The Honest Take

THT Hillel Neuer Durban — corrected transcript
English (US)

00:00:00.160 — 00:00:12.039 · Hillel Neuer
Yes. I mean, you know, if she's watching, I would say, Madame Albanese, please go ahead and sue me. You know, your tweet claimed outright defamation. Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day.

00:00:15.600 — 00:00:35.640 · Ben Chertoff
Welcome to The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff, and today Hillel Neuer of UN Watch returns to the pod. He's a man who spent two decades watching the world's human rights machinery get pointed at exactly one country.

00:00:41.160 — 00:02:58.190 · Ben Chertoff
25 years ago this month, Colin Powell pulled the American delegation out of United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa. Israel walked out with them. It was called the Conference Against Racism. New South Africa post-apartheid the front end of a new century. Serious people went in hopeful. Irwin Cotler, who represented Nelson Mandela, has written about the hope he carried into that room, and here's what came out of it.

Thousands marching in the streets, equating Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion passed around as literature tables laid out with pamphlets, with caricatures you'd recognize from Der Stürmer. In the official governmental declaration, exactly one country was named as a perpetrator of racism.

And in the NGO forum running alongside it, Israel was charged with genocide, apartheid and crimes against humanity. Three phrases that are ambient today and weren't then. Tom Lantos was in the room, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress. He came out of it saying it was the most sickening and unabashed display of hatred for Jews he had witnessed since the Nazi period, and then the part that makes this urgent.

On September 28th, three weeks from the day that we're recording this, the UN General Assembly gives up an entire day to commemorate Durban 25th anniversary. High level meeting, formal declaration and almost nothing in the press. The resolution that set it up passed in July 142 votes in favor and only three against.

So this is a conversation about an origin story that is still being observed on the calendar by the institution that hosted it, where the vocabulary was manufactured, who paid for the room, and why. The word genocide was already fastened to Israel 22 years before October 7th. Hillel Neuer is a lawyer, the executive director of UN Watch in Geneva and, by a wide margin, the most persistent thorn in the side of the UN Human Rights Council, Hillel Neuer.

Welcome back to The Honest Take.

00:02:58.270 — 00:02:59.150 · Hillel Neuer
Thank you.

00:02:59.710 — 00:03:22.560 · Ben Chertoff
So we're recording this on September 3rd. 25 years ago today, the US walked out of the World Conference Against Racism. Israel walked with them. Can you set the scene for somebody who was maybe ten years old in 2001? What was that conference supposed to be and what was it by the time Colin Powell pulled the plug on it?

00:03:22.600 — 00:05:12.010 · Hillel Neuer
Well, look, this was supposed to be the World Conference Against Racism held in the new post-apartheid South Africa, the beginning of the 21st century, 2001. A lot of people were excited. My teacher, human rights lawyer and professor Irwin Cotler, talks about the excitement that he had as someone who fought in the anti-apartheid movement, someone who represented Nelson Mandela.

It was very exciting to be part of a world anti-racism conference in the new post-apartheid South Africa. And yet what happened really was a travesty. A conference that was supposed to be against racism became a conference that promoted racism. It was a devolved into a notorious hate fest. There were thousands of people marching in Durban, South Africa, saying that Zionism is like Nazism, and there were pamphlets being distributed of the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Czarist forgery that accuses the Jews of a plot to control the world that was being distributed, anti-Semitic caricatures that one could have seen it of the 1930s.

Der Stürmer newspaper from the Nazis. These were being distributed as well. This was happening on the sidelines at the main conference itself, the governmental conference. Israel was the only country singled out as an alleged perpetrator of racism by listing the Palestinians as the only group under the rubric of victims of racism.

The NGO forum, which happened in parallel, uh, accused Israel of words that are familiar today but were not then, which is genocide and apartheid, crimes against humanity. So much of the venom and the hate that we're seeing today can be attributed back to what we saw at an international, so-called anti-racism, so-called human rights conference 25 years ago.

