Critics Call for Reforms as UN Global Communications Division Faces Criticism for Anti-Israel Bias

Facing potential financial challenges, United Nations agencies are bracing for a “liquidity crisis” following funding cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Experts suggest that the Trump administration should scrutinize the U.N.’s media wing, the Department of Global Communications, over allegations of promoting anti-Israel propaganda.

According to former National Security Council Special Assistant to the President, Hugh Dugan, the U.N. is criticized for its continuous messaging that lacks efficiency and effectiveness. Dugan believes that this ongoing issue represents the organization’s true financial crisis.

The Department of Global Communications oversees various tasks, including providing media support, managing the U.N. Dag Hammarskjöld Library, supervising global information centers, and handling the U.N.’s presence on Twitter. An independent evaluation of the Department’s operations will be initiated this year.

Fighters of the Sudan Liberation Movement, a Sudanese rebel group active in Sudan’s Darfur State which supports army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, attend a graduation ceremony in the southeastern Gedaref state on March 28, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)

Fleming did not state how much time has been devoted to the Haiti or Sudan crisis cells. The organization’s report on its activities refers to the situation in Sudan as a “massive humanitarian crisis.” 

In January, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that rebel actions in Sudan constituted genocide. Blinken described how tens of thousands of Sudanese individuals had died in conflict, that 30 million required humanitarian aid and that 638,000 were experiencing “the worst famine in Sudan’s recent history.” 

Blinken stated that Sudanese rebel group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) “and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians, have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and (have) deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.”

The U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan did not mention genocide in its September 2024 findings that “Sudan’s warring parties have committed an appalling range of harrowing human rights violations and international crimes, including many which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” 

Conversely, the U.N. Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices declared in November 2024 that “Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians.”

Hamas terrorists left Kibbutz Be’eri, a village near Gaza, in ruins. (Tomer Peretz)

Former national security advisor Jake Sullivan said last year that the Biden administration does “not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide.” 

David May, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital that “the focus on an imagined genocide, Gaza, is taking time and focus away from an actual genocide, Sudan.” May added that “essentially, the Department of Global Communications is tasked with presenting a Palestinian narrative and uses U.N. funds to act as another pro-Palestinian U.N. body.” 

May said that “while the United States withholds funding to the United Nations proportionate to the budgets of Palestinian-specific bodies, Washington does not account for more general U.N. departments carrying out an anti-Israel agenda.” 

Dugan expressed concern over the Department of Global Communications’ emphasis on its role in combating misinformation in its latest report. It “sends its mandate to go far beyond daily relations with the press corps,” he explained, and instead “sets them up to be judge, jury and executioner on storylines and narratives that the secretariat employees find offensive.”