A New Documentary Exposes The U.N.'s DNA

August 5, 2012

By Lauri B. Regan
 

When I was in grade school, I was given a UNICEF collection box every year with marching orders to solicit donations from family, friends and neighbors. My parents always had me toss the box in the garbage explaining that the United Nations was an anti-Semitic organization and we would not support its projects.

Decades later, my children were still sent home from school every year before Halloween with a UNICEF collection box and instructions to take it along while trick-or-treating. Like my parents, my initial reaction was to forbid my children from collecting money for the U. N. It was not just the anti-Semitism emanating from the organization that caused this visceral reaction. It was my awareness of the corruption and dysfunction that permeated that institution that infuriated me every time I drove by the headquarters on the East River, passed a diplomat’s car double parked wherever it chose in Midtown Manhattan, or got stuck in traffic delays due to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again coming to New York to address the General Assembly. But that was difficult to explain to my children as well as adults who questioned my evident callousness at not supporting this organization founded on idealistic hopes and dreams.

Well not anymore. In a brief and entertaining 93 minutes, Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, writers, producers, and directors of the documentary, U.N. Me, take the viewer on a fascinating, disturbing, and often humorous ride through the corruption, criminal activity, ineffectual bureaucracy, and profound uselessness of an institution that was initially created to fight the bad guys and address the problems related to war and peace. As Horowitz, also the star of the film, explains, “In the aftermath of World War II, the leaders of the world created the UN to ensure global security and protect human rights.”

Alas, by the end of the movie the viewer is left with a sick feeling knowing that the $8 billion of U.S. funding of the U.N. in 2010[i] is being used to finance some of the world’s worst atrocities and line the pockets of many of the vilest dictators and despots in modern history. As Claudia Rosett explains, “It’s a culture that has a lot in common with dictatorships. It’s what you’d find in despotisms, not in democratic societies. Secrecy and privilege. And that’s unfortunately what’s come from that utopian charter.”

This Michael Moore-style documentary so artfully and skillfully produced by Horowitz and Groff appropriately begins and ends with Ahmadinejad taking the stage as the keynote speaker at the U.N’s premiere human rights conference in 2009 in Geneva. At the start of the film, Horowitz questions the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and Conference Director as to how Ahmadinejad was chosen as the keynote speaker. There was no substantive answer – how could there be?

Horowitz ties the film together by returning to this theme at the end. In an interview with an Iranian diplomat defending his government’s human rights record, the Iranian explains that each country may have its own standard of human rights based on cultural differences. So when Iran forces sex change operations on suspected homosexuals and stones women for untold number of reasons, they are simply enforcing laws based on cultural differences rather than abusing an individual’s right to live. Horowitz’s sarcasm once again gets the better of his interviewee as he hugs him goodbye and asks, “You like my shirt? It’s not too gay is it?” The irony is not lost on the viewer as the film then points out that Iran was elected to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, the agency assigned with protecting the rights of women across the globe.[ii]

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