00:05:12.329 — 00:05:21.330 · Ben Chertoff
And you mentioned that this was an NGO forum. There were, as far as I understand it, some big household names at that forum.

00:05:21.810 — 00:05:59.530 · Hillel Neuer
That's right. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and other groups were there. They certainly didn't intervene to stop it. They may have egged it on in certain ways. Major foundations. The Ford Foundation, based in New York City, a major funder of so-called human rights NGOs, a major funder of Palestinian groups, advocacy groups that have engaged in very hostile, and inflammatory rhetoric, if not propaganda.

They were funded by the Ford Foundation to go there. So it's not just a distant thing that included Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, but Human Rights Watch, based in New York City, the Ford Foundation, based in New York. They were involved. They were complicit.

00:06:01.540 — 00:06:33.820 · Ben Chertoff
So you mentioned that this was one of the first major international forums where these terms genocide, apartheid were, were tossed at Israel so openly. These were Soviet concepts that that had come out of, of the Soviet bloc. Was was this something that was coordinated to kind of being be launched as a, as a trap almost, or was this just something that came out organically?

00:06:33.980 — 00:08:22.870 · Hillel Neuer
Well, I don't think it was organic there. Certainly. You mentioned the Soviet, uh, origins. Very important. A piece of history. I say, probably beginning in the 1950s, the Soviet Union, which had a very sophisticated propaganda system in, uh, in Russia, in the Soviet Union, uh, pivoted to casting Israel as a demonic state, and it used the terms that would be uh, meaningful to Soviet citizens, namely accusing of Israel being capitalist, colonialist and racist.

And so Zionism being called racism is something that really began in the Soviet Union, and it seeped its way into ideological allies and supporters on the far left around the world. And indeed, of course, most infamously in 1975. The United Nations Zionism is racism resolution, where the Soviet Union and Arab states are seen as having worked hand in hand to uh, adopt that infamous canard, which was thankfully repealed 16 years later in 1991. And

then a decade later, a decade later, the canard is revived at Durban. And I do think that the NGO forum did not happen by accident. There were many groups working together. Certainly the fact that thousands were marching in Durban was not accidental or coincidental. There were definitely major organizers.

We know that Iran played a role. There was one of their groups. It's called something like Islamic Human Rights Commission. But I forget the exact name based on London. There was a radical, activist there backed by Iran. So there were different, clearly different major actors involved and, and were working in concert together.

So this did not happen by accident.

00:08:23.470 — 00:08:52.299 · Ben Chertoff
So Tom Lantos was there, a sitting congressman and the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in Congress. He came out of it calling this the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period. So, I mean, coming from him, what does that say about the NGO ecosystem and the UN by that, by that point?

00:08:53.140 — 00:10:51.010 · Hillel Neuer
Well, it's a complete betrayal of what the UN and the human rights movement were supposed to be about. Let's keep in mind that the United Nations is founded in 1945. Within one year, they create the Commission on Human Rights, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt. Vice Chair René Cassin. These are iconic human rights figures, and all of this is done in response to the Nazi atrocities that shocked the conscience of mankind.

Indeed, that is the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, speaks expressly about being adopted in response to the um, to the atrocities that outraged the conscience of mankind. And so the responding to the Holocaust was a, uh, a a foundation point for the human rights movement, including at the United Nations, and for that same movement to then become the the tools which are used to demonize Israel and Jews, as I said, as a complete betrayal of the origins of the human rights movement.

And it should be added. There was a terrific book by James Loeffler on Rooted Cosmopolitans, where he looks at many of the key figures, the pillars of the international human rights movement in the postwar era after World War I, but also after World War II. Whether it's Hersch Lauterpacht, Raphael Lemkin and others.

And they weren't only Jews. Many of these key international human rights figures, but they were Zionists. They were ardent supporters of the idea that the Jewish people have the right, as recognized in the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate of 1922, to return to their ancient historic homeland.

