The United Nations reaches a nadir today, singing the praises of the late Butcher of Tehran. The General Assembly memorial service to President Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash this month alongside the Iranian foreign minister, is symptomatic of a rot that is eating up the entire UN system. Moral inversion, reverberating from Turtle Bay to Vienna, The Hague, Geneva, and back to New York is somehow taken seriously at world capitals, including our own.

In sending condolences to “the people of Iran,” Secretary-General Guterres noted that prior to the May 19 helicopter crash that killed the Iranian president, Raisi had inaugurated the “largest joint water project” with Azerbaijan. The UN chief lauded the Islamic Republic president’s contribution to “international and regional cooperation,” adding, “such cooperation is critical to building confidence, preventing conflict, and resolving disputes.” 

For what kind of idiots does he take the UN? In the real world Raisi’s Iran and the regional proxies Raisi cultivated are responsible for sowing doubt, initiating conflict, and deepening disputes. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iraqi, Syrian, and West Bank militias are wreaking havoc. The Houthis hold hostage one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The American embassy boycotted the ceremony. Iran’s people are shedding no tears over Raisi.  

“Raisi was involved in numerous, horrific human rights abuses, including the extrajudicial killings of thousands of political prisoners in 1988,” the spokesman for our embassy at the UN, Nate Evans, said in a statement. “Some of the worst human rights abuses on record took place during his tenure.” True enough, but unmentioned was that in the same period, the mullahs made their most significant advances toward becoming a nuclear-armed power. 

So why would President Biden work behind the scenes to prevent a British-French resolution censuring Iran at the UN nuclear watchdog? Such a resolution could eventually lead to the undoing of the 2015 nuclear deal that removed mandated global sanctions against Iran. According to the Security Council resolution that endorsed that deal, at the decade’s end Iran could legally possess as many bombs as it wishes. “Why wait?” the mullahs seem to ask.

Meanwhile, as the Mideast’s most malignant regime gains power in international institutions, the region’s only true democracy, and America’s most reliable ally, Israel, is increasingly maligned. “I condemn Israel’s actions which killed scores of innocent civilians who were only seeking shelter from this deadly conflict,” Mr. Guterres wrote on X earlier this week. “There is no safe place in Gaza. This horror must stop.” 

Mr. Guterres referred to a deadly fire that killed nearly 200 hundred Gazans at a UN shelter. According to an Israel Defense Force investigation, the fire was ignited after a ricochet from an air attack that targeted two arch-terrorists. The ricochet hit a Hamas explosive warehouse hidden at a UN facility. Mr. Guterres has no use for such credible investigations. The baseless, proforma condemnations he issues instead bounce around throughout the system. 

The International Court of Justice relied on Mr. Guterres’s half-truths in its order to Israel to “immediately halt” at Rafah military operations that “may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that would bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Ignoring that last part, Algeria is now calling for a Security Council action to “stop the killing in Rafah,” its UN ambassador, Amar Bendjama, says. 

It’s a vicious circle. Mr. Guterres’s condemnations are cited by ICJ “judges,” whose orders return to the Security Council. In case of an American veto, the general assembly adopts the failed council resolution. The secretary general then condemns Israel for ignoring the Assembly. Round and round it goes. Another Hague venue, the International Criminal Court, ignores Raisi’s atrocities, while seeking to arrest the Israeli premier and defense minister. 

Little has changed in the decades that passed since the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban observed that “if Algeria introduced a resolution that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.” Today’s tribute to a man responsible for single-handedly killing thousands of Iranians was too much for America to stomach. Why should Mr. Biden hold the rest of the UN system in such high esteem?