Nikki Haley, US President-elect Donald Trump’s Indian-American pick for the key post of UN envoy, has come out strongly against the world body’s “outrageous bias” against Israel by adopting as many as 20 resolutions against it in the just-concluded General Assembly session.
At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Haley, currently the Governor of South Carolina, commented that the United Nations’ failure has nowhere been “more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel”.
“In the past ten years, the Human Rights Council has passed 62 resolutions condemning the reasonable actions Israel takes to defend its security,” she said, pointing out that at the same time “the world’s worst human rights abusers in Syria, Iran, and North Korea received far fewer condemnations. This cannot continue.”
Haley, who did not miss the opportunity to attack the Obama administration for abstaining during the recent UN vote against Israel, went on to say: “I will not go to New York and abstain when the UN seeks to create an international environment that encourages boycotts of Israel.”
“In fact, I pledge to you this: I will never abstain when the United Nations takes any action that comes in direct conflict with the interests and values of the United States,” Haley said, making it clear that she, if confirmed, would serve as a strong voice for American principles and interests at the UN. The passage of UN Resolution 2334 last month was “a terrible mistake”, Haley said, noting that while making a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians harder to achieve, the mistake had been compounded by the UN’s “long history of anti-Israel bias”.