So the founders of human rights were Zionists, and that this movement would be betrayed and hijacked to cast Israel as the arch enemy and the ultimate violator of human rights and the ultimate racist is a complete betrayal.

00:10:52.290 — 00:11:31.770 · Ben Chertoff
In fact, at this at at this forum, a paragraph condemning anti-Semitism, which was put forth by Jewish delegates, was voted out of it, was voted out of this. And then the UN's own human rights chief, Mary Robinson, refuses to forward the document to the I guess that's to the governmental forum that was going on at the same time.

And that was the first time in the organization's history that that had happened. Why did she refuse? And did that refusal actually accomplish anything? The language of that didn't survive, did it?

00:11:31.850 — 00:11:33.210 · Hillel Neuer
Well, uh,

00:11:34.290 — 00:13:18.459 · Hillel Neuer
a few things here. One is, I believe that she refused to pass pass on the document. I'm not I'm not certain that there was any legislative action that was meant to be taken. My understanding would probably be more symbolic to pass it on. The NGO forum adopted what it adopted. There was the governmental forum, but these all happened at the same place and were part of the same, um, overall event.

And the event is, is reflected in the governmental declaration, which, as I indicated, put the Palestinians and by implication, Israel in the official document, uh, the event was, was, um, was defined by what was happening on the streets and also by what happened at the NGO forum. And altogether, it certainly was a hate fest as as Lantos said. Now, Mary Robinson, uh, was informed about the anti-Semitic caricatures.

She was informed about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being distributed and all the hate and incitement. She was in Durban. She knew what was going on. And the NGO forum had this demonizing language, which succeeded. You know, Gerald Steinberg, after the Durban conference, created a organization called NGO Monitor.

And for many years until today, they spoke about the Durban strategy, how NGOs had a strategy to promote the demonizing idea, the blood libel that Israel is, in its essence, an evil state by virtue of being racist, apartheid and murderous genocidal. So? So the words were adopted at the NGO forum, but they it didn't end there.

That's where it began. And where it where it has led to is various United Nations

00:13:19.540 — 00:13:30.060 · Hillel Neuer
mechanisms, like a commission of inquiry, like the infamous special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, accusing Israel today of genocide. And it should be kept in mind that

00:13:31.460 — 00:13:35.219 · Hillel Neuer
this term was used 25 years ago, long before Israel, um,

00:13:36.260 — 00:13:37.020 · Hillel Neuer
ever, uh, uh,

00:13:38.660 — 00:15:25.000 · Hillel Neuer
entered Gaza in the recent war, and that Albanese actually a year before the Gaza conflict, uh, was talking about how she had to investigate genocide as well. So uh, that was their goal. On Mary Robinson, I'll just make one point. To her credit, she didn't pass it on at the final moment, but to her discredit.

And you mentioned Tom Lantos, the Holocaust survivor who was known as Mr. Human Rights in the Congress. He wrote a testimonial on what happened at Durban. It's a it's a an essay. The Durban Debacle, published, I believe, in the Fletcher World Forum uh, around 2001 or shortly after the conference, and he details the nefarious role played by Mary Robinson.

She was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. So that was kind of the leading individual figure involved in this whole business and throughout the process, because the Durban conference happened in late August or early September 2001, days before 9/11, but there was a lead up. There was about at least half a year of a lead up of preparatory conferences, including one in Tehran.

The Asian Regional Conference was held in Tehran. They promised that Jews or Israelis would be able to attend. In the end, they were denied visas and couldn't attend. It was at the Tehran Conference in February 2001, where they first began adopting some of that demonizing language in the governmental draft.

Some of that came out and then went into the NGO draft in this period. Tom Lantos documents how Mary Robinson failed to take responsibility, failed to act on the contrary. She insisted at various points that it was right to turn a spotlight on the Israel situation. So it's clear. According to witnesses, high level witnesses who were there on the ground that Mary Robinson played a nefarious role in leading up to the Durban debacle.

