BRIAN LAMB: Ami Horowitz, you made a documentary, and then you left your apartment one day up in New York City and somebody said something to you. What was the story?
AMI HOROWITZ, DIRECTOR: Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate it. We have something in common. You know, you've started the first, you know, nonprofit cable company, and I started this movie as a for-profit documentary, but it ended up being very much nonprofit.
LAMB: How do you like being nonprofit?
HOROWITZ: Not really. I don't like it at all, actually.(LAUGHTER)
LAMB: So what's the name of the documentary first?
HOROWITZ: It's called "U.N. Me." And we've actually banned the word "documentary" from my production office. We call it docutainment, TM.
LAMB: So who confronted you?
HOROWITZ: You know, so here's the story. So I walked out of my apartment, you know, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a very nice, comfortable place to live, nothing particularly exciting generally happens there. And I came out, and I was greeted by a man who was waiting, very nicely dressed, you know, nice, well-made suit, waiting for me outside my apartment, and he said, "Are you Ami Horowitz?"
And, you know, my spidey sense started tingling a little bit. And I said, you know, "Yes, I am." And he just simply said, "Is this movie more important than you family?" And I -- you know, looking back at it now, there's all these things you wanted to do, put him in a kung-fu grip, but you -- just you're stunned. And you said -- and you didn't know what to say. And I said, you know, "Who the hell are you?"
And, you know, with that, he kind of sputtered his heels in a waiting cab, with the door open, went inside, off he went, and before I was able to gather myself, you know, he was gone. So it was a pretty shocking wake-up into this web that I seem to have fallen into. To this day, no idea who he was, who he represented.
LAMB: Was he an American?
HOROWITZ: No, I don't think -- no, he wasn't an American. But I couldn't -- I couldn't really tell -- the accent seemed so generic to me.
LAMB: So why do you think he was doing this to do?
HOROWITZ: I can only surmise. You know, in the movie, we rattle a lot of cages, and I think that we obviously rattled a cage that he and his people felt a little bit offended by. So I can only imagine it was maybe a warning, this might not be a film you want to actually release, because it was probably four or five months before the release of the movie. It wasn't the first threat we got, but it was -- it was a very personal one.
LAMB: I go to a lot of documentaries. I found this at one theater here in Washington that doesn't normally run documentaries.
HOROWITZ: Yeah, you know, we -- we -- almost all of the screenings we had across the country when it was in theaters were AMCs, they were Cinemarks, they were the major theater chains. Like I said, you know, this movie -- I was never a huge documentary fan, you know? I'm a movie fan. And I wanted to make something that I wanted to see, something that was funny and engaging and dark at times.
And so I didn't really make this for necessarily a, quote, unquote, "documentary audience," but more for a mainstream audience. So, you know, by design, we tried to have it, and the mainstream theaters wanted to have it, so it was great.
LAMB: But it came out -- as I read -- at a serious moment in your life.
HOROWITZ: In a serious moment in my life?
LAMB: Yeah, in other words, why you decided to do a documentary, even though you say it's entertainment. But, I mean, I read that you were sitting around one night thinking about Rwanda, which isn't exactly a light subject.
HOROWITZ: Yeah. Don't we all think about that as we're sitting around our couch watching TV? You know, it was funny. Yeah, it was -- it was definitely an event I could put my finger on exactly the moment that this kind of thing triggered in my mind. And it was -- and it was Saturday night. I've got kids, so on Saturday nights, you sit home and you watch movies. And I was watching the Michael Moore movie "Bowling for Columbine."
And while Michael and I have very different political views, I've always looked at him as a really significant figure in documentary film, because he makes films I want to see. They're funny. They're engaging. They're entertaining. That's the kind of, you know, documentaries I wanted to see.
So I was watching "Bowling for Columbine," which I had seen before, so I was kind of drifting off. And, you know, for some reason or another, I was thinking about -- and I can't tell you why -- I was thinking about Rwanda, and I was thinking, here is a genocide that happened like not in the olden days that we read about in the history books. It happened while I was sentient, while I was working. And I said, Rwanda, forget that. There's one going on right now, as I sit here, you know, in my comfortable, you know -- you know, apartment in Manhattan. There are people who are running for their lives in terror.
And I said, how could this be in our day and age? And I thought to myself, you know, as a society, we're so much better off at almost every way you can imagine, whether you look at, you know, availability of food, medicine, in almost every way, we're better off as humans. Yet the one way we're not is security. We're probably maybe even more secure -- insecure than we were before.
