This is the week that a conference on racism is being held in Geneva. It revisits some of the widely deplored incidents of the previous conference on racism, held eight years ago in Durban, South Africa, just before the attacks of 9/11.

In the ensuing international events, it was easy to forget that during the rush to condemn the tiny state of Israel for bigotry and colonialism, some of the conference participants reached into a dark, dirty bag of tricks and pulled out copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Little wonder so many delegates were prepared to boycott this week’s otherwise seemingly noble efforts. Monday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad again targeted only one country: Israel. The speech did not advance the cause, and scores of delegates strode out (video here).

If this is the best the United Nations can do, it really is time to wash our hands and pull the plug on this enterprise. Here are three urgent reasons:

First, there is simply too much effort paid to condemning one country. That would be Israel, of course. And too much energy is spent creating a cloud of anti-Semitism. This is certainly not new; Pedro Sanjuan, the former policy planning director in the U.N. Secretariat, documents the toxic, anti-Jewish environment in his 2005 book, “The UN Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat.”

Second, the UN Peacekeeping forces are no such thing. The worst example is from Yugoslavia during the 90s. There were terrible massacres, mass rapes, and genital mutilation. But there was no child prostitution. That arrived with the UN troops, as documented here by Amnesty International. Eritrea suffered similarly. And because UN troops are not an army for which anybody bears responsibility—they are not the army of a nation-state, after all—there is no way to punish such outrages.

Third, there is a terrible record of genocides occurring on the UN’s watch. Only afterwards do they pass unanimous resolutions that are soggy with crocodile’s tears. So it went when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia, so it was when Rwanda turned into a slaughterhouse, thus it is now as the janjaweed murder women and children and elders in Darfur. UN troops that are sent to places of mass carnage can be counted on to be absolutely useless. Either they withdraw at the moment of crisis and leave the victims to the tender mercies of their killers (Rwanda) or they politely show the murderers the way before the massacre starts (Bosnia).

If the UN were a nation state one would have to call it a banana republic—albeit one that hasn’t produced a single banana in years. If the UN were a company it would need a bailout by now. The United Nations? Flush it down the drain already.

Hannes Stein is a New York-based correspondent for Die Welt, the German newspaper. A version of this editorial is concurrently cross-posted on their opinion page.