00:15:26.440 — 00:16:04.030 · Ben Chertoff
Now, what is astounding is that in three weeks, this is again. We're taping this on September 3rd. On Monday the 28th, the General Assembly gives up an entire day in the Trusteeship Council. And obviously you're the expert on this. So let me know if I'm getting any of this wrong. For a high level meeting marking 25 years since Durban.

Most people watching this have no idea that this is something that's on the calendar. I mean, in plain terms, what's actually going on in that room and what does it say that this is still being celebrated?

00:16:04.150 — 00:16:15.520 · Hillel Neuer
Well, the Durban conference happened in 2001, and the United Nations has a practice of holding follow up conferences to, to, uh,

00:16:16.600 — 00:19:16.140 · Hillel Neuer
put new attention on the same issues. So in the Durban context, in 2009, they held the first follow up conference. The Durban Review Conference, which became known as Durban two, was held in Geneva next to the UN Human Rights Council. Our organization, UN Watch, played a key role in organizing counter events.

We had Elie Wiesel and Natan Sharansky, and David Harris, many other leading figures, on the ground for a week of events that were quite substantial, with thousands of students and other individuals holding candles because it was Yom HaShoah. When Ahmadinejad, the Iranian dictator, denied the Holocaust at the Durban Review conference, we were there holding a Yom HaShoah ceremony with Elie Wiesel.

So that was Durban two, and then Durban three was the 10th anniversary. That was 2011. A meeting was held in New York, adopted a declaration reaffirming the Durban conference. Fast forward to 2020. That was Durban four. That was the story of 2021. That was the 20th anniversary. Again, they adopted the declaration.

And I expect that what we're going to see on September 28th in New York at the UN on Monday will be possibly foreign ministers, but at least ambassadors, you know, the world leaders are meant to gather in New York starting on the 22nd. That's when President Trump and other world leaders show up in New York for a couple of days.

By the 28th, I don't think many world leaders will be left, maybe a handful. Otherwise, it may be some foreign ministers. Maybe the UN ambassadors will gather for a meeting, will adopt a declaration reaffirming Durban and possibly some controversial aspects. Keep in mind that Durban process is about.

Primarily driven by the African countries who wanted to deal with their issues against colonialism. They want reparations for slavery. Things like that. And I would say that Yasser Arafat and the anti-Israel crowd, um, latched on to to the the African led anti-racism initiative to throw Israel in the mix.

But many of the African countries are not necessarily there to promote the anti-Israel part, but it is it is part of it. It is there. So we're calling on all countries to pull out. We have a petition which is available at UN Watch on our website urging all countries. I should mention that in the original Durban conference, the US and Israel pulled out in 2009, ten countries pulled out.

The US, Canada, Canada was the first. Italy. The Netherlands. Australia. The Czech Republic, Germany. Countries that had never pulled out of a UN conference that was ten in, um, the third time, there were 15 countries that pulled out. And the last time five years ago, 38 countries pulled out 38. So we're hoping to see the same.

We hope that leading democracies who truly care about anti-racism will take a stand against anti-Semitism. And the Durban conference is an iconic symbol of anti-Semitism at the United Nations and on the world stage.

00:19:16.740 — 00:19:41.780 · Ben Chertoff
I was going to ask you about the previous boycotts because from what I can tell. So there's this modalities resolution that passed on July 28th of this year. And that's the is that the resolution that kind of sets up the Durban 25 to to happen, because I know there were 142 votes in favor, three against, 13 abstaining, which seems like support for it.

00:19:41.820 — 00:19:51.020 · Hillel Neuer
Oh yes. I mean the, the the the decision to hold the, the the event was made earlier but the modalities document uh

00:19:52.430 — 00:21:12.760 · Hillel Neuer
adds further development of the concept and the details. And indeed, as you said, the vast majority of countries. Anything that says anti-racism, most UN resolutions are adopted by consensus. Those that have some objections, maybe the US objected to certain things or others. Still typically passed by a large majority.

