UN Watch’s Legal Advisor Dina Rovner appeared on Chai FM with Howard Feldman to discuss the UN’s participation in a Holocaust Remembrance Day despite promoting antisemitism.
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: Joining us this morning is Dina Rovner. She is Legal Adviser for UN Watch. Dina, good morning. Thanks for joining us again. How are you?
Dina Rovner: Good morning. Great. Thank you for having me, Howard.
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: A great pleasure. You obviously have a lot more insight into the poor behavior of the United Nations and affiliated countries than we do. Give us an overall view of what yesterday looked like.
Dina Rovner: Yeah, well, I mean, let me start by asking a question. I mean, how can we actually take anything the United Nations says or does on antisemitism seriously when in the face of the worst explosion of antisemitism in recent memory, not only have they been silent but they’ve actually been fanning the flames? And I think that’s kind of what you alluded to. You know, the UN has UNRWA this agency that’s a hotbed of antisemitism. It employs terrorists. It produces terrorists. It teaches glorification of terrorism.
And yet, António Guterres and Philippe Lazzarini and the top UN officials they only defend UNRWA. Then you have UN officials every day applying double standards towards Israel. These false moral equivalencies equating Israeli actions and self-defense to vile Hamas terrorism. And then you have the UN’s own officials people like Francesca Albanese who have been condemned for antisemitism by four countries.
And yet the UN itself has never publicly called her out on that. So I think that when we look at Holocaust Remembrance Day at the United Nations they produce this nice ceremony and it’s all very, you know, nice but that’s one day a year. What are they doing the rest of the year? Yeah, and well, in fact, quite the opposite is what they’re doing the rest of the year.
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: Why don’t they call out somebody like Francesca Albanese? Is it because their structures are just clumsy and cumbersome? Or is it because there is a very very deliberate and overt focus and hatred towards Jews? The same question could be asked around UNRWA.
Dina Rovner: You know, it’s hard to say what the real reason for that is. You know the former US Envoy on antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt had said that in private António Guterres had called Francesca Albanese a horrible person but he should come out and condemn her when she’s comparing Israel to the Nazis and the fact that he doesn’t I think it shows some kind of systemic rot within the United Nations that when it comes to racism on every other group or ethnicity, they’re always, you know, coming out very strongly.
But yet when it comes to antisemitism, they sit they sit on the sidelines and they don’t do anything. And, and then we see on Holocaust Remembrance Day they have this nice ceremony where they start talking about education and, you know preventing the next atrocity and all of that.
Well, what about what’s happening right now today in the world? You know, you have Jews beaten up on the streets in New York, London, and Paris Jewish institutions being firebombed you know, Jewish students bullied on college campuses. What’s the UN doing about that? And I think you ask an important question. Why are they doing nothing? What’s the reason for that?
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: What I also find so interesting is that, and it’s going to sound strange what I’m saying but the Holocaust is safe because it happened in the past. It’s very clearly it was very clearly horrible. Nobody could argue with that. So it’s actually quite comfortable to talk about the Holocaust because it was the murder of Jews in the past. It’s the present that definitely seems to be much more of a challenge for the United Nations, for politicians and for many antisemites who claim that they’re not antisemites because they commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.
Dina Rovner: Yeah, and I think that’s the huge irony here and you’re 100% right. That’s exactly what Holocaust Remembrance Day at the UN represents. It’s a day marking this horrible atrocity that happened in the past. But then when you have a country like South Africa, for example, coming to a UN institution the International Court of Justice and flipping that narrative accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, when actually what happened on October 7th is the Hamas genocide against Israel, and yet the UN allows this to happen and they don’t even they don’t even call it out. They refuse to even say that the Hamas attack on October 7th was genocidal, and they allow these institutions and officials to be co-opted by antisemitism.
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: In terms of UN Watch obviously there’s even been some interesting comments by South African politicians. Clearly the anger that you are seeing towards your organization must mean that you’re doing something. What do you see as your main function?
Dina Rovner: Sure. I mean, UN Watch’s mission is to hold the UN accountable to its charter. And part of that includes fighting for human rights at the UN fighting for the true victims and against dictatorships and fighting against the double standards the anti-Israel discrimination at the UN and what we see we’ve accomplished a lot in the past year on UNRWA especially.
You have just in the last couple months the Netherlands, Sweden announcing that they plan to defund UNRWA. You had a hearing last week in the Swiss Parliament the upper house of the Swiss Parliament on the issue of Swiss funding to UNRWA. You have Trump coming into office announcing that the US won’t be funding UNRWA. And so I think we’ve seen a lot going on there.
Also with Francesca Albanese. We’ve been calling her out day and night. We are- Our work definitely contributed to the fact that four countries condemned her for antisemitism and she doesn’t like us which we take that as a huge compliment that our work is succeeding.
Howard Feldman, Chai FM: Absolutely. Keep up the amazing work that you’re doing.