And I thought, whose role is this? Right, whose job is it to stop these things? And it became very obvious, it was the job of the U.N., and they were failing miserably, and that's kind of when the whole thing kind of clicked together.
LAMB: How would you describe your political views?
HOROWITZ: I would call it right-of-center. You know, I mean, not reflexively. There are things I probably go a little bit left to and things I go a little bit more right to, but I would say right-of-center would accurately describe me.
LAMB: So how much did this documentary cost you?
HOROWITZ: Oof. I don't even want to say the cost. It's embarrassing. So -- it cost us about $2 million to make and another couple million dollars to release.
LAMB: Are you going to get the money back?
HOROWITZ: No. We'll get -- I mean, it was very, very successful, one of the more successful documentaries in the past couple of years, but the economics in the film business, particularly the documentary business, are such where it's very hard to recover your costs.
LAMB: When did you start the documentary process?
HOROWITZ: You know, with -- I was an investment banker when this idea hit me. And within two weeks, I had quit my job and started raising money to make the money, so that was going back to 2006.
LAMB: And you were at Lehman Brothers?
HOROWITZ: I was at Lehman Brothers, yeah.
LAMB: How many years?
HOROWITZ: I was there for four or five years.
LAMB: Let's show a clip. We're not going to show the whole thing, obviously. People can get the whole documentary?
HOROWITZ: They can, if they go to our website, theunmovie.com. They can pick up a copy.
LAMB: Let's -- here's an excerpt, and we'll get you to comment on it.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HOROWITZ: It was April 20, 2009, and the United Nations was opening its anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland. It was designed as a forum to use the global reach of the U.N.'s moral authority to end racism and discrimination, strengthening human rights everywhere.
BAN KI-MOON, UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL: Racism is a denial of human rights, pure and simple. There comes a time in the affairs of humankind when we must stand firm on the fundamental principles that binds us. There comes a time to reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights and dignity and worth of us all.
HOROWITZ: It was only the second conference of its kind in the U.N.'s 60-year history. And as the secretary general concluded his opening remarks, the man that the United Nations had tapped to deliver the keynote address waited in the wings.
BAN: The time is now, ladies and gentlemen...
HOROWITZ: Who would it be?
BAN: The time is now.
HOROWITZ: Who would be the guiding light who could lead the conference toward achieving its vital goals? Who better than this guy?
(UNKNOWN): I will now kindly ask the secretariat to escort his excellency, the president, to the podium.(APPLAUSE)
This is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, and something tells me he wasn't the ideal speaker to kick off this conference.(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Were you there?
HOROWITZ: Yeah. Yeah.
LAMB: Were your cameras in the room?
HOROWITZ: No. Actually, I'll tell you a funny story about that. So we went to the conference, because he was the keynote address, and so we -- you know, we like to do -- you know, if you saw the movie, we like to do a lot of -- kind of some gags and, you know -- so the gag we were going to do was, we -- right after that, he was going to give a press conference. So we were going to go to the press conference, and then I was going to try to put him under citizen's arrest, you know, get Tased on camera. For the audience, it would be fun.
Now luckily for me, my crew missed the flight, so they missed the press conference totally. So I was there by myself with nobody to film me, so we had to come up with another gag. And as you know, at the end of the movie, you know, when I do something that gets me arrested, so that was the -- what we ended up doing for that -- for that trip.
But what's really funny about that is it really kind of sets out really what the U.N. is totally about. Their ideas are phenomenal, right? Nobody can argue with the ideals, the idea, the words they say, but what they want to accomplish. You know, and Ban Ki-moon said it perfectly. Nothing he said we could disagree with. It's a wonderful thing, the way he opened up that conference.
And what do they do? They screw it all up by giving a guy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the snakes living on our planet, the keynote address to open the conference. It's unbelievable.
LAMB: You know, at this point, somebody is sitting there saying, I guess that Ami Horowitz is Jewish, and this...
HOROWITZ: No way. Is it the nose or is it the name?
LAMB: No, it's the name. But, I mean -- I mean, I know because I've read the -- some of the back stories on it -- but immediately say this is clearly an Israeli thing for him.
HOROWITZ: Yeah, I never get the connection between you're Jewish, so you're like a -- no, listen, I'm pro-Israel, you know, obviously.
LAMB: Mom's from Israel.
HOROWITZ: My mom is from Israel. Now, Israel -- it's funny. Israel was not mentioned in the movie at all. Like, we didn't talk about. We could have. We could have, because there's a tremendous amount of bias against Israel. The U.N. doesn't take any kind of moral stands, you know, unless it's Israel.