It's really only a very few amount of resolutions to have some, you know, split and and here the Durban initiative on its face it's anti-racism. So most countries don't want to take a stand even though it's tainted. And they just say, well, I'm voting for an anti-racism initiative. And and historically we only get a minority of Western democracies again.

Last time five years ago was 38 countries. That's substantial. And we we hope to see at least the same. And obviously, five years ago it was a different time than today where after October 7th, we're at a time when some Western countries, the UK, Canada, Australia have completely different policies towards Israel than they had several years ago, much more hostile.

And it's not obvious that they'll pull out. But we we are calling on democracies. If you truly believe in anti-racism, you cannot legitimize a process, an event that was a hate fest, which was the opposite of racism.

00:21:13.160 — 00:21:33.560 · Ben Chertoff
Has there been any attempt in the 25 years since the Durban conference to excise that language from it to reform it? Because in these, uh, you know, in these consistent celebrations of it since then, has there been any movement to, to change the language?

00:21:33.920 — 00:22:34.080 · Hillel Neuer
Uh, sort of I believe it was maybe ten years ago, maybe in the maybe it was in the 2011, possibly in the 2011 10th anniversary. One of those I know there was an initiative by Italy to, as you said, try to excise legally. I'm not sure that they can. Because the conference adopted what it did. So it's not clear to me how you can, um, you know, undo a conference declaration.

But something creative certainly in the, in the reaffirmation and we've proposed even now, our petition says, unless there's an express renunciation of the pernicious elements of the Durban 2001 declaration and a renunciation of the events that happened surrounding that event, then they should pull out.

Meaning, uh, while technically you may not be able to annul or repeal the declaration. Certainly the General Assembly, when it adopts reaffirmation, it can it can

00:22:35.920 — 00:23:10.330 · Hillel Neuer
be, you know, make express reference to the fact that that they renounce the the hate and the racism and the anti-Israel demonization and that they, you know, expressly, oppose it and do not reaffirm it. That would be one practical way of doing it. And there was some initiative at the diplomatic level more than a decade ago, as I said, by an Italian.

I think it was a human rights ambassador and nothing came of it. And to be honest, it's extremely unlikely that you'd find even a

00:23:12.010 — 00:23:53.340 · Hillel Neuer
tiny majority uh, if we get 30 or 40 countries to to do the probably the best that they could, which is to symbolically oppose it by not showing up. Probably the best we can get. It is obviously a shame, and it's deliberate that that Jews who have been at the forefront of the anti-racist movement, you know, our organization, UN Watch, was founded by Morris Abram, who was a great American civil rights leader, marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King in 1964, sat on the UN Human Rights Committee that drafted the convention on the Elimination of Racism.

So Jews were at the forefront of anti-racism. And the fact that that through this horrible actions in 2001 and thereafter. That Jews are basically

00:23:54.900 — 00:24:23.260 · Hillel Neuer
excluded from being part of an anti-racism process is shameful. And so ideally, we could cure that defect. That would be nice. But you could say that the anti-Israel elements deliberately are seeking to exclude Jews. And we've seen that in on steroids in the past few years, since October 7th, where so-called progressive movements in the human rights world have done everything to basically exclude Jews, to drive away Jews from from their movement.

00:24:23.500 — 00:24:25.819 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. I think it's fair to say that Jews were uh,

00:24:27.220 — 00:24:42.260 · Ben Chertoff
were one of the driving forces between, at least in the US, the US civil rights movement. Now, since October 7th, since this global explosion of anti-Semitism, has there been any movement in the UN, uh, structure to address that?

00:24:43.380 — 00:26:32.830 · Hillel Neuer
Uh, not really. On the contrary, I would say the United Nations has been a key driver of the global anti-Semitism. Let's keep in mind, just a couple of weeks after October 7th, Secretary general of the United Nations goes to the Security Council and says, yes, I condemn the attacks of October 7th, the Hamas attacks.

