THE UN DOESN'T BELONG IN NEW YORK

At the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Palestine was at the top of the agenda with a record number of states set to recognise it diplomatically. Yet even such a hollow symbolic gesture, two years into the Zionist holocaust in Gaza, was still a bridge too far for the Trump regime. The US abused its ill-gotten and undeserved authority as the permanent host country of the UN to deny visas to the entire Palestinian delegation, leaving the nation voiceless at its time of greatest peril.

It wasn't the first time they did this -- or even the first time they did it to Palestine specifically. In 1988 the US denied Yasser Arafat's visa right as the First Intifada brought unprecedented visibility to the struggle in historic Palestine, forcing the entire General Assembly to relocate to Geneva.

From outright visa and overflight denials to more subtle intimidation -- the kind that prompted Fidel Castro to relocate to Harlem in 1960 -- the US has shown time and again how patently unfit it is to host the UN headquarters. This is to say nothing of how brazenly it sabotages other UN institutions like UNESCO, UNRWA, and the International Court of Justice. Or its extreme degree of self-isolation on everything from the illegal blockade of Cuba to the global condemnation of Nazism to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It's long past time for the UN to leave US soil for good, if it's to preserve any shred of its credibility.