Our guest today is the excellent Hillel Neuer. Hillel Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch. You can follow him on X at Hillel Neuer. Hillel, thank you so much for joining the Josh Ammer show. Thanks for having me. So long time fan of your work, indeed, a long time in my error back when I was op editor at Newsweek, I recall we worked in at least one or two pieces together. What wants to bring you on now because the the the clown brigade is all congregating right now in New York City for the UN General Assembly. We heard earlier this week from the president of the United States, Joe Biden for those who are not closely tuned in to what is happening right now in Turtle Bay in New York City. Why don't you just talk about some of the highlights or perhaps the low lights as as the case may be. We we heard from the leader of the terrorist Iranian regime earlier this week. The the the UN representative for Qatar had had the Hutzpah to accuse Israel of committing genocide and Gaza. So what one is going through some of the low lights as the case may be in Turtle Bay this week. Yeah, look, it's a reminder that the UN today in the words of Gary Kasper of the Russian chess master, the UN has become a catwalk for dictators. You know, that's not what it was supposed to be. The United Nations was founded by the anti-Hitler Alliance in 1945, was supposed to reaffirm faith in human dignity and establish international peace and security. And today, just to give your readers a sense of where the UN is at, here in Geneva where I'm speaking from, the communist regime of China is sitting on the Human Rights Council. The Islamic regime of Iran months ago was given the gavel as president of the UN conference on disarmament. And prior to that, if humans prior, the same Islamic regime of Iran was made chair of the UN Human Rights Council social forum that that council, including also Algeria, Cuba, Eritrea, and other dictatorships Qatar is now running for reelection. So this is the United Nations that we're talking about, which has gone completely upside down, the complete opposite of what Franklin Dylan or Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had hoped with the UN this week in New York. We have the Islamic regime of Iran came in and actually tried probably an influence operation, tried to make itself into some kind of a reformist regime interested in negotiations and peace in the region. So that was clearly aimed at European audiences, as well as the Biden administration, which unfortunately too often has seemed willing to engage any false message sent out by Iran about peace. So that was one of the one of the highlights was was this new Iranian president, who's really a puppet of the dictator, the Ayatollah Khamenei, who's a murderous dictator who has led his forces to beat blind crush rape torture or women in Iran for the crime of standing up and calling it for their human rights. So that Iranian regime has a new president. He's just a puppet of the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Biden administration let him come in, which is obliged by the UN, but they also led in a huge entourage, including Javad Zarif, who himself is under US sanctions. It's not clear why the US led him in. He was not present at many of the official Iranian functions, but he did appear at functions designed to fool the media. And I'd say one of the lowlights certainly was was Iran basically parading itself in midtown Manhattan at the Millennium Hilton Hotel at a time when its forces have tried to kill top US officials. Intelligence says they're trying to kill former president Trump. They are sponsoring the terror proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others. And I think their free pass in Manhattan is an example of how the international community is just failing to stand up terrorism. I mean, nothing short of disgusting that the Iranian regime, which as you just said, is not only currently trying to assassinate Donald Trump. We have good intelligence on that, but in the past, they have tried to assassinate people like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton. They infamously tried to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the US in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. just over a decade ago. The fact that these, that these jackals are permitted into the country in the first instance, let alone to be faded and to celebrated as some sort of legitimate diplomatic legation is nothing short of atrocious and abominable. And I guess that leads me to my second question, which is looking at all the ways that the United Nations has just utterly be clowned itself. And it would be a long, long, long list. I'm not going to bore the listeners by going through that list. You mentioned a couple of examples, the fact that Iran of all regimes has been high up in the Women's Rights Council or whatever sort of Orwellian nomenclature that used to describe that particular body. Looking at all of this, and the fact that this organization has so, so clearly straight from what it was founded on in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II. Why and how do we still take it seriously? And how can we get it to be taken less seriously if that ought to be our aim in the first place? You know, some people have proposed allowing it to move from New York, prime real estate property. And I was thinking with some of the other days that maybe the UN should relocate to Nigeria. And let's see how many people will be interested in UN jobs. You know, currently, if you get some UN bureaucracy post, you live tax free, you're you and your family who may come from some third world dictatorship impoverished gets to hang out in New York, go shopping in the fanciest boutiques. And you know, what what for? So yes, in a sense, the world does need a forum to exchange ideas. And there are times when different parties do want to come