However, he says it is also important to note that these attacks did not happen in a vacuum. Goes on to enumerate numerous alleged Palestinian grievances. So you have the secretary general of the UN barely weeks after October 7th, effectively giving legitimacy, justifying what Hamas did. They had grievances do not happen in a vacuum.

He lists all the grievances. That was shameful. It set a tone. It set a tone. You had Navi Pillay, who was head of the commission of inquiry targeting Israel. She echoed those terms. You have the infamous rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, on Palestine, who supports Hamas. On October 7th, she was tweeting, saying it's just a response to oppression and you have to see it in context.

And the UN, if it's Guterres with his statements throughout the entire war, they were echoing Hamas propaganda. The UN people like Tom Fletcher, the head of the humanitarian agency OCHA. He was saying 14,000 babies are going to die in 48 hours. This was a complete concoction that was manufactured.

They completely distorted an item in a report that spoke about children, not about babies. Talked about something that could happen in a year and made it into a kind of a modern blood libel. Israel's killing 14,000 babies. So you have numerous UN figures, especially at the Human Rights Council, whether it's the Commission of inquiry targeting Israel, permanent 18 staff, a body with millions of dollars a year to gather legal

00:26:36.150 — 00:27:22.049 · Hillel Neuer
elements to try to indict Israel. Francesca Albanese, you have the Human Rights Council itself 47 nation body condemning Israel. Has the UN done anything to stop anti-Semitism? No, on the contrary, the UN has been a global purveyor of anti-Semitism. When when these blood libels go around the world that Israel is committing genocide, which various UN tainted agencies have have claimed, or starvation.

Then immediately Jews are called baby killers and are supporting genocide. And we've seen endless attacks against Jews in the United States, in the UK, in the continental Europe, Canada. Horrible. Australia. Horrible. It's been worldwide and the UN has sadly bears a lot of the blame.

00:27:23.050 — 00:27:59.120 · Ben Chertoff
I know you don't have much time, but I want to get into the rapporteurs and the secretary general, since you just mentioned that, um, recently, Guterres told the Financial Times that many of his own rapporteurs are, quote, totally out of control. Is that an actual admission that he thinks that there's a problem here?

I know he's the outgoing secretary general. Is this now he's free to to talk about what's actually going on. Or is that just a mistranslation?

00:27:59.800 — 00:28:52.929 · Hillel Neuer
There is no question that it was a significant statement, and it's a significant criticism of the rapporteurs. And there's there's different interpretations. He was asked the context was the Financial Times had a very long interview with him recently. He was asked specifically about allegations of anti-Israel bias at the UN, and he and he began his answer by saying, look, the UN is a very large organization.

There are multiple entities, he said. We have independent figures, we have these rapporteurs. Many of them are totally out of control from the point of view of the secretariat. Then he said, if you ask about the Secretary General's office and the secretariat, which means the bureaucracy that he oversees, he said there I categorically reject.

There's no bias. So, you know, there's two interpretations. He said that he said the rapporteurs are totally out of control and

00:28:54.210 — 00:30:27.899 · Hillel Neuer
that's what he said. And then then his spokesman, a day or two later tried to walk it back, said, no, it's not what he meant. He wasn't talking about the content. He meant the process. Namely, I don't control them. Not that they're out of control. Even if you accept the alternative reading as Mona Ali Khalil, an anti-Israel activist who wrote on the pro-EU and apologist website, PassBlue the other day.

She said even, even in that reading, he was asked about bias. And his first answer is, well, you got these rapporteurs and they're not me, right? Even in the alternative reading that I don't control them. Then he said, but me and our secretariat, we're not biased. So as she said, he appeared to throw them under the bus.

