UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer joined FDD’s Morning Brief to discuss U.S. sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the resignation of the three COI commissioners and the future of the UN under Secretary-General Guterres.
Jonathan Schanzer, FDD Executive Director:
Welcome to the program, Hillel Neuer.
Hillel Neuer:
Thank you.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Well, great to have you with us. There’s a lot to unpack right now as it relates to the United Nations. So let’s start with the sanctions dropped by the Trump administration on Francesca Albanese. What does this mean? What’s the impact? Why is this important?
Hillel Neuer:
Well, it’s historic. We’ve never seen this before. Certainly, a Western country has never imposed official sanctions on a UN official, as far as I can recall, and this was a bold and necessary step. Look, Francesca Albanese is not the usual UN official. There are many problematic UN officials, but she’s in a league of her own. This is someone, to remind the viewers, who has said that “America is subjugated by the Jewish Lobby.” So not 21st century anti-Zionism as antisemitism, but more 1930s antisemitism. She told the BBC, “You have the Israel lobby in your veins.” She has routinely compared the State of Israel and its leaders to the Third Reich. She also hates America. She says America is founded upon genocide. She says Trump, like Winston Churchill, are white supremacists. So she’s a radical, extreme left-wing ideologue who comes from Italy. She studied at SOAS, which is a radical school in London, and she says strange things. She has said that the CIA and the Mossad carried out the Paris attacks of 2015, which, of course, was an ISIS terrorist attack that massacred journalists at a magazine called Charlie Hebdo, who had satirized religion, all religions, including, at the time, a radical Islam, so she said the CIA and the Mossad carried out the attack. So she’s a dangerous nutcase. And, you know, the UN complained when Secretary Rubio announced the sanctions and said, “Well, countries should engage with the UN.” Guess what? America and others engaged about her. They complained about her. Guterres received numerous complaints from the United States. He did nothing. They wrote letters to him this year. Both administrations had approached him. He did nothing. So, you know, when she was up for a reappointment in April, the U.S. government opposed it. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast, sent in a detailed objection. The Human Rights Council threw the objections in the garbage. So, really, there was left with no choice. This is someone whose latest move was to call-I was there in Geneva at the Human Rights Council-when she issued a call to sanction U.S. companies, Google, Amazon, BlackRock, just all kinds of U.S. companies that have any connection with the State of Israel, and Secretary Rubio said, “That’s it, you’re sanctioned.” And I think it was extraordinary, poetic justice, days after she called to sanction the U.S., now she’s sanctioned, and those are real. She may have trouble accessing her bank accounts, her credit cards, traveling. She’s not going to be able to spread her poison anymore on the campuses of Georgetown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University’s Barnard College, all of which, last year, invited her-not just the students, the schools themselves-had invited her. That’s over. No more.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Then that’s, I think, good news. And I do think, at least, as I’ve heard from folks that I’ve talked to in the Trump administration, that it was, in fact, her move to start to try to sanction major U.S. corporations. That was the red line for Donald Trump: don’t mess with trade. I think that is the big message. She took her mandate, whatever that was, way too far. But now, I’ve got to ask you about the rest of the UN looks to be trembling and crumbling in the wake of this designation, these sanctions. We’ve heard about the Human Rights Council. Navi Pillay is, I guess, one of the big names-she resigned. There was another guy that resigned, and then one more after that. Is this like a domino effect that the Trump administration has triggered? What’s going on here?
