UN, neutrality. Noteworthy too is that the full dataset is available online enabling it to reach the larger public, including any critic.

The report concludes with a reminder that “nation-states, which remain at the heart of the multilateral system, must be held accountable for upholding the values and principles of the UN Charter”.

It is a conclusion that recalcitrant countries, especially in the West, ranking low in the index need to be reminded of. Meantime, the report deserves to be part of the essential reading in every forthcoming international conference and summit on peace, security and development.

Original article: Eurasia Review