The United Nations Human Rights Council, in the Palace of Nations (Geneva). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

For all the talk on the political scene about draining the swamp, there is one entity — conveniently located on the East River of New York City — which deserves to be cast adrift if not altogether drowned (certainly more so than Meals on Wheels or Sesame Street).

Yes, that laughably ironic misnomer known as the United Nations, where nations are united only in their hatred of Israel, is now under the kind of scrutiny it has never before experienced. For decades, the UN received a blank check of $8 billion from the United States, and allowed unpaid parking tickets to accumulate with diplomatic immunity.

American presidents never bothered to ask what the United States was getting for its money other than hundreds of resolutions condemning its ally — Israel, while rogue states that slaughtered millions and gave barbarism a bad name got away without even a summons.

The Trump administration, however, is now sending a forceful message that the UN must be held accountable for its moral hypocrisy, fecklessness and theatrical obsession with Israel. For nearly its entire 70-year existence, the UN, coincidentally located on 42nd Street, has acted as if it is a Broadway theatre and not an international peacekeeping enterprise — replete with costumes, comedy and sanctimonious melodrama on matters that do little to benefit humankind. The examples are endless, with Israel as global fall guy.

UN Security Council Resolution 2334 redrew Israel’s 1967 border in contravention of the UN’s own earlier pronouncements. UNESCO passed a resolution denying any Jewish link to the holy sites of Jerusalem. And just last week, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia published a report labeling Israel as an apartheid state.

Worse still, the UN’s Human Rights Council (HRC), a lowbrow farce with a penchant for Shakespearean tragedy, has exclusively been in the “bash Israel” business. Take, for example, the Goldstone Report, that investigation into the Gaza War of 2009, with its one-sided rebuke of Israel and the eternal stigma (and lie) that it targeted not Hamas terrorists but innocent civilians.

The HRC’s primary accomplishment last year was compiling a database of Israeli companies with ties to the West Bank. The HRC had officially entered the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) sweepstakes, ostensibly advancing the cause of human rights by, paradoxically, making West Bank Palestinians jobless. More recently, the Lawfare Project wrote to the HRC registering concern that three organizations dedicated to the BDS movement were asked to join this year’s session.

The HRC has also employed “experts” such as Jean Ziegler, who has justified Hezbollah attacks against Israel. And those that sit on the council itself couldn’t pass a sobriety test measuring human rights violators: Iraq, Egypt, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

Millions of people have been killed in Syria, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria, and we’ve also seen torched homosexuals, beheaded journalists and lashed women all throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf. For these innocents, the HRC has no room on its agenda. Yet, Agenda Item Seven, at each session of the HRC, automatically inspects Israel’s human rights record, and the Jewish state has been condemned, by resolution, more than 60 times.

Regarding Sudan, the HRC once expressed “deep concern.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has recently placed the HRC on notice: America won’t participate in, or arguably fund, a sham. The UN’s institutional integrity, if not its entire existence, is under review.

US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has demonstrated true moral leadership in her early tenure, wondering why Hezbollah and ISIS went unmentioned in her first Security Council session, while all outrage was directed against Israel. And she fiercely objected to Israel being declared an apartheid state. Haley’s predecessor, Samantha Power, was the perfect Obama protégé — an academic who wrote about genocide, but was notably powerless before genocidaires, and yet fearless when it came to browbeating Israel.

The United States rejoined the HRC during the Obama administration, believing, predictably, that the sheer force of “hope and change” charisma would magically lead to its reform. Trump’s team, so far, is refreshingly more dubious. Rather than watch Israel’s isolation, Tillerson and Haley are reminding the world that there’s no point perpetuating a fraud and funding a behemoth that can’t find something meaningful to do in a world full of despots and where Israel is hardly global enemy number one.