Social media has worked its magic yet again, managing to ridicule and expose the anti-Israel bias of António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations. On Monday, the official UN X, formerly Twitter, account posted a series of quotes from the press conference that Guterres gave that same day, one of which said: "We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I have been secretary general." Quickly, the social network's contextualization and checking mechanism, known as "Community Notes," which allows users to provide additional context for "potentially misleading posts," denied Guterres with mountains of data that the bureaucrat blatantly omitted.
X users did the work that representatives of free and democratic countries have been unable to do. Year after year, assembly after assembly, they listen passively to his lies without even confronting him. But what international diplomacy omits, social media exposes, and different X users began to post official data that contradicted what the Portuguese socialist said. They explained that Guterres took office in 2017 and that by that year, two particularly cruel wars, in Syria and Yemen, had already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Further, according to the UN's own records, in 2022 alone, a child died every seven minutes in the Yemeni conflict.
Another X user recalled that more than 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2017, and that 39,000 Syrians also died that year, including 10,507 civilians. Other users shared statistics from different wars in Asia and Africa that do not seem to be important to the controversial secretary general. Writer Hen Mazzig responded with the following:
Syria: 500,000 killed (Syrian Observatory for Human Right, 2021)
Yemen: 377,000 killed
Afghanistan: 176,000 killed
Darfur: 300,000 killed
Iraq: 400,000 killed
Ukraine: 500,000 killed
Congo: 860,000+ killedThese are UN figures, just FYI...
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) November 20, 2023
Faced with the scandal, a spokesperson for the secretary general tried to cover for his nonsense by arguing that he had been misunderstood, a cop out that Guterres' people often use when he misspeaks. The spokesperson said that Guterres "was clearly talking about the casualties among children," and that "although he did use the word 'civilians' in the last sentence, the focus of what he was saying, and the statistics he provided, were about child deaths."
However, Guterres does not hesitate to condemn Israel whenever he can. He also maintained that he was not interested in "discussing the accuracy of the numbers that were published by the de facto authorities in Gaza," something that is not consistent with his initial words. The UN boss is clear that he is using figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by the Gazan dictatorship, which reports that 11,000 people have died in the Gaza Strip since Israel began its response to the terrorist attack on Oct. 7. On the other hand, the Gazan ministry's figure does not distinguish between deaths of combatants and civilians, nor does it specify the causes. In addition to this, Guterres failed to clarify that Hamas deliberately prevented Palestinians from leaving Gaza with the aim of using them as human shields, and that this is a war crime attributable to terrorists and not to the Israeli military.
The UN has been subverting Israel's right to self-defense for decades, operating with a double standard regarding armed conflicts when it comes to Israel. A clear example is its latest resolution on the conflict, in which it did not say that Israel has the right to self-defense nor did it condemn Hamas. In fact, Guterres has been preemptively attacking Israel for weeks; following the October attack, he suggested that Israel had the blood of the massacre on its own hands:
Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets. All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families. Excellencies, It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
In this regard, the watchdog organization UN Watch presented a detailed report on the animosity of the United Nations towards the Jewish state, which included the following:
From its creation in June 2006 to June 2023, the [UN Human Rights] Council has adopted zero resolutions on serial human rights abusers such China, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Zimbabwe and Cuba. It adopted 2 condemnatory resolutions on Sudan, 3 on Venezuela, 12 on Eritrea, 14 on Iran, 16 on North Korea, 42 on Syria — and 103 on Israel.
On the other hand, Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has called for Guterres' resignation, saying he has lost "all morality and impartiality." He further stated stated that the secretary general "distorts and twists reality." Guterres' peers and the UN itself should sanction such a biased character. However, it has been society, the community, that has exposed his hypocrisy. Bureaucrats are not safe when there is freedom of expression, and social media is free. This is why the people in power insist on censoring and controlling them.
Professor Anne Bayefsky, president of the NGO Human Rights Voices and director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, says:
The reality is that the United Nations apparatus has been appropriated by Israel's enemies to destroy the Jewish State for the last 75 years. Two days after the horror of October the 7th, the Pakistani ambassador, on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, said at the Human Rights Council, the UN's highest human rights body, that this was a 75-year occupation (meaning that Israel's existence is an occupation).
There are many voices that have been raised in recent years to criticize the role of the UN in the war that Israel is waging for its right to exist. But Guterres' ideological alignment appears to be pushing beyond the hypocritical modesty that the towering socialist leader used to display. In this regard, Bayefsky maintained that the UN is "enabling terrorism," and the truth is that this is not the first time that Guterres has entered into conflict with Israel. When Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Guterres complained bitterly, and during the 2021 attacks from Gaza on Israel, he asked to investigate possible human rights violations by the Israeli Army, which provoked the wrath of the government of then Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who described the UN report as "biased, false, inciting and blatantly unbalanced."
On this occasion, it is not international diplomacy or the mass media who have confronted Guterres, rather it has been the community, the majority that is not endowed with privileges nor must respond to the influence of bureaucratic interests. It is the community that has condemned Guterres' lies and cynicism, although the UN does not want to admit it.
