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If satire weren’t already dead, this would have killed it. There are jokes, and then there is whatever the United Nations has just done. CASE IN POINT: The Islamic Republic of Iran – a regime that treats women as a sort of troublesome sub‑species, that harvests political prisoners like a cash crop, that hangs gay men from cranes and arms terrorists from Beirut to Sana’a – has been nominated to a UN committee that will help shape policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament and terrorism prevention.

The sheer, operatic absurdity of this vote is beyond belief.

Times of Israel

ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Iran is a country where a young woman, Mahsa Amini, can be beaten to death for the crime of insufficient hair concealment, where schoolgirls are poisoned for daring to remove headscarves, where the “morality police” patrol the streets as if they were animal control and half the population a species to be managed. This is the state now invited to contribute to the global conversation on gender equality. It is a bit like asking Jack the Ripper to sit on the board of a women’s shelter.

ON HUMAN RIGHTS: The Islamic Republic has turned the abuse of its citizens into a system of government. Torture is not an aberration but a technique. Trials are not hearings but theater. Journalists, lawyers, artists and students are jailed, flogged, disappeared. Minorities – Kurds, Baluchis, Baháʼís, Jews – are treated as internal enemies, laboratory subjects for the regime’s paranoia. Who better, then, to help the UN shape its priorities on human dignity and the rule of law? Perhaps they can offer a breakout session on efficient repression: “From Arrest to Confession in 24 Hours or Less.”

ON DISARMAMENT: Iran’s record is one long love letter to the proliferation of things that go bang. Ballistic missiles, drones, enrichment centrifuges spinning away in underground caverns, shipments of weapons routed through every smuggling lane from the Gulf to the Mediterranean – this is a state that collects UN Security Council resolutions the way other nations collect stamps. To consult Tehran on disarmament is to invite an arsonist to draft the fire code.

ON TERRORISM PREVENTION: One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – that dashing outfit of humanitarians – has spent decades recruiting, training and funding militias whose sole raison d’être is to terrorize. Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, various letter‑soup factions in Iraq and Syria – all beneficiaries of Iran’s singular devotion to “non‑state actors.” The regime’s fingerprints are on bombings in Buenos Aires, plots in Europe, rockets on Riyadh, drones on tankers. The only terrorism Iran has ever wished to prevent is the terrifying prospect that any of these networks might one day run out of ammunition.

And yet, into the committee room shuffles this theocracy, robes flapping, blood still wet on its hands, and the UN – that husk of an idea we once dignified with the term “international community” – smiles beatifically and hands it a nameplate.

When you invite a regime like Iran’s to sit in judgment on the rights it tramples, you are not merely being hypocritical; you are vandalizing the very concepts you claim to uphold. “Women’s rights” becomes a phrase so elastic that it can cover the compulsory veiling of children. “Human rights” becomes roomy enough to include show trials and mass graves. “Terrorism prevention” stretches to embrace the patrons of Hezbollah and Hamas. Words become costumes that any state can don for the duration of a committee meeting.

Iranian feminists – those astonishingly brave women who have faced batons, bullets and prison cells chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” – will not see this nomination as a charming quirk of multilateralism. They will read it as confirmation that the institutions supposedly designed to protect them are quite prepared to use their suffering as décor, while handing the microphone to their tormentors.

This kind of outrageous behavior has become a pattern at the UN.

Syrian representatives a few years after barrel bombs; Saudi Arabia once elected to a women’s rights commission; Libya, under Gaddafi, heading the Human Rights Council; North Korea presiding over disarmament forums. The UN has turned the fox‑on‑the‑henhouse‑watch into a sort of performance art.

What might be refreshing, just once, would be for a handful of member states with their moral faculties still intact to stand up and say, with polite but unambiguous disdain: “No. This is ludicrous. This is an offence not only to the victims of this regime, but to the language we use to describe their suffering. We will not participate in the charade.”

The Islamic Republic’s nomination to this UN committee is not merely a bad joke; it is a confession. It reveals, more starkly than any speech, how far the international system has drifted from the moral architecture its founders imagined after 1945. If we are not prepared to be scandalized by this, we have not only failed Iran’s victims; we have begun to fail ourselves.

Hillel Neuer of UN Watch in his own words: