Eric Zuesse
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
8 November 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
World Food Program of the U.N., 26 October 2026
Before joining WFP, Lindberg served as Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs at the United States Department of Agriculture.
He previously founded South Dakota Trade, a public-private partnership dedicated to expanding international markets for the state’s exporters and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer. He also served as Chief of Staff and Chief Strategy Officer at the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
The New Humanitarian, by Irwin Loy, 5 November 2026
Luke Lindberg started his first official day as head of the World Food Programme on 26 October, swapping a lightly worn cowboy hat and an Israel-bound sniper rifle for a wardrobe of navy suits and multi-pocket gilets.
Lindberg’s first few days offered an early immersion into the reality of international humanitarianism: meetings. This included a roundtable of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) – the closed-door sit-downs for dominant aid agencies, where public agendas and transparency are optional but group photos are not.
The new WFP chief also made the rounds among the nosey UN press in New York, and on Fox News, the right-wing US TV network. His initial batch of talking points shows his team (including a new chief of staff) has identified a handy narrative for his job (ending famine), and developed a conspicuous fixation on dropping food from planes (generally not considered humanitarian “best practice”). A couple of terms seemingly missing from his vocabulary: “climate change” and “UNRWA”.
Part of his team’s task is to iron out the incoherence behind his appointment: an America First Trump pick now trumpeting humanitarian neutrality; a promoter of weapons exports to Israel now calling for world peace.
He might unlock more funding, and tap into a side of the US public still foreign to many aid leaders – who else at the IASC is getting sympathetic interviews on Fox News? But he might also twist the perception of the international humanitarian system, and the World Food Programme in particular, at a precarious time.
Here are a few notes on what we’ve seen so far:
- The message: Lindberg is trying out some new messaging, skipping baseball and gym analogies and swapping out an earlier tagline (“Let’s get folks fed”) for a less twangy one: No more famines. “For me, there’s a baseline that we all can agree on, which is, we should have no more famines in the world,” Lindberg said on an appearance on Fox News. “Famines are the most severe situations imaginable, where people really can’t get access to basic nutrition whatsoever. So making sure we don’t have any more famines is, for me, a critical, important goal that I’m starting off this job focused on.”
- On politics: It’s a handy narrative: talk about hunger; spend less time on what causes it. “The World Food Programme’s job is to show up no matter what, to safely and effectively deliver food, and to really stay out of the politics of it,” Lindberg said later in the interview.
- Luke Lindberg, peace activist: So how do you end famine? Lindberg may be starting his Nobel campaign early: “If there’s one thing we could do to reduce the amount of hunger in the world, it is to have more peace in the world,” he said. “Two thirds of the 266 million people around the world that are facing acute food insecurity are directly resulting from the conflict that exists in the world. So if there’s one silver bullet, it’s end conflict.”
- Protecting aid workers: Part of Lindberg’s early talking points include defending aid workers under attack. During the Fox News interview, he pointed to stats showing that 700 humanitarians have “died in the line of duty” in the last couple of years, presumably referring to Aid Worker Security Databasetallies for 2024 and 2025. The three-year figure from 2023 tops 1,000 aid workers killed. Israeli forces killeda majority of them. In the edited interview, Lindberg appears to have been asked how many of these aid workers were Americans (he said he would check). The vast majority of all aid workers attacked and killed are from the countries in which they work. But there is at least one dual US-Canadian citizen among the 700: Jacob Flickinger, one of seven people Israel’s military killed in an April 2024 attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy. The organisation that employed him now believes Israel deliberately targeted the convoy. …
https://jehadmalaka.substack.com/p/guterress-fatal-oversight-why-an
It contradicts the UN’s stance on Gaza, threatening to turn a humanitarian mission into a partner in engineered starvation.
8 November 2026, DR. JEHAD MALAKA
In September 2026, UN Secretary-General António Guterres unexpectedly announced the appointment of American politician Luke Lindberg as the Chief Executive of the World Food Program (WFP), a vital agency operating alongside international humanitarian bodies in the Gaza Strip amid an ongoing war of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Lindberg was hardly an unknown figure, nor were his political alignments a mystery when he was handed the leadership of an organization tasked with saving the lives of Gaza’s population.
