Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
In Agatha Christie’s mystery novel And Then There Were None, the ten main characters realize early on that they have been lured to an island by an imposter using aliases with the initials U.N. Owen. As Judge Wargrave informs the other characters, these initials coupled with the last name sound like and signify “unknown."
As the last two weeks have made clear, the initials “UN" used by the United Nations also stand for “unknown," as we discover that its leaders and so-called “experts" are woefully ignorant of the world they claim to monitor and protect.
During the UN General Assembly last week, Secretary General Antonio Guteress claimed that Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre constituted “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in my years as Secretary-General." Apparently, the words Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Congo, Iran, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and many more sites of conflicts with far greater death tolls than the Hamas war slipped his mind.
It is apparently unknown to the UN Secretary General that at least 150,000 people have been killed in Sudan since 2023, more than double the death toll in Gaza in roughly the same period. And that is the low-end estimate. The true death toll may be as high as 400,000. If Guterres had read the UN’s own reports, he would know that 13.6 million people in Sudan have been forced from their homes, with more than 4 million becoming refugees. Nearly 20 million people face acute food insecurity, with millions living in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) level 4 (emergency) conditions, and hundreds of thousands enduring IPC level 5 (Catastrophic / Famine Risk) conditions.
In Syria, as many as 200,000 people have been killed in the country’s civil war since Guterres became Secretary General, and over half a million have been killed in total. In Ethiopia, an estimated 160,000-600,000 people were killed during the Tigray War of November 2020-November 2022, with massacres against civilians such as the Mai Kadra massacre and the Humera Massacre. Far more people were killed there in 2 years than were killed in Gaza in the last 3 years, but this fact is unknown to Guterres.
In January 2026, the Iranian government committed one of the most brutal massacres in modern history, murdering an estimated 36,000 civilians in just a few weeks. The rate at which protesters were mowed down would merit the description of “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed" if the UN had a Secretary General who possessed the eyes to see reality or the ears to hear the cries of actual victims.
The ignorance of the UN was on full display 2 days ago when UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese apologized for being unaware of the definition and history of the word antisemitism.
In her apology, Albanese wrote, "I misread the term 'Muselmann' used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death [thinking it meant Muslim] and wrongly inferred that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples. In fact it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews."
This woman has been in the UN’s position of chief Israel-basher since 2022. And after 4 years of doing nothing but bashing the world’s only Jewish state and defending the genocidal antisemites of Hamas, she admitted that she did not know what antisemitism meant.
This is the woman who said that French President Emmanuel Macron was wrong to characterize the October 7 massacre as “antisemitic" in nature. This is the same woman who rushed immediately after that to co-opt the expression “J’accuse," used by Emil Zola in a famous letter meant to call attention to the antisemitism behind the false prosecution and persecution of Alfred Dreyfus. Albanese used it to attack Israel and blame the Jews for being massacred by Hamas.
This is the woman who called it “unacceptable" and “victim-blaming" to demand that Hamas release the hostages it took captive, including babies and toddlers. According to Albanese, it was not antisemitic for a young man to call his parents and shout with joy that he had “killed ten Jews with my own hands." According to Albanese, it was “victim-blaming’ to demand the release of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, because it was Kfir’s kidnappers and murderers who were the real victims.
And after years of this abuse of Jewish victims, she now says that she didn’t know what antisemitism is?
One has to wonder why Albanese is apologizing now, rather than for her defenses of Hamas or her claim that the hostage takers were the real victims and not the innocents they kidnapped, starved, tortured, and murdered. And one has to wonder whether this apology is sincere, or if she was truly as unforgivably ignorant as she now claims to have been. The odds of her suddenly recognizing that it is evil to kidnap or murder Jewish babies and that massacring thousands of Jews just for being Jewish is wrong are virtually zero. And if she did start acting like a human being instead of like a Hitler cheerleader, she would likely not remain in her position for much longer.
Actually knowing the meaning of words is frowned upon at the UN, which fired UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu because she correctly understood the definition of “genocide" and would not falsely apply the term to Israel’s acts in self-defense. However, when UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Reem Alsalem claimed that “No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October," in deliberate ignorance and blindness to the UN’s own reports that sexual violence and rape were committed that black day, she was allowed to keep her position. Ignorance and denial of reality are prerequisites to working at the UN, to which truth and human rights for Jews are unknown concepts.
It is easy to accuse Israel when you go out of your way to ignore the meanings of words like “genocide" and “famine" and pretend that they mean something completely different. It is easy to defend Hamas when you can act like antisemitism does not mean hatred of Jews and thereby pretend that anti-Jewish prejudice does not exist. It is easy to deny that rape, kidnapping, and murder occurred when you pretend that these crimes do not apply when applied to Jewish women and children.
Real suffering goes ignored when the UN Secretary General acts as though every conflict other than Israel's is unknown to him. Real women suffer when the UN official tasked with defending women acts as if the concept of Jewish women being victims is unknown to her. And real people suffer when the UN official tasked with the Arab-Israeli conflict acts as if the concept of Jew-hatred is unknown to her.
If the UN is to function, if it is to be anything other than a den of hatred and a safe place for dictators and mass murderers, if it is to be of any benefit to humanity whatsoever, then it needs to be led and staffed by people of integrity, people for whom the truth and reality are not optional. The UN cannot continue to stand for “unknown."