UN Staffers Agitate for the Removal of Pro-Israel Voices at Turtle Bay

Calls are growing for the resignation of the United Nations’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, as employees intensify pressure against officials who buck the predominant anti-Israeli bias at the world body. A petition with more than 13 thousand signatures so far demands that Ms. Nderitu, who is a Kenyan national, step down after “she failed to acknowledge Israel’s overwhelming violence against Palestinian civilians” in what the signatories consider a violation of her job’s mandate. The petition, launched on December 8 by “Concerned Citizens of the International Community,” is merely the latest instance of internal division at the United Nations over accusations that Israel is conducting “genocide” at Gaza.The push to oust Ms. Nderitu comes as voices of support for the Jewish State grow even more rare in the halls at Turtle Bay. The UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, endorses “a full humanitarian cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war, which critics say would cripple the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself from the terrorist organization. Muslim member states — more than a quarter of the 193 member nations — exert pressure on the organization to condemn Israel.While many top UN officials have neglected to show any public sympathy for Israel, Ms. Nderitu has condemned the terrorist group’s violence at Gaza and urged for the release of Israeli hostages. In an October 15 statement, she pointed to the “very serious risk of military escalation in the region” because of Hamas’s actions. Such remarks on the “risk” — not the reality — of violence in the region provoked outrage from UN staff. “Instead of condemning the dehumanization of Palestinians,” Ms. Nderitu’s rhetoric “may have further dehumanized them,” asserts an October 24 letter “signed by concerned UN staff including Palestinians,” whose names are redacted from the public copy. It argues that she failed to acknowledge “the 16-year blockade that has already been imposed on Gaza” and “the recent intensifications of the measures of collective punishment imposed on Gaza’s residents.”The staffers point to comments by Israeli and American leaders, like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel’s remark on October 9 that “we are fighting against human animals.” Such “genocidal rhetoric,” the letter asserts, suggests the possibility of a “special intent” for genocide led by Israel.The genocidal intent of Hamas, however, is abundantly clear. Its covenant, the Hadith, states: “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”According to the spokesman for the UN’s Secretary General, Stephane Dujarric, “genocide” cannot be invoked to assess Israel’s aims to expel Hamas. The organization adopted the term in Article II of its Genocide Convention, held in 1948 in the wake of World War II. It was coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to denote “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group” — in Latin, the killing, cide, of a genus. “As far as the Secretariat is concerned, the designation of a genocide needs to be made by a competent legal body,” Mr. Dujarric said in a press briefing in late October. “It is not a designation that the Secretary-General has the legal authority to make within the UN context.” The United Nations’s legal affairs department, he said, would agree with this assessment.“The Secretary-General has full confidence in Ms. Nderitu’s work and the way she fulfills her mandate,” Mr. Dujarric tells the Sun. Despite growing anti-Israel sentiment at the UN under Mr. Guterres’s leadership, he adds, “the Secretary-General has always been outspoken in his criticism of antisemitism, both as Secretary-General and his former career.”Contrary to the “concerned UN staff,” the mandate of Ms. Nderitu is to bring to the attention of the Secretary General situations that could devolve into genocide. “The Special Adviser would not make a determination on whether genocide within the meaning of the Convention had occurred,” outlines a security council resolution from 2001. “The purpose of his activities, rather, would be practical and intended to enable the United Nations to act in a timely fashion.”UN employees might be the ones violating their organization’s mandates. A slew of recent statements and incidents from staffers appear to contradict the UN rules dictating that civil servants should not be affiliated with their home country in order to protect impartiality. In an October 28 letter to the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber called for “the dismantling of the deeply racist settler colonial project” — meaning Israel. He accused the United Nations of failing to stop Israel’s “genocide” and thus abandoning its commitment to international law. “We are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it,” said Mr. Mokhiber, who subsequently stepped down from his post as director of the UN’s human rights agency at New York City. That assertion, Mr. Dujarric said in a statement, reflected “the personal views of the staff member who is retiring.” The United Nations protects staff members’ “right to freedom of expression” as long as such expression complies with the principles of the UN’s charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Online activity, according to the organization’s social media guidelines, “should be consistent with the ideal of peace” and “must not discriminate against any individual or group of individuals.” Yet social media has become a breeding ground for anti-Israel sentiment espoused by UN employees. A UN humanitarian affairs officer, Nurhaida Rahim, has taken to LinkedIn to characterize descriptions of Hamas’s October 7 attacks as part of “the propaganda machine and deplorable racist ideology of an apartheid regime.” A senior human rights advisor at the United Nations Development Coordination Office at New York, George Abualzulof, has shared posts on social media that advocate for the destruction of Israel. He once made his Facebook profile picture the banner, “Freedom for Khalida Jarrar,” referring to the Samidoun group, which the Israeli Ministry of Defense has designated a terrorist organization and “a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”These sentiments are the foundation of the pressure campaign against Ms. Nderitu and other officials who are deemed to be pro-Israel, or not sufficiently anti-Israel. Staffers at the UN’s World Food Programme have circulated two public petitions calling for their executive director, Cindy McCain, to demand a cease-fire at Gaza and echo the view spouted by other UN agencies. the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment.________This article has been updated from the bulldog.

UN Staffers Agitate for the Removal of Pro-Israel Voices at Turtle Bay

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