But I deliberately chose not to put Israel in the movie for that particular reason. I didn't want -- you know, first of all, I didn't want the debate to be about Israel. I want it to be about the United States. And Israel could be such a hot-button topic that oftentimes you're going to end up debating whether Israel's policies are good or bad. I don't want to get in that debate.
LAMB: How is it that somebody that a lot of Americans think is not just a tremendous friend of this country's, Mr. Ahmadinejad, how does he get to lead off a human rights conference?
HOROWITZ: You know, if you ask them, they're going to say, well, it's all process, right? We have a process involved. He submitted his name, so, you know, we put him -- since he was the -- he was one of the only world leaders to come to the conference, that we give him that spot. So that's what they'll tell you, which, you know, may or may not be true, but that's not really the point. Right?
The point is, if you, in fact, stand for the ideals you claim to, how could you have that man do this? And if -- even if it's true that the machinations of the U.N. require you to have him there, but what I expect you to do, as Ban Ki-moon, is to speak out against the man before he comes up there and say, you know what, everything I said here is being countermanded by this guy, but my hands are tied. But they don't do that. They accept him as a legitimate leader of Iran.
LAMB: Ban Ki-moon, in his second term, will be there until 2016, a South Korean. Who, when you went to the U.N., did you work with? And what were the rules?
HOROWITZ: You mean in terms of access and such?
LAMB: Yeah. I mean, because I saw part of this where you're walking around the U.N. at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and going down the hallways, and there's nobody in the offices.
HOROWITZ: We got unprecedented access to the U.N., I think now much to their chagrin. And so how we got access is actually kind of a funny story. So I called up Ted Turner. Now, Ted Turner, for people who don't know, is one of -- probably the most powerful layperson at the U.N. He gave them $1 billion a few years ago, and that -- in all places, you know, money talks, and $1 billion gives you a lot of power.
So I -- knowing that he had access, I called him and spoke with his office, said I'd like to meet, I'd like to pitch an idea about -- a movie about the U.N. So we had a meeting, talked about the idea behind the movie. Now, I don't know how they came away with this idea -- I don't know -- but they thought it was a pro-U.N. movie.
So a couple phone calls to the foundation, and they were -- the U.N. opened up the red carpet for me for full access. I think they may have regretted that decision, but that's how we got it.
LAMB: Was former Senator Tim Wirth, who runs the foundation, involved in all this?
HOROWITZ: He was involved, yes, yes.
LAMB: Have they gotten back to you now that the documentary is finished?
HOROWITZ: Radio silence from the foundation. The U.N. itself has spoken out about the movie a number of times, but the U.N. Foundation has -- no, I take it back. They did make a statement. They did make a statement. They didn't call me personally, but they made a public statement.
LAMB: And how much access did you really have?
HOROWITZ: You know, from what they say, unprecedented. I mean, we were able to shoot anywhere we wanted. Like you see in the movie, you know, I'm running around the place, you know, picking up phone calls and there late at night, which is a real embarrassment, because, you know, the last place in the world you want to be is at 5 o'clock standing outside the building. You'll get stampeded by the people running out, I mean, because as you know, all genocide happens between 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern Standard Time. So, you know, it works out OK.
LAMB: Let's go back to another excerpt. By the way, how long is your documentary?
HOROWITZ: Ninety-three minutes, to be exact.
LAMB: This is one about the sexual abuse by U.N. personnel.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(UNKNOWN): This is a story of betrayal and abuse of men working for the United Nations as so-called peacekeepers preying on the very people they're supposed to be helping.
HOROWITZ: Sexual abuse is a continuing problem within the U.N. peacekeeping legs. Of the missions launched since 1999, the vast majority, including Cote D'Ivoire, have been implicated in sexual abuse and exploitation. In the Congo alone, there have been hundreds of reported rapes and the creation of a United Nations peacekeeper pedophilia ring.
The ring was headed by this man, a U.N. official, Didier Bourguet.
(UNKNOWN): The abuse by peacekeepers is not the special purview of some countries or a few units. Over the course of our history, every contributor to peacekeeping has had an example of this behavior.
(UNKNOWN): We take now very forceful measures, so that any individual who is convinced of sexual abuse will be prosecuted.
(UNKNOWN): You will not get away with it.
(UNKNOWN): There is almost no peacekeeper who has been held accountable and who's had to face the courts because of what they have done.
(UNKNOWN): Now, you may not end up with the kind of justice that everyone in this room could agree on would be appropriate in the circumstances.
