Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Conventions, a date celebrated by the UN as “Human-Rights Day.” As Gerald Steinberg notes, the United Nations—which last week failed to pass a resolution condemning Hamas—has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting human rights, despite its “self-congratulatory rhetoric.”

Ignoring most of the victims [of genuine persecution] around the world, the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva continues to be controlled by some of the worst violators, including Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia (a major offender long before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi), Egypt, and China. The member-states and UN officials they appoint routinely exploit the rhetoric of international law to deflect attention from their own behavior, and obsessively target the Jewish state. Syrian and Iranian diplomats take the floor to make poisonous accusations against Israel, while their governments make genocidal threats that turn the 1948 Universal Declaration into a mockery.

This year, the council voted again to conduct a pseudo-investigation of Israel, this time over the claims of excessive force and war crimes during the Hamas-orchestrated violent “Grand Return March” incidents along the Gaza border with Israel. Like the infamous, and eventually discredited, Goldstone Report [accusing Israel of fictitious war crimes in its 2008-2009 conflict with Hamas], the one-sided results of this investigation were decided before the commission members were named. . . .

[To make things worse], powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to promote human rights, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, promote [instead] the agendas of the dictatorships they are ostensibly monitoring. At the meetings, these NGOs routinely take the floor to repeat unsupported claims and denounce democracies, reinforcing the attacks against Israel with particular relish.

On Friday, the Indian-born, Anglo-American novelist Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed and severely wounded while giving a public lecture in western New York. Reports have since emerged—although as yet unverified—that the would-be assassin had been in contact with agents of Iran, whose supreme leaders have repeatedly called on Muslims to murder Rushdie. Meanwhile U.S. and European diplomats are trying to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran. Stephen Daisley comments:

Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin might have been a lone wolf. He might have had no contact with military or intelligence figures. He might never even have set foot in Tehran. But be in no doubt: he acted, in effect, as an agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Under the terms of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, Rushdie “and all those involved in [his novel The Satanic Verses’s] publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.” Khomeini urged “brave Muslims to kill them quickly wherever they find them so that no one ever again would dare to insult the sanctities of Muslims,” adding: “anyone killed while trying to execute Rushdie would, God willing, be a martyr.”

An American citizen has been the victim of an attempted assassination on American soil by, it appears, another American after decades of the Iranian supreme leader agitating for his murder. No country that is serious about its national security, to say nothing of its national self-worth, can pretend this is some everyday stabbing with no broader political implications.

Those implications relate not only to the attack on Rushdie. . . . In July, a man armed with an AK-47 was arrested outside the Brooklyn home of Masih Alinejad, an Iranian dissident who was also the intended target of an abduction plot last year orchestrated by an Iranian intelligence agent. The cumulative weight of these outrages should render the new Iran deal dead in the water.