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NTD News: I know there’s a video circulating on social media showing several UNRWA children saying they’re taught in school to hate Jews, and that they want to stab and run them over. One child even said he’s ready to be a suicide bomber. Now your organization has just recently released a report saying that 20 teachers and staff in this UN program celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israel. They called terrorists “heroes,” and said the day was “a great October.” Now, recently you presented these findings to the UN commission. What were their reactions? And do you see any movement here in terms of turning this situation around?
Hillel Neuer: Well, look, we’ve submitted these to the United Nations. I presented them in the United States Congress last week, and also in the Bundestag in Berlin. The United Nations has not answered yet. We’ve not seen any action, anyone fired.
These are teachers who glorified one of the worst atrocities of our time, a mass terrorist attack where an estimated 1200 people – I say estimated because a number of the bodies were mutilated and burned beyond recognition, so Israeli forensic teams are still working hard to identify DNA of the victims. So the numbers may change, but we’re talking now estimated around 1200 people massacred, mutilated, burned alive and UNRWA teachers, these work for the United Nations. They’re Palestinians, typically, and we’re talking now in Gaza. They praised the attacks, as you said they call them ‘heroes’, the murderers, they call them ‘princes’, said it’s a ‘glorious day.’
And we’re paying for it. You know, I’m living in Switzerland, I’m Canadian. Both those countries, Canada and Switzerland, give money to UNRWA. The United States is giving well over $300 million a year to UNRWA. The American taxpayer is paying for teachers who are celebrating the murder of Jews.
Interviewer: Right. And combined, the total UN funding yearly is over a billion dollars, as of last year. Now, how could this happen under the UN’s watch?
Hillel Neuer: Well, that’s an excellent question. It’s the question that we’re posing to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and the head of this particular agency, Philippe Lazzarini, and we haven’t gotten an answer yet. They tend to stonewall, they try to avoid the issue.
They will attack us. When Mr. Lazzarini, he’s the Commissioner General of UNRWA, this agency, he spoke recently at the Saudi summit. And he said that there are ‘groups that are against our agency’ and that are trying to tell, you know, ‘false information’, that we ‘preach hatred.’
Well, it’s all documented. You see the teachers, you see photos on their Facebook page of them teaching at UNRWA. There’s no question that they belong to UNRWA. And there’s no question of what they said. In any other framework, if a teacher in the United States at a public school were found to be glorifying Hitler and celebrating the mass murder of anyone, that teacher would be fired immediately and would never go before a classroom again.
Why is it that Palestinian children are denied their basic human rights? And the United Nations is knowingly employing teachers who are indoctrinating Palestinian children, the next generation, if you will, to become Hamas murderers. That’s what the UN is doing. They have not given any answers yet. As I said, they either deny the problem or try to downplay the issue.
Interviewer: Right. And the UN has done other questionable things, you know, on their human rights council, they let regimes like China and Iran on and there’s been more UN resolutions targeting Israel than Iran, Syria, and North Korea combined. Now how does the UN treat Israel in relation to these other countries, especially those with, you know, communist and dictatorial governments?
Hillel Neuer: Well, look, indeed, as you said, we’re seeing a violation of the UN’s guarantee under the founding UN Charter, which is to treat all nations equally. That’s in the 1945 preamble of the UN Charter, and yet, when it comes to Israel, we see a double standard. For example, the General Assembly, as you mentioned, last year, there was one resolution on Iran, one on Syria, one on North Korea, and 15 on Israel. All right, there’s no other country in the world that had 15 resolutions. It’s absurd. And I would say it’s pathological.
And it takes away time from countries that are never addressed. The UN never addressed the persecution of the Uyghurs. China is immune and has never been criticized by the General Assembly. If we speak of the Human Rights Council, as you mentioned, China’s a member.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, which beats, blinds, tortures women for the crime of protesting– they were made the chair of the UN Human Rights Forum recently. These are breaches of the UN’s founding principles which are supposed to protect human rights.
It’s absurd, and regular people around the world are losing credibility in the UN, when they spend all their time demonizing the Jewish state and giving a free pass to the world’s worst dictatorships.