(UNKNOWN): My understanding is that they've got a new zero-tolerance policy. Somewhere written down in the U.N. books, it says that U.N. peacekeepers should not diddle minor children, as if this is something that had to have been written.(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Go back to the one fellow that you pointed a finger at with a picture of him. I think he -- I don't think he had even a shirt on.
HOROWITZ: Didier Bourguet.
LAMB: Yeah, has he been convicted of...
HOROWITZ: He has, in France. He was one of the very, very few -- here's the problem, is that the U.N., A, doesn't have any prosecutorial powers, right? So what they do is, they just send the person -- at worst, they send the person back to their home country. Now, most of the countries simply refuse to prosecute these people.
Now, what really often happens in most cases, that nothing even -- with all the charges -- and these -- remember, you're in Africa. You're raping a child. This isn't going to a court of law. There's nobody who's going to hold this person accountable. So the charges are made, if they're brave enough to make the charges, and generally the U.N. just fluffs it off or just keeps the person working there. Very rarely are they ever sent away, and even rarer than that, Didier Bourguet might be one of the only -- I think there were only -- that I can think of -- two examples in the thousands of rape cases, anybody's ever been prosecuted.
LAMB: Why then were the folks at the U.N. and the woman standing at the podium saying that they were tough on this stuff?
HOROWITZ: Because they -- you know what? Whenever you do an interview or you speak to a person at the U.N., you walk away thinking, they get it. These guys get the problem, they know how to handle it, and you think, all right, they're on top of it. But at the end of the day, nothing ever happens, right?
In the movie, you hear them say zero-tolerance, zero-tolerance, you know, probably 15 times in the course of the movie, yet the rapes continue unabated. So the rhetoric in no way matches what the action really is on the ground.
LAMB: Do you know -- can you get through all the different stories and figure out what their -- the U.N. budget is a year?
HOROWITZ: Yeah. You know, the other thing about the U.N., which is unbelievable, you know, it's meant to be -- to represent all nations on the Earth. It should be, you know, one of the most transparent organizations on the planet. And the reality is, oddly, it's one of the most opaque. So it's very difficult to get any real hard information about budget issues, but they -- if you -- piecing things together, their budget is roughly, I think, in 2008, 2009, which is the last number we have -- I'm sorry, 2010, sorry, last number we had it was, I believe, $24 billion.
LAMB: Does that include -- I mean, I've got a list here of all the different organizations, everything from the Food and Agricultural Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Monetary Fund?
HOROWITZ: No, it includes only what they call the core mission of the U.N., so...
LAMB: Is that $24 billion for one year?
HOROWITZ: Yeah. Now, that number is much higher in 2012. You know...
LAMB: Does that include peacekeeping?
HOROWITZ: That includes peacekeeping.
LAMB: And I saw a figure that said that the United States pays 22 percent.
HOROWITZ: Yeah, I think somewhere between 22 percent and 24 percent...
LAMB: But they only pay about $1 billion.
HOROWITZ: No, no, no. See, that's the -- that's a lie they like to tell. It's $1 billion just for the secretariat, but does not include the -- so it doesn't include the Human Rights Council, peacekeeping, all that is outside the $1 billion. So we gave in 2010 $8 billion. They expect 2012 to be over $10 billion.
LAMB: Why is it that the United States pays 22 percent of the bill and Japan, which is the second payer in the list, pays only 12 percent?
HOROWITZ: Even worse than that, I mean, China, the second-largest economy in the world, they pay -- I think their number is...
LAMB: 3.1. I've got a list here.
HOROWITZ: ... 3.1.
LAMB: Percent.
HOROWITZ: Percent, right, yeah. I mean, that's what's insane. In fact, when you -- if you add in a lot of the money they get from the U.N., it actually ends up being much lower than that.
LAMB: And then Germany, which is -- only has 80 million people, they pay 8 percent.
HOROWITZ: Because we're suckers. We're suckers. You know what? They know, come -- good, old U.S. and our checkbooks are open. And the reality is, listen, the truth is, I have no problem giving $8 billion or $10 billion or $15 billion to the U.N. if I knew it was working. Right? If I knew these people were solving the problems of the world, I'd have no problem giving them that money. It'd be an honor to do it. But the reality is, we're throwing the money away. And, in fact, we are acting as classic enablers, no different than somebody who's enabling a drug addict or enabling, you know, a gambler. If you continue to give these people what they want without forcing the change in behavior, what's going to force them to change their behavior? Nothing.