together and settle their differences and the UN can be a forum for that. So obviously there are occasions when the UN can serve a purpose, but certainly it's in the past year when the piece of the world has been disrupted by the Iranian terror proxies, which of course now they seek the destruction of Israel, but make no mistake, these jihadi's for them, Israel's the little Satan, the great Satan is America. And they're not going to stop. And if Iran has nuclear weapons, they're going to demand the submission of the Western world. They have major missile programs to send their missiles far enough to reach European capital, certainly. And the United Nations has not only failed to stop these regimes, but has become kind of a propaganda arm. I mean, Secretary General Gutierrez, shortly after the massacre of October 7 when innocent men, women and children were slaughtered to the most horrific sadistic way by Hamas. And Gutierrez, a couple weeks later said, I condemn what Hamas did, but he said, but, you know, the attacks, Hamas attacks, they did not happen in a vacuum. Then he went on to enumerate one after another alleged Palestinian grievances against Israel, one after the other. In effect, the head of the UN was justifying the Hamas atrocities. And that message went throughout the system. It certainly empowered this nutcase named Francesca Albenizi. She's the UN Rapporteur on Palestine. That means an investigator. She's the UN special Rapporteur on Palestine. She's someone who famously wrote on Facebook 10 years ago. She wrote, America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby and Europe is subjugated by Holocaust guilt. She told a Hamas conference, you have the right to resist. She months ago, she responded to another former UN official who had posted pictures comparing Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. And she wrote, she responded, said, oh, yeah, I had the same idea to compare the two. So she's doing this every single day. And many of the things she's doing at some point, you could say she got the okay from her secretary general, who refuses to condemn her. She was condemned by France, Germany, and the U.S. France, anti-Semitism. It's very rare for any of these major countries to condemn a UN expert for anti-Semitism. But the secretary general kind of gave the green light to them, refuses to condemn her. Someone like that who openly supports Hamas, who's coming in a few months to address, to give talks in October to Princeton University, to Georgetown, really just to incite the pro Hamas mobs that have taken over our streets and our campuses. It's not clear at all that America should give her a visa. And we have a report coming out soon, which is going to call on Secretary Blinken to deny this basically modern day Nazi, to deny her a visa. She should not enter the United States. If she has to be allowed to enter the UN, her perimeter should be 10 feet around UN building and then back to the airport and out. Unbelievable. I mean, that really is just the word that comes to mind. I mean, just hearing details and the more that you hear, the more that you learn about the specific moral credence, the ignoramuses who comprise the purported leadership of this wretched organization, the more that you hear about it, the more that it is just astounding that it is able to retain any legitimacy in the eyes of the world. So perhaps just one final question then in the topic of the UN, then we can switch topics slightly here, which is, you know, I look, I'm an American constitutionalist. I have issues with the United Nations, not merely for the overarching leftism and the obvious anti-Semitism and the pro-terrorism, but as a constitutional matter, I have always had grievous concerns with the purported jurisdiction in a way that I view butts up against at a bare minimum and at a maximum is in violation of our constitutional order. So I have long been sympathetic to the American argument to defund it and for America to actually outright exit it, to actually just extricate itself from it, to just say, we're done with you to not just kick it off our shores and ship it off to Nigeria or wherever it all sit, it ought to be, but to literally just not deal with it anymore. Now the flip side of that argument that the UN has this security council where the US has a very prominent and powerful veto. So I'm curious and admittedly you're not an American per se, but I'm curious if you were giving unsolicited advice to the American listeners of the program, what should the American perspective on the United Nations be in terms of what we ought to do with this body? Look, I think in principle, there is a very good argument to say that in 2024, despite again, I said the UN has various uses from time to time. When some of their agencies do humanitarian work, we have to grant them that when there are millions of refugees suddenly in Sudan or exiting Syria and Ukraine, you want someone to help these people and the UN becomes the vehicle for the international community. Basically, the leading democracies, America, France, Germany, to dodge the rest, they want it. They feel pressure to help people. They're going to do it in some way and the UN is just the vehicle where they give the money to the UN refugee agency and it does the work. So there will always be need for some international agencies to do certain things. Here in Geneva, there is the telecommunications agency that regulates different area codes and frequencies and there's intellectual property agencies. So there's a bunch of specialized agencies. The world is going to need, but certainly when you talk about the more political agencies, the Secretary General's Office, the General Assembly, the so-called Human Rights Council, the so-called Women's Rights Commission, which was indeed elected. Iran was a member. We helped lead the initiative to kick them off, which was an incredible one-off, I would