UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer appeared on ILTV with Calev Ben-David to discuss the high-level opening of the UN General Assembly and the overt bias of UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Transcript:
Calev Ben-David, ILTV: Joining us now for more is Hillel Neuer. He is the Executive Director of UN Watch. And of course, this is a busy time of the year for you, Hillel, with plenty of material there at the UN General Assembly.
Let’s start with your comments, which you put out in a tweet about Antonio Guterres. The Secretary-General predictably criticized Israel in his address. Maybe just talk about your reaction to his remarks.
Hillel Neuer: Look, it’s not the first time that he has chosen to make this kind of comparison, where he says that Israel is doing something that’s the worst he’s ever seen in his entire life or in his entire tenure. And the fact is, it’s false.
He says that what’s happening in Gaza is the worst situation he’s ever seen, the scale unprecedented from anything he’s witnessed. Well, in the time that he’s been Secretary-General, perhaps he didn’t notice, but hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Sudan, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Ethiopia, and the list goes on.
So, just factually, by any measure, if you look at Hamas’s maximalist figures, the other situations that I mentioned are far greater. The other piece which is significant is that Hamas invaded Israel. Hamas launched a massacre on October 7, killing 1,200 people in one day-the equivalent of 12 9/11 attacks proportionally, if you compare Israel’s population to America.
Israel responded to destroy Hamas, with innocent people killed. Of course, every innocent death is tragic. But Hamas launched a war. They launched a massacre with genocidal intent. Guterres erases all of that and falsely says it’s the worst he’s witnessed. The only way it’s the worst is if he was willfully blind to everything else happening in the world. Very sad.
Calev Ben-David: Now, Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to be speaking on Thursday. He’s put out a statement already saying he’ll go there to tell the truth about Israel’s heroic soldiers. Presumably, he’ll also speak on Iran and perhaps on Gaza. He also said he’ll talk about New York Mayor Mamdani.
What do you think the Prime Minister-what do you think he should be saying, will say, and should be saying there to the GA?
Hillel Neuer: Well, I think that he is going to make the case for Israel, as he always does. I think he’s certainly going to identify Iran as the head of the snake, which it is in the region. It’s the cause of war and terrorism from Syria to Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq to Yemen, right now spilling over into Saudi Arabia.
So I think he’s going to certainly talk about the war in Iran. He’s going to talk about Israel’s war against Hamas. These are all important subjects. He has a very difficult challenge ahead of him. Israel’s standing in the world is at a low point, certainly Western democracies, whether it’s Britain, Canada, Australia and other countries.
We saw France taking an unfair hit at Israel. We saw Macron just the other day. I think Netanyahu will hit him back. Macron said in French, basically, that Hamas never ravaged the West Bank the way it did in Gaza, so Israel has no excuse to act in the West Bank. And then he was attacked for it because, of course, Hamas has killed many people in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria.
His office said that he said Hamas never governed, but that’s not the typical use of the French word according to any dictionary. So I think Macron will get hit. Let’s keep in mind, Macron is whitewashing Abbas. He talks about sovereignty for the Palestinians. A year ago, he defended his decision to recognize the State of Palestine, saying that he’s being criticized for doing something on paper. It was a fiction. There is no State of Palestine.
If we talk about Abbas, even the mayor of Paris in France stripped Abbas of a major award because of his remarks denying the Holocaust, justifying Hitler. So you have the mayor of Paris recognizing that Abbas is a Holocaust denier. His PhD from the Soviet Union is on Holocaust denial. And you have the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, whitewashing this defender of Hitler. It’s rather shameful.
Calev Ben-David: What about some of your response to President Trump’s remarks? He was a bit-I want to say-restrained when it comes to President Trump. I mean, he certainly has strong statements about Iran. Notably, he did not criticize the UN itself, something he’s done in the past, including last year. I mean, what was your response? How did you feel about President Trump’s remarks?
Hillel Neuer: Well, I think President Trump, interestingly, though in some cases he has a sledgehammer on certain issues. On the UN, it’s important to note he’s never said, “Destroy the UN.” Even when he signed executive orders pulling out of certain UN bodies, he said the UN has great potential. We need to make it great again.
His ambassador, who’s very busy in New York, Ambassador Mike Waltz, and Jeff Bartos, the ambassador for UN reform, have cut a lot of money from the UN budget, but they’ve talked about making the UN great again. So I think President Trump was consistent with his narrative.
He did, at the same time, call out UN human rights officials on certain of the remarks, either dealing with migration or transgender mutilation, as he put it. And let’s keep in mind that there are UN human rights officials who are, in the words of Guterres himself, “totally out of control.”
Whether it’s Francesca Albanese, who just said two days ago that the Western world should stop arming Ukraine, basically allowing Russia to destroy innocent people in Ukraine; whether it’s the Chairman of the UN Human Rights Officials, Mr. George Katrougalos, who recently gave a speech where he mentions China 32 times, yet not once criticized China or Xi Jinping, didn’t mention 1 million Uyghurs locked up, didn’t mention 6,000 Tibetan temples destroyed, didn’t mention Hong Kong democracy extinguished, and 78-year-old pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai languishing in prison.
So there’s a lot to talk about on the UN human rights officials. I’m glad President Trump put a finger on that.
Calev Ben-David: Is it worth it for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak from the podium at the UN General Assembly, given all the Israel-bashing there?
Hillel Neuer: Yes. You can’t escape the world. This is the world as it is. It’s a tremendous forum. Prime Minister Netanyahu is a very accomplished speaker. So it’s a unique opportunity to address the world. He’s obviously, of course, addressing the Israeli people. He has an election coming up. You may be looking at his domestic audience more than anything.
But for Israel, it’s a tremendous opportunity to make its case before the world. And I hope Prime Minister Netanyahu will use felicitous language and eloquent language to make Israel’s case as the only democracy in the Middle East fighting to defend itself from terrorists.
