U.N. global comms arm under fire for anti-Israel bias as critics call for reforms

"As a major ‘liquidity crisis’ looms for United Nations entities in the face of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) funding cuts, with experts saying the Trump administration should examine the U.N.’s media branch, the Department of Global Communications, for its role in churning out anti-Israel propaganda.

‘The U.N. continues its spin-cycle messaging machine without washing out its waste and inefficiencies,’ former National Security Council Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for International Organization Affairs Hugh Dugan told Fox News Digital. ‘That’s its real liquidity crisis.’

Among the Department of Global Communications’ responsibilities are the provision of press support, upkeep of the U.N. Dag Hammarskjöld Library, heading of worldwide information centers and coordination of the U.N.’s Twitter presence. A full independent review of the Department’s activities is set to begin this year.

Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, expressed her desire for the U.S. itself to examine the Department of Global Communications’ funding. Bayefsky told Fox News Digital that ‘the United Nations is the world headquarters of global disinformation,’ with an ‘assembly line of lies, hate speech, incitement to violence, and antisemitism [that] is totally out-of-control.’

Bayefsky said it is the ‘organization itself that poses an integrity risk — to world peace, civilized discourse, and human rights protection. The information environment cultivated by the U.N. has been poisoning the minds of generations of Americans, so isn't it about time that Washington posed a risk to this U.N. ‘work’?’

The Department’s fixation on Israel was evidenced in a February report about its operations, in which it briefly described crisis communications cells it runs regarding worldwide disasters in Haiti, Sudan and Ukraine, and went into more expansive detail describing its cell on ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’

According to the Department, the crisis in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory ‘required strong messaging and outreach to ensure continued international support for the work of the United Nations and its partners.’ The Department also mentioned that the cell ‘analyzed information integrity risks, such as the spread of misinformation and disinformation about United Nations work.’..."