Now, if he's talking about rapporteurs being biased on Israel, who is he talking about? Well, at least a dozen, but at least one. Okay. It's Francesca Albanese who every five minutes is parroting the latest Hamas blood libel, as she says Hamas is are not cutthroats. They are a political party. They were elected in the most democratic election.

She says America subjugated by the Jewish lobby. And we know that. That Guterres, even though he bears a lot of blame, as I said, we know that there's no love lost between them. In fact, the US special envoy on anti-Semitism, former one Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the great historian, told Jewish Insider and others that on the sidelines of the 2024 Munich Security Conference, Guterres told her twice Albanese is a horrible person, a horrible person.

That was published

00:30:29.620 — 00:32:14.390 · Hillel Neuer
in under the testimony of historian Deborah Lipstadt. U.S. special envoy. Second, when the spokesman was asked, I think it was several months ago that might have been last year was asked about Albanese. He said, you know, there's many things that she says that we don't agree with. So that was a significant distancing from that.

It's not sufficient okay. We want way more. Ban Ki-moon condemned Richard Falk when Albanese predecessor supported the 9/11 conspiracy theory and justified somehow made some weird comments about the Boston Marathon bombings, which were done by jihadist terrorists. And he, I think, alleged that the US or Israel were profiting by it or connected.

Ban Ki-moon condemned him. He he condemned him for his preposterous remarks in the council. And then in a letter that his office wrote to me. So, uh, Guterres hasn't done that, but clearly he doesn't like her. as you said, maybe he feels a bit more liberated months before he's leaving office. Any self-respecting UN human rights expert would have resigned by now.

When you have the secretary general, clearly distancing himself, telling someone you're a horrible person twice. And she's complained about it in some interviews when she was sanctioned on July 9th, 2025. A day later, it was, I believe. Al Jazeera had an interview with you or Middle East Eye. They're pretty much the same thing she was asked about.

Has Guterres spoken to you? She said, no, never, never. He never spoke to me. Not now, not before. And I don't think after. So clearly they don't like each other. Um, but he, he bears responsibility because although he distanced himself, he never specifically condemned her. Something that his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon did do.

00:32:15.270 — 00:32:39.430 · Ben Chertoff
It's anybody who's been following your social media feeds lately which have been extraordinarily entertaining. Would know that now Francesca Albanese has threatened to sue you for defamation. Is that true? Um, so, like, is that something that she could even do? I know you've said that you welcome that, because that would bring out all of this in, in into the light of day.

00:32:39.790 — 00:34:01.360 · Hillel Neuer
Well, yes. I mean, you know, if she's watching, I would say, Madame Albanese, please go ahead and sue me. You know, your tweet claimed outright defamation. Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day. Because we have a record. The record is voluminous. It is at least four years. And it actually goes back a decade of making remarks that were condemned by the Canadian government.

The Canadian special envoy on anti-Semitism France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the UK, at least half a dozen other countries. No other UN rapporteur in a history has been criticized and condemned for Holocaust inversion, anti-Semitism, ethical breaches amounting to a breach of the UN Code of Conduct requiring her to resign.

French Prime Minister called for a UN human rights official to resign. The French foreign minister called for her to resign. So, you know, all of those are facts. And she can complain that Elon Musk has to police the X platform because I'm defaming her. And the defamation that she claimed was that I called her the de facto spokesperson for Hamas at the UN.

And that's exactly what she is. And I'll say it again. She is Hamas's de facto. Francesca Albanese is the de facto spokesperson for Hamas at the UN.

00:34:02.800 — 00:34:10.400 · Ben Chertoff
You have joked that you're running for next secretary general. That's not true, are you? Would you?

00:34:10.440 — 00:35:11.890 · Hillel Neuer
Well, I didn't I didn't say it was I said I have to consider it and I have not put in any candidature, um, to be to be fully honest, in order to be elected secretary general, you need the approval of some of the most brutal regimes, which include China and Russia. So it's a very hard to get someone who takes a principled position, which we at UN Watch do defend the UN charter.