LAMB: Here's another excerpt -- and this has to do with your trip to Cote D'Ivoire.
HOROWITZ: Cote D'Ivoire.
LAMB: Explain that before we get into it.
HOROWITZ: So the Ivory Coast, also known as Cote D'Ivoire -- my French is not great, so it's embarrassing when I say it -- it was a former French colony. They had independence, and they've had a number of major problems. They've had civil war raging on for years. The U.N. came in to help try to fix the problem and some would argue made it far worse.
LAMB: But you're trying to interview somebody?
HOROWITZ: Trying to.
LAMB: Who is it?
HOROWITZ: I think the person you're referring to is the head of U.N. peacekeeping in Cote D'Ivoire.
LAMB: Abou Moussa?
HOROWITZ: Abou Moussa.
LAMB: Explain all that. Who was the man?
HOROWITZ: So -- I'll give you some background. OK, so he was the head of U.N. peacekeeping in Cote D'Ivoire. I believe he was from Chad. A very interesting story about him and Chad and who is populating, you know, these very important offices in the U.N. The head of human rights that he brought one of his buddies from Chad, the head of human rights for Cote D'Ivoire for the United Nations, he was known in Chad as the butcher. He was known as the main guy for the intelligence agencies who would torture people to get answers. So it gives you a sense of who's populating these offices.
And we were confronting him -- the reason why we went there to begin with was because there was a slaughter of unarmed Ivorians who were protesting the French peacekeepers. The peacekeepers who were sent in by the U.N. were French, the former colonial masters of Cote D'Ivoire, and they did it for the sole reason to put their foot back on the neck of their former colony.
And when the people were upset, because they were robbing banks, they were shooting people, they protested in front of...
LAMB: Well, the guy sitting next to you that you ask, are you Security Council, did he know that you were taping at the time?
HOROWITZ: He knew -- I mean, the camera was there. It wasn't a hidden camera. Yeah, they knew we were filming.
LAMB: He seemed to hesitate, to...
HOROWITZ: I don't think there -- they thought it was a very odd situation on their private bus to have a guy with a camera asking questions.
LAMB: How did they go along with the 99 bottles of beer on the wall? HOROWITZ: They seemed not to know that one. I don't understand why. They were a little bit -- they're bit of stuffed shirts on that bus for some reason. And, again, I wasn't on the cool bus, obviously.
If it cost you $4 million before it was over to do this documentary, who paid for it?
HOROWITZ: Investors. I put some money in myself. As an investment banker, I had access to people who had some funds, and I found people who were like-minded, individuals, you know, $50,000 here, $100,000 here, who, you know, believed in what we were doing and thought this was a really important issue to get out there.
LAMB: Did they expect to get their money back?
HOROWITZ: See, when I started this movie, I didn't have any gray hairs at all. I've got about 40 or 50 now; each one represents an investor. You know, they had -- they're the greatest investors in the world. They didn't pressure me. They understood that this was not something which is generally known as a money-making venture, so they didn't put a lot of pressure for me to -- you know, to return their money. And they're probably going to take a loss, but they were -- they've been very good to me. I appreciate that.
LAMB: The next clip is the U.N. cannot agree on the definition of terrorism. And we see two people. We see Congressman Rob Simmons, I believe, a Republican, and Danielle Pletka, who is at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of what you see, other than Jody Williams, who would not be categorized as a conservative, are conservatives. Is there any doubt -- should there be any doubt in people's minds that this is from the conservative point of view, this documentary?
HOROWITZ: Yeah, not at all. Now, as it happened -- I mean, the only elected officials we had were Republicans. And we reached out to a lot of Democrats. They just -- I don't know, they didn't want to come on camera. We had more access to Republicans.
The truth is, I'm a -- like I said, I'm more conservative. Everybody who worked on the film, other than me, my co-director, the editors, the writers, were all liberals. We had writers from "The Daily Show." We had writers from The Onion. Michael Moore's writers and editors worked for us. I was the only conservative.
And while it's obviously, you know, being -- taking the U.N. to task has been a conservative issue, I think it's become more bipartisan of late. I think the movie, I think, has helped in some ways. But, no, you know, Jody Williams is really the hero of the movie, and she's -- she's as left-wing as you can get.
LAMB: We'll show her eventually. I don't know if she's in this clip or not, but we'll run this clip and continue.
HOROWITZ: Good.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Less than one month after September 11th and 11 days after enacting Resolution 1373, Syria was elected to sit on the Security Council.
