Quoting a former school teacher, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee warned in Jerusalem on Wednesday night that when it comes to the global campaign being waged by politicized NGOs, international courts and U.N. bodies against Israel, “silence is agreement.”
Huckabee spoke at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center to a packed NGO Monitor event titled “Human Rights Industry at a Breaking Point,” in conversation with its founder and president, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, and vice president, Olga Deutsch.
Urging Jews and Christians alike to speak out against growing attempts to delegitimize Israel’s historic sovereignty over the Holy Land, he recalled a wise lesson he had learned from his high-school speech teacher in Arkansas.
“I was a 16-year-old student in high school and my speech teacher drilled into me and to all the other members of the class a little phrase. He would say to us: ‘Silence is agreement.’ And he said, ‘You’re taking speech, not because you’re going to be making speeches the rest of your life'—even though I have been. But then he said, ‘You’re going to hear things that are fundamentally untrue or unfair, and when you hear them, you have a responsibility to challenge them. And if you don’t challenge them, if you let evil have an unchallenged voice, then you have agreed with the evil, and you are a part of the evil.”
Huckabee added, “When we hear libelous statements about the Jewish people or about Israel, we have a responsibility to say something.”
Praising NGO Monitor for its “valuable” work, the American ambassador credited the Jerusalem-based research institute with uncovering some $200 million in problematic NGO funding.
“They provide an incredibly valuable service in exposing some of the abuses of people’s money,” he said. “People are fleeced into believing that they’re helping a humanitarian organization … and in many cases, it’s nothing more than a scam in order to get people to let go of hard-earned money so that organizations can use it for the most nefarious of purposes.”
He added, “If it were not for the work of NGO Monitor, these scams would continue unchallenged.”
Steinberg, a former political science professor who is now professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University, founded NGO Monitor in the aftermath of the U.N.’s 2001 Durban Conference, where dozens of NGOs led an anti-Israel campaign that gave rise to the BDS movement. He established the organization to systematically research, document and expose the activities, funding and political agendas of NGOs operating under the banner of human rights and humanitarian aid.
Steinberg noted that the Dec. 10 event coincided with the 77th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, which he recalled had been drafted “in the shadow of the Shoah” but are now being repeatedly abused.
“It should be a day of honoring the principles of human rights,” he said. “But instead it has become a day of mourning, and is exploited in the most blatant ways.”
The conversation centered on NGO Monitor’s recent report, “Puppet Regime: Hamas’s Coercive Grip on Aid and NGO Operations in Gaza,” which painted a sprawling picture, based on scores of internal Hamas documents, of Hamas’s infiltration and exploitation of international NGOs’ operations in Gaza.
“We make sure that the U.S. taxpayer does not put any of their money into NGOs that have been complicit with Hamas and counterproductive to bringing home the hostages and ending the war,” Huckabee stated.
Calling out U.N. and ICC ‘absurdities’
Asked by Steinberg about the policy of the current U.S. administration, Huckabee said President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had shown unprecedented clarity in support of Israel and against international bodies that, in his words, “weaponize” human rights.
“This is an administration that has called out the United Nations for its abuses,” he said, explaining that Washington is still prepared to work with the U.N. when necessary, but “with eyes wide open to the abuses and to the extraordinary ways in which often that forum is used to circumvent human rights rather than present it.”
Huckabee reserved some of his strongest language for the International Criminal Court and its anti-Israel actions. “The ICC is an organization that is well beyond its bounds. It thinks it has jurisdiction over people that don’t even participate in it,” he said. “We’re not even playing their silly little game, so why do you think you can throw the flag on us?”
He likened it to “a baseball umpire miles away trying to call a penalty in a soccer game,” stressing that the U.S. had “sanctioned its leaders” and urged other countries not to join or to withdraw their membership.
‘Ignorance can be fixed’
Deutsch pressed Huckabee on whether European governments understood that many self-styled human-rights and humanitarian NGOs—funded through official aid budgets—had abused their mandates and partnered with Hamas in Gaza.
“I think some of them are unaware,” he replied, describing meetings with diplomats who uncritically repeated casualty figures and narratives originating from the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry,” then laundered through U.N. agencies and international media.
“Your source was Hamas, not a very credible source,” Huckabee said. “There’s an important difference between being dumb and being ignorant. Dumb can’t be fixed. Ignorance can.”
“A lot of what we’re seeing is ignorance,” he continued. “I’m convinced that there are some countries that don’t know any better. People make the assumption that if an organization calls itself a humanitarian NGO, then they must be doing God’s work. People who would never give money to a terror organization can’t imagine that there would be any group founded for the sole purpose of funneling money to bad people.”
He added, “One of the reasons why what you do at NGO Monitor becomes so important is: ignorance you can fix.”
Both Steinberg and Deutsch highlighted NGO Monitor’s newest report, based on original Hamas documents captured in Gaza and declassified by Israel. The material, displayed on large banners in the lobby, detailed how dozens of NGOs operating in the Strip under a humanitarian framework coordinated closely with the terrorist organization.
“It’s harder now for government officials to say there’s no evidence,” Steinberg told JNS. “We translated the documents from Arabic into English, analyzed and published them. The response we’ve received is perhaps the beginning of a change from ignorance to paying attention to the details.”