We do call balls and strikes. We call out abusers. Secretary general, uh, doesn't do that. The Guterres gives a free pass to China, gives a free pass to Vladimir Putin. If he's not railing against Israel, he's railing against the climate. Um, so, you know, if I were ever to run for secretary general, it would be for the purpose of putting on record what the problems of the UN are, whether it's the rapporteurs run amok, whether it's dictatorships taking over human rights bodies, the Islamic Republic of Iran getting itself elected to numerous women's rights bodies, someone's got to spotlight this.

Someone's got to

00:35:13.050 — 00:35:20.410 · Hillel Neuer
put this on the agenda. So if I ever were to run, it would be for the purpose only of putting things on the agenda in a global way.

00:35:21.810 — 00:35:29.490 · Ben Chertoff
For somebody who's listening at home, who wants to get involved, how can they do that? Can they sign your petition directly?

00:35:29.530 — 00:35:44.930 · Hillel Neuer
Yes. The best way to get involved. Go to unwatch.org. Sign up on our website. You get latest updates when we have campaigns like the Durban 25 petition urging all democracies to stay away from what is a global hate fest.

00:35:45.810 — 00:35:47.970 · Ben Chertoff
Hillel Neuer, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:35:48.010 — 00:35:49.020 · Hillel Neuer
Thank you for having me.

00:35:54.620 — 00:39:42.429 · Ben Chertoff
Here's what stayed with me. I went into this thinking of Durban as an episode, a bad conference, something that happened, embarrassed everyone and got buried under September 11th, a week later. But that's not what Hillel describes. He describes a launch, the vocabulary we now argue about every single day apartheid, genocide, crimes against humanity.

The whole indictment was ratified at an anti-racism conference in 2001, and has been in continuous use ever since. Not as a description of events, as a fixed conclusion. Looking for events to support it. Albanese was preparing to investigate genocide before there was a Gaza war to investigate. The term was already there.

It was there in 2001. What changed was the footage you could staple to it, and there's a line running backward from Durban. Zionism as racism doesn't start in South Africa, it starts in Soviet propaganda in the 1950s, becomes a UN resolution in 1975, gets repealed in 1991, and then comes back ten years later in a cricket stadium in Durban wearing the language of human rights.

But the part I keep turning over is who built the thing that got hijacked? The UN creates its Human Rights Commission in 1946, one year in with Eleanor Roosevelt chairing it and René Cassin as her deputy, explicitly as an answer to the Nazis, the men who drafted the legal architecture, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word genocide, were Jews, and many of them were Zionists.

UN Watch itself was founded by Morris Abram, an American civil rights lawyer who marched with Martin Luther King in 1964 and sat on the committee that drafted the Convention Against Racial Discrimination. The people who wrote the instrument are now the only ones it plays against. Neuer calls that a betrayal, and I don't think that's too strong a word for it.

So what's actually available here? He was straight about it. You're not going to repeal a conference declaration. What you can do is not show up. In 2001, two countries walked the US and Israel. In 2009, ten. In 2011, 15. Five years ago, 38. UN Watch is running a petition now asking democracies to make it more than 38 on September 28th, or at least to demand that any reaffirmation explicitly renounce what happened in Durban.

That's at unwatch.org. And here's what I'm taking out of this one. When a phrase arrives fully formed and everybody suddenly knows it, it has a birthday. Someone drafted it. Someone voted on it. Somebody funded the trip. Find out when. Because a word that was written before the event it describes isn't a finding.

It's a verdict waiting for a file. You can find Hillel's work at UN Watch, and the Durban 25 petition is there to follow him on X. His feed has been extraordinarily entertaining lately. Links are in the description. If this one changed what you hear when somebody says apartheid, genocide, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, do me a favor, leave the show a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening right now.

It's the single biggest thing that helps new people find us. And if you're not already subscribe, hit the notification bell and follow HonestReporting on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. I'm Ben Chertoff. This is The Honest Take, and we'll see you next time.