The United Nations regularly enables antisemitism through an extensive network of “pro-Palestinian” agencies that work with jihadist terror groups, condemn Israel in response to radical Islamic attacks on the country, and employ individuals who openly express antisemitic sentiments, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs heard during a Wednesday hearing.
The hearing — titled “United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Anti-semitism Poisons Palestinian Youth” — focused largely on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a body that supposedly offers aid to Palestinian “refugees” in Gaza and the West Bank via education and aid initiatives. Years of evidence have revealed that UNRWA schools indoctrinate children in antisemitism and promote jihad — and the agency has employed people who have openly praised Adolf Hitler and the Islamist terror organization Hamas, which controls Gaza.
“The United Nations is unquestionably the world’s foremost legitimizer of antisemitism, including in its most virulent and violent forms,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who chaired the hearing, said on Wednesday.
“Make no mistake, antisemitic bigotry is at the root of the U.N.’s hostility to Israel, which is ugly, evil, and manifests itself in almost every U.N. entity,” he asserted.
Beyond the UNRWA, bodies such as the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.N.’s largest organ, the General Assembly, routinely display anti-Israel discrimination and spread antisemitism, witnesses testifying to Congress asserted.
The hearing was called in light of the United Nations’ failure to respond in any meaningful way to the massacre of more than 1,200 people at the hands of Hamas in Israel on October 7, a terrorist assault Hamas proudly calls the “al-Aqsa flood” that deliberately targeted civilians in their homes, community centers, and public events. Hamas is estimated to be keeping about 240 hostages from the attack in Gaza; evidence in the aftermath of the attack revealed the extensive rape, torture, and killing of civilians, including Hamas terrorists torturing, decapitating, and incinerating babies.
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Following the attack, the U.N. Security Council has failed to pass a resolution addressing the situation at all, while the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel not take any measures to protect itself from Hamas. The Human Rights Council allowed the Islamist theocracy of Iran, a top Hamas funder and one of the world’s most egregious human rights abusers, to chair a “social forum” on November 2.
UNRWA staffers, meanwhile, celebrated the attack, posting statements online reading, “reality surpasses our wildest dreams,” “welcome the great October,” and praising a terrorist as a “hero” and “prince.”
“Just one month ago, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Rather than preventing such atrocities, the U.N. has enabled them,” Jonathan Schanzer, the senior vice president for the Research Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), told the House hearing on Wednesday. “Anti-Israel bias and anti-Israel policies have spun out of control, undermining the U.N.’s very mission. At the U.N. today, the world’s leading human rights abusers emerge as leaders on human rights.”
Schanzer noted that the United Nations regularly allows its funding — much of which comes from American taxpayers — to go to members of groups such as Hamas and the Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah because it does not recognize those groups as terrorist organizations. He cited the UNRWA as an agency of particular concern and accused it of having “blood on its hands” for cooperating with terror groups.
“The agency has over 30,000 employees. UNRWA doesn’t screen them for ties to terrorist groups, meaning that many employees are members of or affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or other violent groups,” Schanzer observed. “As far as UNRWA is concerned, Hamas affiliation is a political label, not a terror red flag.”
“Congress has raised concerns about a UNRWA school headmaster moonlighting as a terrorist. His story is just one of dozens that have been reported over the years,” he continued. “UNRWA employees have promoted antisemitism online, including praise of Hitler. This is not a case of a few rotten apples but rather an agency that openly promotes hatred and violence while masquerading as a humanitarian body.”
“Over the past month, despite some condemnations of Hamas, the overwhelming majority of statements by U.N. bodies and officials have been pointing the finger at Israel, expressly or by implication,” Hillel Neuer, the head of the monitor group U.N. Watch, told the hearing. “The most excited and emotive declarations by the UN’s highest officials, describing suffering in Gaza, are directed at Israel. Never does the U.N. blame Hamas launching the war and for embedding themselves inside hospitals, homes, mosques and schools.”
Neuer accused United Nations officials of a series of actions intended to attack Israel and elevating the causes of antisemitic Islamists, including:
[M]isrepresenting basic facts, such as by falsely accusing Israel of bombing a hospital where the culprit was the Islamic Jihad; falsely characterizing Israel’s legitimate self-defence, actions aimed at targeting terrorists, as “collective punishment”; creating false moral equivalence between such self-defence and the terrorism; misusing numbers of Gaza dead: not telling us the source of the data is Hamas, not telling us how many are terrorists, including those killed in Israel; and pretending that proportionality is about comparing death tolls when it is about using proportional means to achieve a military objective.
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“At the General Assembly last year, there was one resolution on Iran, one on Syria, and one on North Korea — and 15 on Israel,” he noted. “At the World Health Organization, every year its annual assembly deviates from global public health for a special debate singling out Israel.”
“There is no such focus on Syria, where hospitals are repeatedly bombed by Syrian and Russian forces; nor on North Korea, one of the worst health systems in the world. On the contrary, the WHO recently elected North Korea to its Executive Board,” Neuer added.
Both Neuer and Schanzer highlighted as a particular concern the appointment of Francesca Albanese as the Human Rights Council “special rapporteur on Palestine.” Albanese, both noted, has an extensive history of making antisemitic statements and supporting Hamas.
“Before she was appointed, we informed the Council that Albanese had repeatedly equated Palestinian suffering with the Nazi Holocaust and accused Israel of war crimes, apartheid, and genocide,” Neuer noted. “In a 2014 Facebook post, she wrote that America is ‘subjugated by the Jewish lobby’ … Last November, she addressed a Hamas conference where she said, ‘you have a right to resist.'”
“Albanese should never have been given her current post. In 2014, she described the United States as ‘subjugated by the Jewish lobby,'” Schanzer recalled. “Separately that year, Albanese claimed that the ‘Israeli lobby,’ directed by ‘Israel’s greed,’ skewed media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“Albanese has also compared Israel to the Nazis, declared Israel to be a racist endeavor, and repeatedly voiced opposition to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism,” he concluded.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.
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