Facts, persuasion are powerful tools against Israel haters, advocate says
UN Watch's Hillel Neuer urges students to be courageous and diligent: 'Everything I do is to speak rationally, bring facts, and make arguments.'
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that holds the United Nations accountable to its founding principles, recently spoke with Neil Seeman outside the University of Toronto. The Montreal-raised lawyer has spent two decades confronting dictatorships, double standards, and moral inversion at the highest levels of international diplomacy. He reflected on what inspires him and how students can spot distortion and stand their ground. The conversation comes as UN Watch leads a high-stakes campaign to block former human rights chief Michelle Bachelet's bid for UN secretary-general, with Neuer calling for a leader 'willing to confront dictators, not shield them.'
What do you say to students who fear losing their friend group by taking an unpopular stand?
It is easier said than done, but if you have friends who are going to ostracize you because you told the truth — because you contested the manufactured blood libel that Israel commits genocide, and that whoever supports Israel is somehow a supporter of baby-killing — then they are not really your friends and you are better off without them.
Certainly, in my own experience, I have been in a hostile atmosphere for two decades. But with the contempt and hatred I get from those who have become apologists for the Islamic regime in Iran, I also get support, encouragement, and admiration from amazing people around the world. It may be difficult at first to be ostracized, but you will earn respect from morally principled, good people. They may be fewer — but better to have a few good people than a majority of fake friends.
How would you coach a student to spot antisemitism in the classroom?
Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, came up with a useful three-D test: Double standards, Discrimination, and Demonization.
Some signals are obvious — I have seen demonstrators in Toronto recently lifting up 1930s-style Nazi caricatures that dehumanize Jews. But today's antisemites are often more clever. They mask antisemitism in the cloak of virtue — and antisemitism has always done that. When society was religious, Jews were accused of having killed God. When science was the reigning virtue in Nazi Germany, Jews were declared the inferior race under racial science. In Soviet Russia, Jews were accused of being fascists, nationalists, and capitalists. In our time the great virtues are human rights and anti-racism, so it is in their name that people demand the elimination of the Jewish state.
An easy tell is the double standard: if an activist has not lifted a finger when tens of thousands were killed in Sudan, when a million Uyghurs were placed in camps in China, when thousands were massacred in the span of two days in other conflicts — but the only issue they speak about is Israel — then you have a basis to ask whether they are truly motivated by human rights or by something much darker being masked in the name of virtue.
