Our View: True Wonder

The United Nations is not our favorite institution in the world.

It’s easy to forget when we look at the bloated bureaucracy that delves into public health, food, the environment, nuclear proliferation, human rights and so much more, but the idea behind a global deliberative body is to reduce the likelihood of war. If top diplomats from all the nations are gathered on neutral ground, day after day, maybe they’ll find a way to talk through their disputes instead of shooting.

Needless to say, it hasn’t worked.

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Instead, beyond the make-work jobs for government cronies around the world, the specialty of the United Nations is Israel-bashing.

From giving the Palestinians perpetual refugee status with their own U.N. agency to address their needs and advocate their cause, to the UNESCO resolutions that ignore or deny the Jewish history in the land of Israel, to the U.N. Human Rights Council (whose members include such paragons as Cuba, Qatar and Venezuela) focusing almost exclusively on the ills of Israel (including, laughably, women’s rights), to the annual exercise of the U.N. General Assembly passing resolution after resolution critical of Israel, the United Nations treats Israel as if it were the size of Russia with the population of China.

No wonder people have a hard time believing Jews are roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
But the United Nations took its special brand of insanity to a new level the past two months with Wonder Woman.

The comic-book Amazon turned 75 in October, and the men at the upper echelons of the United Nations, having just angered feminists worldwide by choosing another man to be the next secretary-general, decided to focus all the frustration by naming Wonder Woman the honorary U.N. ambassador on women’s empowerment and gender-based violence.

In some ways, Wonder Woman was an inspired choice. She’s a powerful woman, representative of a matriarchal society, who regularly saves men and stands equal with male superheroes. She’s also smart, and she’s an immigrant (almost certainly undocumented). She could be a role model for the millions of women and girls whose lives have been ruined by the warfare the United Nations is powerless to prevent.

But she’s also drawn with supernatural curves and beauty, and she’s perceived as being an all-American hero. It probably doesn’t help the character’s popularity within the United Nations that Israeli model/actress Gal Gadot is portraying Wonder Woman in her own movie next year, as well as in various Justice League films.

And, of course, Wonder Woman isn’t real, so promoting her as the ambassador of an institution with the thickest of glass ceilings is, well, undiplomatic.

So we shouldn’t have been surprised when news broke that Wonder Woman’s ambassadorial reign will end Friday, Dec. 16, less than two months after it began. We wish she could wrap her golden lasso around a few U.N. officials to get the truth about why her term ended 10 months earlier than expected.

It would all be just another U.N. farce except for what’s going on in the real world. The Wonder Woman announcement came as Syrian forces were slaughtering their way through eastern Aleppo in some of the ugliest moments of a horrible civil war — the kind of warfare the United Nations might be able to prevent if it weren’t playing childish games.