As a major “liquidity crisis” looms for United Nations entities within the face of Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) funding cuts, with specialists saying the Trump administration ought to look at the U.N.’s media department, the Division of World Communications, for its position in churning out anti-Israel propaganda.
“The U.N. continues its spin-cycle messaging machine with out washing out its waste and inefficiencies,” former Nationwide Safety Council Particular Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Worldwide Group Affairs Hugh Dugan instructed Fox Information Digital. “That’s its actual liquidity disaster.”
Among the many Division of World Communications’ duties are the supply of press help, maintenance of the U.N. Dag Hammarskjöld Library, heading of worldwide info facilities and coordination of the U.N.’s Twitter presence. A full unbiased assessment of the Division’s actions is about to start this 12 months.
HEAD OF UN WATCHDOG SAYS UNRWA HIRED PEOPLE ‘WHO WERE SUPPORTING TERRORISM’
The image of the United Nations is displayed outdoors the Secretariat Constructing at United Nations Headquarters in New York Metropolis on Feb. 28, 2022. (AP Picture/John Minchillo)
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, expressed her need for the U.S. itself to look at the Division of World Communications’ funding. Bayefsky instructed Fox Information Digital that “the United Nations is the world headquarters of worldwide disinformation,” with an “meeting line of lies, hate speech, incitement to violence, and antisemitism [that] is completely out-of-control.”
Bayefsky stated it’s the “group itself that poses an integrity threat — to world peace, civilized discourse, and human rights safety. The data atmosphere cultivated by the U.N. has been poisoning the minds of generations of People, so is not it about time that Washington posed a threat to this U.N. ‘work’?”
The Division’s fixation on Israel was evidenced in a February report about its operations, wherein it briefly described disaster communications cells it runs relating to worldwide disasters in Haiti, Sudan and Ukraine, and went into extra expansive element describing its cell on “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
In keeping with the Division, the disaster in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory “required robust messaging and outreach to make sure continued worldwide help for the work of the United Nations and its companions.” The Division additionally talked about that the cell “analyzed info integrity dangers, such because the unfold of misinformation and disinformation about United Nations work.”
All through 2024, the United Nations Aid and Works Company for Palestinian Refugees within the Close to East (UNRWA) got here beneath critical scrutiny and lost donors after information was uncovered about UNRWA leaders’ and members’ ties to terrorism, and the hate propelled by UNRWA curricula.
Help vehicles of the United Nations Aid and Works Company for Palestinian Refugees within the Close to East (UNRWA) ship assist close to Gaza Metropolis. (Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu by way of Getty Photos)
Fox Information Digital requested Melissa Fleming, U.N. Below-Secretary-Normal for Communications, to make clear the division’s allegations of misinformation and disinformation, and to explain why “robust messaging” was required of the division.
Fleming defined that the Division wanted to “clearly clarify the position” of the U.N. and its humanitarian companies, and analyze “info environments to higher perceive tendencies that may pose threat to the U.N.’s work.”
Dugan, who was a senior advisor to 11 U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. stated on the subject of the disaster in Gaza, “there’s some particular remedy they’re giving to that area and the protection of it, which I believe is regarding to me.” He famous that cells specializing in Haiti, Ukraine, and Sudan “don’t discuss misinformation [or] disinformation.” The scenario, he stated, “wreaks… of the U.N.’s hand in propagandizing and repair as a kind of mediator of what info will get to whom, and when, and the way.”
Requested what number of hours the Division of World Communications dedicated to its varied disaster cells, Fleming stated that point “is set by plenty of components,” together with “the size of the disaster and the pace of developments on the bottom,” and the extent of worldwide curiosity and U.N. occasions concerned with the disaster. Fleming added that cells meet extra usually “within the early phases of a disaster.”
Fleming stated that “the Israel-Occupied Palestinian Territory disaster communications cell has met on a weekly foundation for about one hour” following the assaults of Oct. 7, 2023. She famous that this was “equal to the frequency and timing of conferences for the Ukraine disaster through the first 12 months of the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation in 2022.”
WORLD FORGETS ‘CATASTROPHIC’ WAR IN SUDAN AS RUSSIA, IRAN, OTHERS REPORTEDLY FEED FIGHTING WITH ARMS
Fighters of the Sudan Liberation Motion, a Sudanese insurgent group energetic in Sudan’s Darfur State which helps military chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, attend a commencement ceremony within the southeastern Gedaref state on March 28, 2024. (AFP by way of Getty Photos)
Fleming didn’t state how a lot time has been dedicated to the Haiti or Sudan disaster cells. The group’s report on its actions refers back to the scenario in Sudan as a “huge humanitarian disaster.”
In January, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that rebel actions in Sudan constituted genocide. Blinken described how tens of 1000’s of Sudanese people had died in battle, that 30 million required humanitarian assist and that 638,000 had been experiencing “the worst famine in Sudan’s latest historical past.”
Blinken said that Sudanese insurgent group Fast Assist Forces (RSF) “and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct assaults in opposition to civilians, have systematically murdered males and boys — even infants — on an ethnic foundation, and (have) intentionally focused ladies and women from sure ethnic teams for rape and different types of brutal sexual violence.”
The U.N.’s Unbiased Worldwide Reality-Discovering Mission for the Sudan didn’t point out genocide in its September 2024 findings that “Sudan’s opponents have dedicated an appalling vary of harrowing human rights violations and worldwide crimes, together with many which can quantity to warfare crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity.”
Conversely, the U.N. Particular Committee to research Israeli practices declared in November 2024 that “Israel’s warfare in Gaza is according to the traits of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening circumstances deliberately imposed on Palestinians.”
Hamas terrorists left Kibbutz Be’eri, a village close to Gaza, in ruins. (Tomer Peretz)
Former nationwide safety advisor Jake Sullivan stated final 12 months that the Biden administration does “not consider what is going on in Gaza is a genocide.”
David Might, a analysis analyst on the Basis for Protection of Democracies, instructed Fox Information Digital that “the concentrate on an imagined genocide, Gaza, is taking time and focus away from an precise genocide, Sudan.” Might added that “basically, the Division of World Communications is tasked with presenting a Palestinian narrative and makes use of U.N. funds to behave as one other pro-Palestinian U.N. physique.”
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Might stated that “whereas the USA withholds funding to the United Nations proportionate to the budgets of Palestinian-specific our bodies, Washington doesn’t account for extra common U.N. departments finishing up an anti-Israel agenda.”
Dugan expressed concern over the Division of World Communications’ emphasis on its position in combating misinformation in its newest report. It “sends its mandate to go far past day by day relations with the press corps,” he defined, and as a substitute “units them as much as be decide, jury and executioner on storylines and narratives that the secretariat workers discover offensive.”
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