say. Of course, they just made Saudi Arabia the chair and to be fair to Saudi Arabia, the MBS, the ruler has made enormous strides, but it still doesn't quite need to be chief when it comes to Women's Rights Chief of the Women's Rights Commission. So I think many of these agencies are not fit for purpose, but to be honest, it's just so enormous to make significant changes there. In my daily battle, what we need is, even if we're going to lose the vote on many of these things, if the decent country speak up, you know, when Nikki Haley was there and she would speak out forth rightly and call out the abuses, the world hears it. So even if a vote is passed and it embraces some dictatorship or it, you know, calls Israel the aggressor when in fact it's been hit by over 8,000 missiles and deadly drones by Hezbollah every day since October 8th, if despite the majority resolution that's adopted, if the U.S. and leading Western democracies speak out and say the right thing, that moral minority can carry the day because anyone who matters in the world in terms of legitimacy, they're not looking towards Zimbabwe says or Algeria or Egypt or Turkey or Venezuela, they're looking to what the leading democracies say. So until we get to the to the battle of how do we, how do we change this, this Leviathan, which is almost impossible, at a minimum, the decent countries have to speak out and do the right thing and sadly too often they don't, you know, America under the Biden administration rejoined the Human Rights Council. I wasn't necessarily opposed, so long as you had, again, someone like Nikki Haley standing up every day calling out their support for terrorism, their support for the Chinese Communist regime, their betrayal of the Whiggers, which just a week ago I was in a debate where some Orwellian UN experts said that the Chinese regime is the victim of Western sanctions and the whole problem for the Muslim Whiggers, a million of whom are in camps, the problem is Western countries imposing sanctions on Chinese companies that that employed them for forced labor. Despite all these evil things, you know, the Biden administration has spoken out from time to time but far from enough and too often they cheerily they say we love the UN, we love the UN Rights Council and that's far more prevalent are their statements legitimizing the UN than calling them out and that's wrong. So at a minimum, what we'd like to see is the decent country standing up and saying the right thing would make a world of difference. Fair enough and certainly point very well taken. So we're talking again with Hillel Neuer who is the executive director of UN Watch, which just is spent indispensable. Watchdog work for an organization in the United Nations that desperately needs many, many watchdogs out there. So let's talk briefly about about Unora. So Unora, which is the agency that has been in charge of handling the so-called Palestinian refugee problem since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Unora has a longstanding problem when it comes to Hamas and Gaza in particular. This issue, which many of us had followed for years and years, you and I think both among them, this really burst out into the open in the aftermath of the Simchatura massacre, the single largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Nazi regime was still in power just under a year ago. Where does Unora stand right now? You had a lot of Western countries and Western style countries that were either pulling funding or threatening to pull funding. What does the future of Unora look like right now? Perhaps also, maybe you can touch on this claim that Unora deserves immunity from being sued by the victims of October 7th, which I believe I saw the Biden Department of Justice filed a horrific legal brief actually citing with Unora and saying that they should get immunity, which I was just shaking my head. I could not believe that. For those who may not know what this agency is about, just a word or two on the back down in history. Israel fought its independence war in 1948. That's when shortly after the UN General Assembly voted on 29 November 1947 to divide to partition what was then British mandatory Palestine into two countries, one for each people, one a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs in Palestine. The Jews, even though it was a truncated small sliver of the land of Israel, these sort of land of Israel, what was promised to them under the Balfour Declaration and the UN League of Nations mandate from the 1920s. The Jewish representatives, the Jewish community of proto-Israel embraced the decision they danced in the streets until even Jerusalem, that they finally after 2000 years have a Jewish state. The Arabs did the opposite. They weren't really interested in a Palestinian state, which had never existed, an Arab state, which had never existed in history. Their main goal was to destroy the Jews. That's what their leader, the Muslim, said. Their goal is jihad and to destroy the Jews. Together with the neighboring Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, help from Iraq as well, they invaded Israel and thought to destroy Israel. Actually, the Egyptian troops came right on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The outskirts of Tel Aviv, the Iraqis had come in. So it seemed like Israel would be destroyed and miraculously, even though Israel lost one percent of its population, which was at the time 6,000 Jews out of 600,000, Israel prevailed. And after the war, there were refugees. And there were somewhere, somewhat over 500,000 Arabs who were now refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank or Judean, Samaria. The United States said, let's help these people. And out of altruistic motives, created a UN agency to help them resettle and develop. They called it the UN Relief and Works Agency. America sent the head of its Tennessee Valley Authority, who had done