Hillel Neuer:
Jonathan, I think you’re right. The dominoes are falling. The sanctions hit the UN in a way that they never expected it. Navi Pillay, who is the infamous UN chairperson of a Commission of Inquiry-I say “infamous” because she also hates America and hates Israel and she was named, absurdly, in July 2021 to be the head of an inquiry on Israel after she had publicly lobbied governments to “sanction apartheid Israel.” She had written a letter to President Biden to blame Israel for its war of May 2021 with Hamas, and then she was named to head an inquiry that was going to look at that war, among other things. So it’s really, you know, Alice in Wonderland kind of kangaroo courts at the UN Human Rights Council. And, just to add in how absurd it is, she was appointed by the President of the Human Rights Council in July 2021, that person-her name is Najat Shamim Khan-then went to The Hague and was elected as Deputy Prosecutor in The Hague. Navi Pillay and her two colleagues, Chris Sidoti and Milan Kothari, went to The Hague to meet with Deputy Prosecutor Najat Shamim Khan, after she was the one who had appointed them. So it’s such a sort of incestuous conflicts of interests that just keep adding up. The point is, Navi Pillay got scared. According to news reports, she has family members living in New York, and she was afraid she would not be able to see them again. And because, you know, the sanctions, they came under an Executive Order signed by President Trump in February, saying that anyone who cooperates with the International Criminal Court and going after American or Israeli officials can get sanctioned, and of course, as I just indicated, she went to The Hague to meet with the Deputy Prosecutor, who had appointed her, to hand them information to go after America and Israel, and then she got afraid about being sanctioned, according to reports. She, you know, cited other grounds. She cited age and health and other weighty commitments, but the timing, you know, says it all. And then the other two followed as well, each perhaps for their own reasons, but it seems to be very clear, and that’s what I was told by insiders, is that Navi Pillay certainly was frightened of U.S. sanctions. So that’s another win when it comes to fighting UN abusers, because that’s who these people are.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Yeah, it looks like sanctions actually work here. I mean, for all the people that say that we over-sanction, that we wield that power too much, it actually looks like this is having a direct and immediate impact on the UN, and I think that’s laudable.
I want to pivot for a second. We had recently Reverend Johnny Moore, the chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, come on. There’s an obvious UN angle to what’s going on here. GHF has come in, and they’ve tried to supplant the traditional aid mechanisms that have been dominated by the UN, that have really served to support Hamas, to actually undergird Hamas, in many ways, inside the Gaza Strip. From your vantage point, as you watch this from Geneva, as you watch it from Turtle Bay, what’s going on here? I mean, do you think that the UN is ultimately going to be undermined by this private sector initiative? Is the battle still, kind of, being fought to a tie? How do you view the impact of GHF right now?
Hillel Neuer:
Well, I certainly hope that GHF does manage to undermine this toxic monopoly that, basically, UNRWA and Hamas have had on the population in Gaza. Let’s keep in mind that UNRWA, however it began and whatever its origins were, in the past 20 years-certainly when Hamas took over in the Gaza Strip-UNRWA became completely infested with Hamas. Our upcoming report, coming out of UN Watch that should be out in September of 2025, will document how the entire school system in Gaza and in Lebanon were infested with Hamas. And, you know, I’ll just throw out two names that are well known to experts on this issue, but not to regular folks. One is in Gaza, Suhail al-Hindi. He was the teacher, a school principal, working for UNRWA in Gaza, also an elected member of the Hamas political bureau in Gaza, a 20-member bureau-at least ten of them have been eliminated, and he’s one of the few that remain. He actually seems to have gone into hiding, he hasn’t posted anything for several months, he used to be posting a lot, he’s based now in Turkey. But he was also the head of the UNRWA union, different unions, but at one point, he was head of the entire UNRWA regional union system, which is 30,000 employees. So I’ll say that again: an elected Hamas politburo member-pictures of him arm-in-arm with Yahya Sinwar-was head of 30,000 UNRWA employees, and also at one point, head of the UNRWA teachers union. And he was forced to leave, eventually, when his election became public. Initially, UNRWA’s spokesman at the time, Chris Gunness, said, “No, no, we asked him, and he said, ‘Everything’s okay.’ He said, ‘It’s not true.’ So, you know, we’ve done our due diligence, case closed.” And then when Israel and others pushed back, they sort of let him go, and then he officially ended his connection to UNRWA, this is about 2017, but de facto, he maintained his connection to UNRWA, and he has very close ties with the people who succeeded him, and our report will document that. Same in Lebanon. The head of UNRWA in Lebanon was Fathi al-Sharif, the head of the teacher’s union was Fathi al-Sharif, teacher, school principal, head of the teacher’s union, and when he was eliminated in about September or October of last year, in 2024, Hamas issued an announcement that Israel had killed their leader, Hamas’s leader in Lebanon, whether he was the leader or a leader is not entirely clear, but we had already complained to the UN because for a decade, on his Facebook page every day, Fathi al-Sharif-UNRWA teacher, school principal, union leader-was posting pictures of Hamas leaders, posing in pictures with various terror chiefs, Hamas, the Jihad, even an Al-Qaida affiliate, and he was doing it in plain sight. So when the head of UNRWA, Mr. Philippe Lazzarini, was challenged, he said, “Well, we don’t know. We didn’t know. How could we know?” Or the UN spokesman in New York of the Secretary-General, said, “Well, you know, how do we know? You know, terrorist leaders don’t usually advertise it.” He did for ten years, every day on Facebook, he was posting pictures of him as basically some kind of Hamas leader. So, to come back to your question, Hamas completely subverted UNRWA and anything that reduces the monopoly that they have on giving out humanitarian aid, which really they don’t just give it out, they sell it, Hamas takes over the aid, they sell it, they use it to give aid to their fighters, and then the money is used to fuel their terrorism. And you saw how UNRWA freaked out in the past two months when this GHF, U.S.-Israel backed entity, was giving out 70 million meals-not through UNRWA, not through Hamas-they freaked out, and the rhetoric was, I’ve never seen more wild rhetoric coming out of a UN agency, saying “you’re killing people, you’re massacring people,” when, of course, they don’t mention that it was if it was in anyone’s interests to have trouble at these distribution points, it was the interest of Hamas. So we’ll leave it there.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Yeah. I mean, really, it’s been wild to watch.
