CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Thursday lambasted United Nations member countries that are serial human rights violators but voted to condemn the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, describing them as hypocritical for "lecturing" Washington about peace, human rights, and stability.
Earlier on Thursday, 128 countries supported a non-binding U.N. General Assembly resolution that condemned the U.S. for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and for deciding to move its embassy there, while nine voted "no" and 35 nations abstained. Some of the countries that voted for the resolution have records of egregious human rights violations, and their representatives at the U.N. spoke before the General Assembly to criticize the U.S. and Israel.
Tapper called out these states for castigating the U.S. while abusing their own citizens.
"Among the 128 that voted to condemn the U.S. on this issue were some countries with some rather questionable records of their own," Tapper said. "Take Venezuela's representative today."
Tapper then played a clip of Samuel Moncada, Venezuela's representative to the U.N., telling the General Assembly that the U.S. "threatens global peace."
Venezuela, which continues to experience a humanitarian disaster amid an economic collapse due to government mismanagement, has been ravaged by malnutrition and violent protests as the government has cracked down on dissent.
"On what moral platform does the government of Venezuela stand today?" Tapper asked.
Tapper then noted how the government of Syria—which has used chemical weapons on its own citizens, including children—condemned the U.S. at the U.N.
He then turned the discussion to Yemen, which helped draft the U.N. resolution, and played a clip of Khaled Hussein Alyemany, Yemen's permanent representative to the U.N., expressing concern about threats to "international peace and security." Tapper noted that Yemen decided to focus its energies on the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel rather than the "seven million Yemenis on the brink of starvation in that country's civil war."
"There are plenty of policies and actions that are perfectly valid to criticize about the United States and about Israel, and certainly whether this move will help the peace process in any way seems one of them," Tapper said. "But listening to these countries, including North Korea and Myanmar and Turkey and China, lecturing the United States in any way about human rights and peace might seem a bit much."
Tapper then cited statistics from the non-governmental organization U.N. Watch to show that, from 2012 to 2015, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 97 resolutions "specifically criticizing an individual country." And of those 97 resolutions, 83 of them, or 86 percent, focused on Israel.
"Now certainly Israel is not above criticism," Tapper added, "but considering the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the lack of basic human rights in North Korea, the children starving in the streets of Venezuela, the citizens of Syria targeted for murder by their own leader using the most grotesque and painful of weapons, you have to ask: is Israel truly deserving of 86 percent of the world's condemnation, or possibly is something else afoot at the United Nations, something that allows the representative of the [Syrian] government to lecture the United States for moving its embassy?"