incredible work in the US on development for millions of people, to help them. And this gentleman realized after a few years, by the early 50s, complete failure, complete failure because the Arabs, the Palestinian Arabs, refused to resettle, refused to move on, because for them, if they would say, okay, I'm now a citizen of Lebanon, or I'm now have a new life in Gaza, which was then ruled by Egypt, they would essentially be giving up their war against the Jewish state. They refused to do so, and they refused to move on anything, wherever they would live, they would say, no, it's temporary because we're going to go back, and we're going to destroy Israel and undo and dismantle Israel. And to this day, you have this perverse dynamic where Western states, for a variety of reasons, are funding an agency that is not about resettling people, not helping them move on, but the very opposite, it's just nurturing grievances to undo Israel. So keep in mind, here in Geneva, I work next to the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, their mission is to resettle people. Again, millions of refugees from Syria and other countries, they are found new homes in Sweden and Switzerland and America and Canada, and they move on, and they become citizens of those countries, and they move on, like many of us did, my great grandfather escaped, Russian persecution to move to Canada 120 years ago, and my family's been Canadian since then. That's what the UN Refugee Agency is supposed to do. UNRA is the opposite. They are not resettling a single Palestinian Arab from 1948, and the contrary, they tell each of them, you have the "right of return," which really is to dismantle Israel. October 7 is really the fruition of Palestinians taught in UNRA schools that they have the right to dismantle Israel. So the problem with UNRA is right to the core, that what they learn in schools is that they're going to dismantle Israel. And you asked about funding, you know, our group, UNWatch, had exposed the fact that hundreds of UNRA teachers were regularly, regularly in sight to commit terrorism. They cheer terrorist attacks, they glorify Adolf Hitler. These are teachers in Gaza, teachers in Lebanon of so-called Palestinian refugees. Again, these are Palestinians who've been living in Lebanon for 75 years, the same in Gaza, the same in Jordan. By the way, Jordan gave them citizenship. So you have this oxymoron where you have two million Jordanian citizens who are of Palestinian descent from 75 years ago, who the UN says are refugees, which is absolutely absurd. And there's no such thing as a citizen refugee except for UNRA. And we're paying for it. Again, we revealed the excitement of terrorism. We exposed in January this chat group of 3,000 UNRA teachers who were celebrating in live time, the massacre as it was happening on October 7 in a telegram chat group of UNRA teachers. They were cheering it on saying this jihad is incredible. Where did these heroes learn the jihad? They said, are they imbibed the jihad from their mother's milk? So we exposed that. I testified in Congress of the joint hearing. Then it was revealed at least a dozen UNRA staffers took part in the massacre. We're involved in kidnapping and slaving, torturing Israelis on October 7. Then America famously, the Biden administration announced a freeze in UNRA funding. And many countries followed suit, but it was performative. For most of the countries, they quickly found a way to restore the funding. They created a fake phony audit headed by Catherine Colona, the former French Foreign Minister. She was completely biased. She was on record and saying she loves UNRA. I hired three Scandinavian groups who were incredibly biased, also basically pro UNRA agencies surprised in April. They determined that UNRA gets a clean bill of health. All the countries basically reinstated funding, but the U.S. could not because my friend Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey, chair of the UN subcommittee of the congressional subcommittee on the UN. He and his colleagues initiated legislation, which President Biden had to sign ended up being bipartisan as part of a foreign aid agreement to ban any funding for UNRA until next year, until March 2025. But the State Department just last week said they're eager to undo that and to restore funding, which I think is perverse. Well, it's extraordinarily helpful context. So thank you for walking us through all that. I think the number one most important thing to take away, which is a point that I've tried to make in my own commentary for years, is that there is this bifurcated definition of who a refugee is under the Nine Nations own internal way that they conduct this sort of thing, which is you have, as you mentioned, you have the standard definition refugee for the UN High Commission on refugees, where a refugee is you are an individual who has been displaced, but if you are the descendant of an individual and you are a native to a different country, so if you are a native of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, or whatnot, then that's where you are. You are, you ought to be considered a Lebanese, a Jordanian, Egyptian, or so forth. And then UNRA has this intergenerational refugee status that exists for presumably literally no other reason than to manifest this so-called right of return, which in practice simply means the eradication of Israel. So UNRA literally, since it was formed, has been a structural obstacle, a structural obstacle to any kind of peace or rapprochement there in the Levant and that part of the world. So that was all extraordinarily helpful context. Thank you for walking us through all of that. So one final question for you, Hillel, before you let you go on, this has been a wonderful conversation. I do want to touch on the nearby conflict that is rapidly escalating in Lebanon. So the UN has interim forces, I guess they're interim, they've been