Last question before I let you go, Hillel. You know, we talk a lot about the need for reform. We talk about, you know, all the problems with the UN.
When you look around the Middle East right now, in particular, is there any place where the UN has a positive role to play? I mean, you know, we hear about possible normalization between Israel and Syria, and maybe the need to deploy some kind of multinational force on that southern border of Syria, the northern, northeastern border of Israel, a buffer zone. The multinational forces in Egypt, I mean, are they playing a role? Or are we just looking at the need to just wholesale throw this thing out and start over?
I think people still struggle with that, right? Trying to maintain some semblance of an international community. Is anything worth salvaging?
Hillel Neuer:
Well, that question has become certainly sharper in the past two years, when the Secretary-General, António Guterres, has shown himself incapable of bringing some seriousness to the conversation. You know, in the past, the Secretary-Generals-Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan-from time to time, were able to push back against the alliance of dictatorships, 56 Islamic states who tried to dominate and subvert UN bodies, and sometimes you could have a meeting with the Secretary-General that was serious and he would recognize that the particular UN resolution wasn’t very helpful, and that in his own way, he could try to put in some balance.
Guterres has done the opposite. Right from the beginning of the October 7th atrocities, he said, “Hamas didn’t operate in a vacuum.” He listed alleged grievances, and, you know, every day, just yesterday, he issued a statement condemning Israel for bombing in Syria, without mentioning the fact that there were massacres taking place by the Syrian regime. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Islamist gunmen were committing massacres. They were burning villages, allegedly raping, executing civilians-Druze, attacking the Druze-and Israel stopped the slaughter. And he said nothing about the Islamists and their slaughtering of the Druze. Instead, he only had words of condemnation for Israel. So, you know, you ask, can the UN be a serious entity here? Less and less. However, there’s no question that from time to time-if Israel and Syria, for example, reach some new understandings, or Lebanon-you do want to have some kind of third party who can help manage the peace. But sadly, the UN really sapped our confidence. And to be fair, we say “the UN,” and that’s legitimate. But of course, the individual troop-contributing member states weren’t very helpful. When I saw in 2006 that Italy and maybe France and some other European powers were going to be contributing thousands of troops, you said, “Okay, this is real.” And then you saw, very quickly, that Hezbollah maybe picked off one or two of them early on, and very quickly, the European countries realized they did not want to sacrifice a single one of their soldiers, and ended up playing some kind of a game where they looked the other way and let Hezbollah do whatever they wanted. So beyond the UN, of course, it’s the member states themselves. So, right now, the UN is not going away. There will be times when Israel-even Israel or America-may want them. But I’d say this is a narrower set of options than we thought in the past.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Yeah, kind of grim stuff, not really seeing a lot of hope. There are no real glimmers for the UN. But we appreciate all the work that you’re doing, Hillel, in holding their feet to the fire, speaking truth to power. I know you’re alone out there in Geneva, a lot, in the wilderness, “the belly of the beast,” as we say.
I want to thank you, Hillel Neuer, for joining us today on the FDD Morning Brief.
Hillel Neuer:
Thank you. I’m looking forward to having a new U.S. ambassador, Mike Waltz. Hopefully, he’ll be confirmed soon, and we’ll have a strong U.S. presence to push back against the dictatorships, and having groups like FDD, which lead the fight for principles on the world stage, I look forward to working with you guys together.
Jonathan Schanzer:
Thanks a lot.