Fighting Jew-hatred
Turning to the surge in antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Steinberg said that leading international NGOs “have human rights for everybody—but not for Jews,” and that antisemitism is “not on their agenda.”
Huckabee responded with examples of what he called “action, not talk.” He cited Trump’s appointment of Leo Terrell to head a dedicated antisemitism task force in the Department of Justice and the creation of two ambassador-level posts at the State Department focused on combating antisemitism, filled by Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun and former congressman Mark Walker.
“These are full-time people whose sole job… is to combat this worldwide,” Huckabee said. “Other people talk about it. You’ve done something, and you’ve put people in these offices not as honorary jobs, but people who are passionate about doing that job.”
He also defended the administration’s hard line on UNRWA and other agencies implicated in Hamas cooperation, describing a joint U.S.-Israel effort to ensure that no American taxpayer funds go to NGOs “found to be complicit with the activities of Hamas” or “counterproductive to getting the hostages out and ending the war.”
“There’s a list of what I would call the ‘no-go NGOs,’” Huckabee said. “Some of them have said, ‘But wait, we’re wonderful organizations.’ Well, we have the receipts to show they’re not so wonderful.”
Aid to Gaza, he argued, was more generous from Israel’s side than acknowledged. “Israel let more food, more humanitarian aid go in than any time in all of human history during a time of war,” Huckabee said. “Did Israel get credit for that? No. They got condemned, as if they were starving the people of Gaza.”
He contrasted that with the plight of the Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas. “There were people starving in Gaza,” he said. “You know who never talked about being starved in Gaza? The hostages.”
Expanding the Abraham Accords
Steinberg asked Huckabee whether the Abraham Accords could still serve as a long-term antidote to incitement and rejectionism in the region after the trauma of Oct. 7 and the ongoing multi-front war against Iran and its proxies.
Huckabee responded that he believes the accords can be “dramatically expanded” and argued that more countries in the region, including Syria, will eventually recognize that Israel “has no desire whatsoever” to conquer its neighbors.
“Israel simply wants this tiny little sliver of real estate that they were given by God 3,800 years ago,” he said, giving a characteristically faith-infused description of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel and pointing to archaeological discoveries in the City of David as “validating” the biblical narrative.
The ambassador urged Israel’s supporters to respond with facts whenever the Jewish state is falsely labeled with terms such as genocidal, colonial or apartheid. “We should do so with a winsome spirit,” he counseled, paraphrasing Proverbs 15:1. “A soft answer turns away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger. It’s not only important what we say, but how we say it.”
“We may not change the provocateur,” he suggested, “but we’re speaking for the people around them—students on a campus who haven’t lost their minds, people who aren’t getting paid to pour out venom. That’s part of the why, the what and the how of what we must do.”
‘Don’t be afraid to expose the truth’
In an exclusive interview with JNS after the panel discussion, Huckabee lauded U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, whom he accompanied on his first official visit to Israel this week.
“Michael Waltz is a very, very experienced person, having been in the military as a Ranger for 27 years,” Huckabee said. “He fought radical and dangerous Islamists in person. He was literally shot at repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He understands the Middle East because he’s lived in it, and he is a strong supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance.”
Huckabee said that after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Waltz traveled from the IDF Northern Command down to the Gaza envelope to gain a firsthand view of the operational picture. “It’s one thing to read about it or see it,” Huckabee said. “It’s quite something else to be there in person and understand the topography.”
Huckabee also had words of praise for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and congressional leaders in Washington this week, noting that it was Sa’ar who had facilitated the recent visit of more than 1,000 American evangelical pastors—the largest delegation to come to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks.
“These are people who influence millions every week,” Huckabee said. “They came, they saw Israel and they go home and tell millions. If this had failed, everyone would have blamed him, but it was an extraordinary success.”
Asked about the Hind Rajab Foundation, which NGO Monitor identified in its recent report as being tied to Hezbollah and passing personal information on more than 1,000 IDF soldiers to the ICC, Huckabee declined to address the specific case but emphasized the Trump administration’s willingness to take action when necessary.
“We’ve already demonstrated that we’re willing to sanction individuals and organizations that use the ICC as an illegitimate front to terrorize and intimidate people,” he said.
Asked about Israel’s recent steps to confront hostile international bodies, such as the raid by Israel Police and municipal officials on the shuttered Jerusalem offices of UNRWA, which it banned in January, Huckabee said he supported uncovering corruption in both U.N. bodies and NGOs.
“Don’t be afraid to expose the truth,” he said, comparing elements of the NGO sector to what he termed the “industry of poverty” in the United States. Many organizations, he argued, had shifted from helping the vulnerable to preserving their own structures.
“It wasn’t about the people in poverty,” Huckabee said. “It was about the people running the programs. If you took all the money they had and just gave it away to the people in poverty, they wouldn’t be in poverty anymore.”
Huckabee concluded by telling JNS how impressed he was by NGO Monitor’s rigor. “Get a copy of NGO Monitor’s latest report,” he urged. “A lot of the research is valid, scholarly and verifiable. That’s what makes it powerful.”
“They don’t make wild statements,” Huckabee added. “They say, ‘Here are 17 pages of examples.’ That gives it real teeth.”
