Claim: Arab/Islamic states consistently vote against the U.S. in the United Nations.
Status: True.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2003]
How they vote at the U.N.! Below are the actual voting records of various Arabic/Islamic States which are recorded in both the US State Department and United Nations records: Kuwait votes against the United States 67% of the time. US Foreign Aid to those that hate us: Egypt, for example, after voting 79% of the time against the United States, still receives $2 billion annually in US Foreign Aid. Jordan votes 71% against the United States and receives $192,814,000 annually in US Foreign Aid. Pakistan votes 75% against the United States receives $6,721,000 annually in US Foreign Aid. India votes 81% against the United States receives $143,699,000 annually Perhaps it is time to get out of the UN and give the tax savings back to the American workers who are having to skimp and sacrifice to pay the taxes. Pass it along. Everyone needs to know this. Might even mention it to your congressman, who knows this anyway... what a disgrace... no wonder the world has no respect for us. |
Origins: This is one of those items that seems simple enough to verify at first blush, but proves quite difficult in practice.
First of all, we have to consider what our parameters are:
- Are we measuring the voting records of the named countries across the entire six-decade history of the United Nations, or only from some subset of that period?
- Which votes are we counting — just those of the
General Assembly , or also those of theMain Committees and theSecurity Council ?
Even deciding that we're only going to consider the postions various countries took on resolutions presented to the General Assembly during a specified time period still makes compiling an accurate tally difficult, because:
- The majority of General Assembly resolutions are adopted without a vote.
- Unless a recorded vote is specifically requested before a resolution is voted upon, the U.N. makes available a voting summary which provides only a tally of the final vote, not a listing of how individual Member States voted.
Once we narrow our focus to resolutions submitted to a recorded vote, we still have some thorny issues to consider:
- Nearly every resolution ends up with some Member States either abstaining or failing to vote on it. When countries abstain from voting on a resolution which the U.S. either supports or opposes, are those countries to be regarded as voting against the U.S. (because they failed to support its vote), or are they to be considered as neutral parties neither for nor against the U.S.?
- Quite often U.N. votes address the issue of whether a single paragraph (or even just a few words) in the draft of a resolution should be changed or omitted. When the U.S. otherwise supports a resolution but seeks to change some of its wording, are other countries to be regarded as voting against the U.S. if they do not also vote in favor of the alterations?
Since we had to start somewhere, we tallied the recorded votes for all resolutions put before the General Assembly so far during the current session, running from October 2003 to
The results of this tally were even worse (from a U.S. perspective) than the message quoted above indicates, with the countries named voting contrary to the
Country | Times Voted With U.S. | Times Voted Against U.S. | % of Votes Against U.S. |
Kuwait | 10 | 61 | 86% |
Qatar | 9 | 64 | 88% |
Morocco | 8 | 62 | 89% |
United Arab Emirates | 8 | 61 | 88% |
Jordan | 9 | 64 | 88% |
Tunisia | 8 | 63 | 89% |
Saudi Arabia | 7 | 62 | 90% |
Yemen | 9 | 64 | 88% |
Algeria | 9 | 63 | 88% |
Oman | 9 | 63 | 88% |
Sudan | 10 | 60 | 86% |
Pakistan | 9 | 59 | 87% |
Libya | 8 | 63 | 89% |
Egypt | 10 | 63 | 86% |
Lebanon | 7 | 62 | 90% |
India | 14 | 52 | 79% |
Syria | 7 | 59 | 89% |
Mauritania | 7 | 63 | 90% |
However, we also surveyed the U.N. voting records of several countries generally considered to be close allies of the U.S., and those results were none too impressive either. Only Israel consistently voted with the U.S.:
Country | Times Voted With U.S. | Times Voted Against U.S. | % of Votes Against U.S. |
Australia | 33 | 26 | 44% |
Canada | 31 | 32 | 51% |
Israel | 56 | 7 | 11% |
Japan | 26 | 36 | 58% |
United Kingdom | 40 | 27 | 40% |
France | 36 | 31 | 46% |
How much significance one should place in these figures is problematic, because most other
Last updated: 3 December 2007