there for almost a half century at this point. It's a unifill, the UN interim force in Lebanon, they were established in 1978. You know, following the Second Lebanon War in 2006, I'm just looking here at the text of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. One of the things they were tasked with back in 2006 was to, quote, "assist the Lebanese armed forces in taking steps towards the establishment between the blue line and the Latani River, the Latani River being in southern Lebanon, of an area free of any armed personnel." So in other words, the UN task force was specifically tasked with making sure that Hezbollah could not get up right on the border with Israel. Suffice to say, Hillel, that has not exactly happened, has it over the past 18 years. So I want to talk about some of the UN's failures in Lebanon, and perhaps about the conflicts right now in Lebanon with Hezbollah more broadly. Well, you know, absolutely. The notion that many people have will send in the UN. No, that's the care of business. Are you kidding? Are you kidding? Hezbollah is an Iranian regime created armed, funded terror proxy. They've taken over Lebanon. Nothing happens in Lebanon without their approval. You arrive in Lebanon airport. You have to pass through a Hezbollah checkpoint. They run things in Lebanon. They're the strongest military force. And Unifil, as you said, the end of the 2006 war, Israel was told you can stop the war because Hezbollah was firing thousands of rockets at Haifa and other northern towns. And Israel was told, don't worry, we got this. We got the UN troops. We're expanding, you know, 10,000 troops, French troops, Italian troops, you know, serious countries. And they're going to disarm with the Lebanese army. They're going to disarm Hezbollah for a security zone of, let's say, I don't know, 10, 20 miles, push them away from Israel's northern border and they didn't do a damn thing. You know, from time to time, when an Italian patrol would be going by a Hezbollah controlled village where, by the way, Hezbollah has stored thousands of missiles in people's homes. You can go on Twitter, on social media, on the internet. You can see pictures of homes all across southern Lebanon, villages, where Hezbollah would offer poor villagers a lot of money each month to store a missile in one of their rooms. So the missile sitting on some kind of hydraulic launcher that could launch within minutes and it was hidden within home. So if Israel would ever attack it, you have the usual crowd, the usual jackals, as you said, the United Nations, the Amnesty Internationals, the EU, the Guardian, and other journalists to say Israel's bombing homes, right? So that's their MO at Hezbollah. So when Hezbollah was doing all of this, turning southern Lebanon, all the villages into a terrorist headquarters, when Unifil would come by and say, we're going to be patrolling here, you know, suddenly an Italian peacekeeper would wind up dead, right? That happened initially in the early years and, you know, the Italians coming with their impeccable uniforms. No one has more beautiful uniforms than they do. And they just want to do their time in Lebanon for a year or two. Lebanon's very beautiful. They want to do their time. They want to go home and they don't want to get killed. They don't want to get wounded. The Italian government is not willing to explain to the Italian people why they lost troops in Lebanon. So basically they made a deal with Hezbollah, which is if we ever go in your areas, we're going to give you like lots of notice and we're not going to go anywhere where you actually have the ammo. They didn't do a damn thing, the opposite. They basically covered for them and legitimized them. So, and that's really, to me, it epitomizes, you know, the UN in this conflict, you know, bring in the UN. The UN has legitimized and enabled the terrorists and Unifil as a classic example. Keep in mind what we're facing here since October 8th. So October 7th Hamas invades Israel, massacres, 1200 people. The next day, equally unprovoked Hezbollah from the north attacks as well. You know, gazas in the south in Israel, Hezbollah in the north, they try to show solidarity with their fellow Iranian terror proxy. They begin firing. They have some 200,000 missiles. They begin firing well over 8,000 missiles at Israel every single day. Depopulated much of Israel's north. 70,000 people are internal refugees within Israel. And the world didn't say a damn thing. Amnesty International was silent. The UN Human Rights Chief, Volkerturk. Guterres didn't say a damn thing. Suddenly, finally, Israel says, that's it. We're responding. Israel sets off an brilliant operation to explode pagers that were distributed to the top Hezbollah terrorist commanders across Lebanon, the most pinpoint operation of counter-terrorism in modern history. And suddenly, hundreds, thousands of pagers go off blowing up in their pockets. If the pager went off, it means you're a senior Hamas commander. They weren't giving them out to everyone. And, you know, some civilians were hurt. That's inevitable in any military operation. But the ratio was the lowest in history. Thousands of terrorists maimed, taken out of commission, and a handful of civilians nearby who were collateral damage. And the UN decides to condemn Israel. So the same folks who were silent, who enabled Hamas to attack Israel every day, suddenly say that basically Hezbollah has a right to attack Israel. And if Israel dares to take out the terrorists, suddenly, it's in violation of international law, completely upside down. It's a dystopian universe. And we shouldn't take it anymore. Very well said. So Hillenoyer is the executive director of UNWatch. You can follow him on X at Hillenoyer. Go ahead and follow UNWatch as well at UNWatch. Hillen, thank you so much for joining the Josh Hammer Show. Keep up the great work you're doing, my friend. Thanks for having me.
