UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s ineffectual response contrasts with former leader Kofi Annan, who advocated for the dissolution of the UN Human Rights Commission.
By Eve Epstein
(October 8, 2024 / JNS) UN Secretary-General António Guterres is a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, scheduled to be announced on Friday. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the International Court of Justice are also being considered. Awarding the prize to any of them would be a travesty. The secretary-general’s moral equivalence between terrorists and victims, his false statistics and his distortions of international humanitarian law raise serious questions regarding his neutrality, commitment to justice, and ability to uphold the principles enshrined in the UN Charter.
For the past year—since the barbaric Oct. 7 assault by Hamas operatives who slaughtered, raped, tortured and burned individuals in Israel’s south; Hezbollah’s unremitting 8,000-plus missile attacks on civilian populations in Israel’s north, which UN Resolution 1701 was mandated to prevent; and two attacks by Iran, including the most recent launching of 180 ballistic missiles at millions of Israelis in civilian population centers across Israel—Guterres has been disproportionately focused on condemning Israel’s legally justified actions to defend its citizens and ensure that all 135,000 people who have been displaced of them can safely return to their homes. Israel has been facing an existential threat from Iran and its terrorist proxies on multiple fronts.
Those of us with institutional memory recognize a troubling recrudescence of the era of Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general with a hidden Nazi past who presided over the world body for a decade, during which the General Assembly passed its infamous resolution declaring “Zionism is racism.” Waldheim’s tenure was mired in accusations of antisemitism. Eventually, he was barred in disgrace from entering countries in Europe and the United States.
Similar political theater was on full display last month at the UN General Assembly when an automatic majority of anti-Israel member states were similarly elated at the passage of the Palestinian-drafted UN General Assembly resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israel. Volker Türk, the secretary-general’s Austrian protégé and high commissioner for human rights, was one of the measure’s advocates. Subsequently, Guterres stated before the UN General Assembly meeting that he was prepared to back the implementation of the adopted resolution.
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre and repeated thereafter, Guterres has averred that the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “did not happen in a vacuum” but should be understood in the “context” of Palestinian oppression. Equally tendentious and false is his repeated statement that during his time in office, he has not seen any conflict anywhere in the world with the scale and speed of killing inflicted by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. The secretary-general has accepted without question the exaggerated casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, and even after the United Nations cut the death figures in half, he continued to use his voice to influence UN member states, ignoring casualties in other conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Sudan.
When Francesca Albanese, a UN official who is part of the United Nations’ human-rights apparatus, wrongly and astonishingly accused Israel of apartheid and genocide—and called for Israel to be expelled from the United Nations—Guterres’s office offered nothing more than a weak deflection, noting that UN rapporteurs are “independent.”
His ineffectual response contrasts sharply with the moral clarity of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who rightly advocated for the dissolution of the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights Commission, recognizing its lack of credibility and the disproportionate focus on Israel was contrary to the United Nations’ mission. He also firmly denounced the “Zionism is racism” resolution, calling it a “low point in history,” saying he was “glad it had since been rescinded.” (It took 16 years to be revoked.) When a UN member state claimed that Israel was infecting Palestinians with AIDS-tainted blood, Annan swiftly admonished that there was no place at the global body for such rhetoric.
Today, however, Guterres not only fails to confront baseless accusations of apartheid and genocide against Israel, he has become a megaphone for the Palestinian narrative, and allows dangerous allegations and hate speech against Jews and Israel to flourish unchallenged.
His failure to include sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 against Israeli women in his annual report for “lack of evidence” is a further outrage.
Nor has the secretary-general ever unconditionally condemned Hamas’s kidnapping, starvation and cold-blooded execution of Israeli hostages without linking it to a ceasefire, which would enable Iran and its terrorist proxies to fulfill their stated genocidal goal of eliminating the only Jewish state and democracy in the Middle East.
Most recently, on Oct. 1, when Iran launched a barrage of 180 ballistic missiles against Israeli population centers, forcing millions of Israelis to seek protection in bomb shelters, the secretary-general rushed to post on X an outrageous statement that failed to even mention Iran:
“I’m gravely concerned by the dramatic escalation of events in Beirut in the last 24 hours. This cycle of violence must stop now. All sides must stop back from the brink. The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, as well as the wider region, cannot afford an all-out war.”
Iran launched the largest single ballistic missile attack ever recorded against a sovereign UN member state during your tenure. This did not happen in a “vacuum.” Iran is the world’s greatest purveyor of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of the United Nations.
The brilliantly precise targeting of Hezbollah combatants through simultaneous explosions was condemned by Guterres, who distorted international law by saying that widespread targeting of civilian objects was a war crime that should be investigated and the perpetrators prosecuted. According to the U.S. Department of Defense military manual and legal experts, such activity is not prohibited by said law.
Additionally, the secretary-general’s forceful lobbying for UNRWA ignores clear and convincing evidence that Hamas terrorists are embedded within UNRWA and use its facilities with impunity.
By functioning as a force multiplier for the Palestinian narrative, the UN secretary-general’s rhetorical invective against Israel is swallowed whole and regurgitated by many in the media. From informing international policy to creating a social-media frenzy, Guterres’s moral inversions, distortions of international humanitarian law, his implication that Israel has murdered Palestinians with “impunity” and other specious “facts on the ground” contribute greatly to public hysteria, the university campus riots against Israel and Jews, and the explosion of antisemitic violence worldwide.
In the halls of the United Nations, I hear Türk referred to as Guterres’s “alter-ego” and “surrogate son,” raising questions about whether the secretary-general is exercising impartial judgment.
During his tenure, Annan welcomed divergent perspectives. Yet, since Oct. 7, Türk has issued endless press statements accusing Israel of “collective punishment,” “war crimes,” “forced displacement” and other alleged violations of international humanitarian law. And after Türk did so, Guterres repeated these claims that inverted the truth and harmed the free world’s efforts to combat terrorism.
When the fog of war clears, history will undoubtedly judge Guterres’s legacy as a stain on the United Nations, as was the case with Waldheim.
Members of the Nobel committee who rightly questioned Waldheim’s era, asking where was the moral authority of the secretary-general then, would do well to ask: “Where is the moral authority of the secretary-general now?”
Eve Epstein is the president of Epstein & Associates, a strategic communications and media firm located in NYC. She has also advised top UN officials, including a UN secretary-general.
This article was originally published in JNS and can be viewed here.