The newly appointed WFP head is a staunch American ally of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. He has previously publicly commended the genocidal campaign waged against Palestinians. Furthermore, he is the son-in-law of US Senator John Thune, one of the most prominent allies of the occupying state and a figure deeply embedded within the Israeli lobbying apparatus.
Lindberg’s record is neither obscure nor hidden; it is impossible that the Office of the Secretary-General was unaware of it. Even under the assumption that Guterres’s office was led down a deceptive path in coordination with the Trump administration, immediate intervention is required to rectify this decision. The post demands a figure who does not endorse genocide and war crimes, but rather remains committed to the Secretary-General’s explicit stance and UN resolutions regarding the Palestinian cause.
Luke Lindberg represents a textbook example of international officials deploying contradictory rhetoric. On the surface, he offers polished statements expressing sympathy for Gaza’s famine and claiming that peace is the ideal path forward. Behind the scenes, however, his record reveals deep alignment with the Zionist lobby, personal friendship with Netanyahu, and active participation in passing anti-Semitism legislation designed to criminalize criticism of Israel during his tenure as a US official. Guterres is fully aware of who Lindberg is, raising fundamental questions about whether he was chosen deliberately or coerced into the decision.
It remains incomprehensible how Lindberg’s appointment slipped past António Guterres, who has stood out as one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian rights among international leaders. Guterres broke with the slow, bureaucratic tradition of his predecessors when he traveled to the Egyptian city of Rafah on the Gaza border on March 23, 2024—becoming the first top UN official to reach the border after the launch of the genocidal war on October 7, 2023.
As recently as October 26, 2026, speaking from Cairo, Guterres reiterated the urgent need to lift Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid and remove obstacles halting the implementation of the UN Security Council’s comprehensive plan to end the conflict. Emphasizing the protection of civilians and adherence to international law, he also addressed the ongoing aggression in the West Bank, warning: “We are witnessing an environment of increasing coercion, where the specter of ethnic cleansing looms ever more clearly. This must stop.”
Throughout his tenure, Guterres’s principled positions in support of Palestinian rights and his firm rejection of genocide, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing have drawn severe backlash from Netanyahu’s government. In an unprecedented move, Israel declared Guterres persona non grata, barred him from entering Tel Aviv, and subsequently severed all official communication with him and his office.
Even if we assume that appointing an apologist for genocide to lead a critical humanitarian agency was an administrative blunder, it must be corrected immediately before it turns into an indelible political stain on Guterres’s legacy regarding Palestine.
Allowing Lindberg to remain in his UN post during a time of extreme siege, engineered food crisis, and crippling operational restrictions in Gaza makes the organization complicit in the war of starvation, an unforgivable humanitarian disgrace.
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MY COMMENT:
The U.N. needs to be replaced. It is not the organization that FDR so carefully planned during 9 August 1941 to 12 April 1945 so as to prevent a WW3, and which Truman (influenced by Churchill) ended up shaping in order for the U.S. Government (NOT the U.N.) ultimately to become the federal Government over the entire world, which latter (creation of a U.S. empire to rule over the entire world — Tuman’s plan) has been happening and expanding ever since 25 July 1945 but is ignored by all ‘historians’ so that the world doesn’t know what it’s coming from (imperialism) and what it’s heading toward (another World War — WW3). Truman — not FDR — made this U.N. which accommodates U.S. imperialism, and so it must be replaced (because FDR’s anti-imperialist plan for the future was right, and Truman’s U.S.-hegemoniacal plan — originated by Rhodes — is wrong). Only the SCO can do it (replace the U.N.), if it will. (Less likely but also possible, the BRICS could do it.) If it won’t, then the only alternatives are either WW3 or else the U.S. empire will ultimately succeed in taking control over the entire world. Either the SCO (or BRICS) will grow to replace the U.N., or else there will be WW3, or else the U.S. empire will succeed in its aim of achieving a global U.S. dictatorship. Those are the only options. The existing U.N. (designed to accommodate a U.S. global dictatorship) needs to be replaced (by a committedly anti-imperialist democratic federal Government over the entire world). Incidentally, Truman created Israel. FDR never would have.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
