UN Expands Staff to Handle Anti-Israel Dossier

One more reason for the American government to slash the $18 billion it contributes to the UN every year is the UN’s ever-expanding, extravagantly paid staff to handle matters pertaining to Israel and what the UN insists on calling “the occupied Palestinian territories.” More on the latest outrage — note the size of the salaries being offered — can be found here: “UN blasted for funding committee ‘created to destroy the Jewish state,’ despite budget crisis,” by Beth Bailey, Fox News, July 5, 2025:

Critics slammed the United Nations for rewarding a controversial anti-Israel Commission of Inquiry with four new positions worth up to three-quarters of a million dollars, even as the world body undergoes a severe cash crisis.

“When it comes to spending money for the spread of antisemitism, the U.N. doesn’t have a spending limit,” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, told Fox News Digital.

On June 4, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem (COI), led by South African Navi Pillay, announced four new job openings for senior-level positions in Geneva. These include two P-2 level associate interpreters, one higher-level P-3 level human rights officer, and a still more senior P-4 level human rights officer.

Combined, their salaries will range from $530,000 to $704,000, based on salary scales released by the U.N. and its location-based salary multiplier (set at .814 for Swiss employees), published in a document supplied to Fox News Digital by a diplomatic source.

These are grotesquely extravagant salaries, ranging from $530,000 to $704,000. Such salaries — greater than the amounts paid to any democratic leaders in the world, including the salary of the American president — would be considered astonishing anywhere in the world. At a time of severe belt-tightening, the UN’s OIC proposes to pay its mid-level functionaries, including interpreters, and two human rights officers, amounts that in the private sector would be paid to the highest-ranking executives. How does the OIC manage to get away with offering such salaries, in addition to such perks as free housing and first-class travel, and in some cases “hardship” pay when the work requires time spent in conflict zones?

These salaries do not include other senior-level U.N. employee benefits, including dependent costs, housing allowances or relocation fees.

Bayefsky asked why the U.N.’s “belt-tightening exercise … applies to all kinds of urgent matters but exempts the COI, which has simultaneously gone on a spending-spree.”

“The COI was created to destroy the Jewish state and is now conducting itself accordingly.” She said its latest report, issued in June, is “totally unhinged” and “claims Israelis are like Nazis engaged in ‘extermination’ of the Palestinians, refers to those ‘extremist Jews,’ denies biblical history, [and] fuels antisemitism by claiming Jews defile Muslim holy sites.”

The COI is a UN agency that promotes Hamas and slanders Israel at every opportunity. It routinely describes the IDF’s behavior in Gaza as akin to that of the Nazis, denies the 3500-year history of Jews in the Land of Israel, falsely accuses Israel of defiling Muslim holy sites when Israel is scrupulous to take care of those sites, while Muslims have vandalized and in some cases partly or wholly destroyed Jewish holy sites, including the tombs of Joseph and of Rachel. On the Temple Mount the Israeli police take care to protect Muslim sensibilities by enforcing the prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount.

A spokesperson from the U.N. Human Rights Office did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about the Commission’s findings.

Pillay and the COI have come under fire previously for anti-Israel sentiment. In January 2022, 42 Republicans and Democrats in Congress signed an open letter calling for the U.S. to defund the COI. The Representatives expressed concern that “Chairwoman Navi Pillay, while serving as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, repeatedly and unjustly accused Israel of committing war crimes.” They stated that while she condemned Israel, Pillay “reportedly said nothing at all about egregious human rights abuses in dozens of other countries which, unlike Israel, received the worst, ‘Not Free’ rating from the respected Freedom House.”…

Most notably, Pillay has still not uttered a syllable about the mass assault by Arabs on black Africans in South Sudan, where the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is taking place, but receives a tiny fraction of the coverage that the world’s media devote to Gaza and its nonexistent “famine.” In South Sudan, 25 million people — half the population — are acutely food insecure, while about 700,000 (the highest number anywhere in the world) face catastrophic levels of hunger.

In March, Pillay’s commission claimed that rape and sexual violence are part of the Israel Defense Force’s “standard operating procedures towards Palestinians.” Pillay also said that the IDF’s sexual violence creates “a system of oppression that undermines [Palestinians’] right to self-determination.” In response, Bayefsky called Pillay “the world’s leading champion of the 2001 U.N. ‘Durban Declaration’ slander that a Jewish state is a racist state.”

Pillay plucks these slanderous claims against the IDF out of thin air. The IDF never has practiced “rape and sexual violence” against the Palestinians; the “rape and sexual violence” are instead practiced by Hamas on Israeli civilians, as was seen during the atrocities on October 7, 2023. The IDF’s refusal to rape Arab girls and women has even been held against them; their refusal to rape Arab females has been been turned inside out: now the Israelis are accused of “racism” precisely because they do not rape Arab women.

In March 2024, Congress passed a budget bill that eliminated funding for the COI while simultaneously banning funds for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), according to the Jerusalem Post….

Under Trump, Congress has come to its senses, eliminating American funding for both of the two most anti-Israel groups working under the UN aegis — UNRWA (hundreds of whose staff are members of Hams in Gaza, with some even taking part in the October 7, 2023 atrocities), and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel, whose staff members are famously full of anti-Israel animus, and work hand-in-glove with the infamous Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Conditions in the Palestinian Territories, who routinely accuses the Israelis of committing “genocide.”

The UN Human Rights Council, another of those UN sub-groups that spends much of its time denouncing the tiny state of Israel, is having trouble — “inadequate resourcing” — and is now unable to complete “dozens of reports” as well as “studies, regional workshops, and panels mandated by the Council.” Such reports are always used to slander Israel and often, its chief backer, the United States. The staffs of the UNHRC, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel, and UNRWA consist of international bureaucrats, often from Third World despotisms, who hate America, Israel, and the rest of the west. Now they have been deprived of money to pay for their “dozens of reports” and other Drucksache. Too bad.

The US may be the host country for the UN, but that does not mean than everyone who works for, or is in some way linked to, the UN, must be admitted into the United States. Those who carry with them the virus of antisemitism, or other forms of race hatred, for example, can be kept out.

By the sound of what is coming from the administration, it appears that there is a serious possibility that all American financing of the UN may well end. What was once a hopeful enterprise when it opened in 1945 with 35 members, a majority from the advanced Western world, now has 193 members, many of them Third World despotisms, for whom the UN has become a vehicle for denouncing Israel, the United States, and the rest of the West. It has passed its sell-by date. Trump would do well to stop funding of the UN altogether. Let the noxious organization close down; it cannot be reformed. A handful of its dozens of agencies, such as UNESCO (the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), UNICEF (the UN’s International Children’s Emergency Fund), and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) can continue their work under new management, unconnected to the former UN.

It’s up to the Trump administration to end all American financial support for the UN, an institution that by its actions has already lost what moral authority it may once have possessed, while offering to continue support for three agencies — UNESCO, UNICEF, and FAO — as long as they refashion themselves as independent bodies, drop the “UN” from their names, and have nothing further to do with that disgraced, and now insolvent, institution. The heathen will rage, but the world will be a better place without the UN.