(UNKNOWN): Syria provides safe haven to terrorist organizations, headquarters, training facilities, infrastructure, intelligence.
(UNKNOWN): Syria is arming Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria has -- and Iran have been responsible for bringing tens of thousands of rockets into that area. Those rockets aren't for self-defense.
(UNKNOWN): Sponsors, pays for, and arms Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and other terrorist organizations.
Despite its deep connections with terrorism, Syria was elevated to the presidency of the Security Council.
(UNKNOWN): So there are a number of countries which certainly could improve the performance as far as terrorism is concerned.
Maybe the problem is more fundamental than I thought.
How does the U.N. define terrorism?
(UNKNOWN): Well, technically, the United Nations so far has not been able to define terrorism.
(UNKNOWN): The U.N. member states have not been able to agree upon a definition of terrorism.
(UNKNOWN): Definition of terrorism is a very difficult thing.
(UNKNOWN): You know, this is one of the pending matters in the United Nations.
(UNKNOWN): My own view, quite frankly, is that terrorism is rather like pornography. You might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Why -- why were they having trouble defining terrorism?
HOROWITZ: Because they don't want to define it. I mean, these aren't stupid men. These are people who obviously understand what terrorism is. But they have no intention of defining it. And the reason why they don't want to is very simple, because otherwise they're going to be calling a good third of their membership terrorist nations. And they can't stand that.
LAMB: How much do these folks that work at the U.N. make?
HOROWITZ: Make quite a bit. You can make, when you first start off, you're in the six figures, and you can make quite a bit higher than that, well into the six figures, and a lot of it is tax-free.
LAMB: How much...
HOROWITZ: I only wish I worked there, but when in graduated from college, if I had known what kind of gravy train it was, I wouldn't have work hard to become a banker. I would have been a U.N. diplomat.
LAMB: If an American works there, do they have to pay income tax?
HOROWITZ: If you're an American, it's -- it gets complicated. I don't think -- I'm not sure how it works if you're an American. Mostly, the foreign diplomats don't have to pay taxes.
LAMB: So in order for you to get yourself up to speed on the U.N., how much studying did you have to do?
HOROWITZ: I probably read 20 or 30 books, you know, dozens of dozens of white papers, and thousands and thousands -- a countless amount of articles. Quite a bit. I mean, I was pretty -- I was pretty fluent on the U.N. and the issues before I started it. I mean, obviously, this is a polemic. This was not, you know, an unblinking eye, but I came in with a point of view. But I wanted -- I wanted to understand all -- you know, every side of the U.N., so I would say the majority of the books I read were pro-U.N. books, gave me a sense of what they're trying to do.
You know, historically, a lot of it was, you know, the founding, why it was being created, you know, the thought process there was in terms of the framers and what they thought the U.N. should be, a lot of very interesting stuff about what the ideals were behind the United Nations.
LAMB: The last figure I saw was there are 193 countries that are a member of the U.N., members, and there are only 196 countries in the world, something like that. The Vatican's not a member, and I think Taiwan's not a member, and maybe a couple other places. But...
HOROWITZ: The Taiwan thing is, to me, as insulting you can get. I mean, the Vatican is a -- they're not a member, but they have -- they have observer status. Taiwan -- a Taiwanese diplomat can't walk into the building. It really is one of the most -- more offensive issues.
LAMB: And they used to be a member.
HOROWITZ: They used to be a member, yeah, until we switched and Red China became...
LAMB: Did you ask anybody about that?
HOROWITZ: I did. I did. And they give you the same, you know, BS. Listen, there's one China, and that's -- that's the People's Republic of China, so therefore Taiwan is not a country.
LAMB: Here's some more from your documentary, "U.N. Me." By the way, who named that?
HOROWITZ: My wife. My wife came up with the name. And if I wanted to stay married, that was the name we were sticking with.
LAMB: This is more on terrorism.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HOROWITZ: Sometimes the U.N. does more than just have a dialogue. For example, the U.N.'s Palestinian refugee program, UNRWA, provides services for kids, the elderly, this goat -- and terrorists?
(UNKNOWN): UNRWA was peopled by officials who were terribly, terribly sympathetic to Hamas and other extremist Palestinian organizations.
(UNKNOWN): Oh, I'm sure that there are Hamas members on the payroll. And I don't see that's a crime.
It may not be a crime, but wouldn't the taxpayers of the world be disturbed by the office of this U.N. staffer, who hung suicide bomber tributes on his wall? Personally, I prefer pictures of my kids. Or the U.N. allowing the use of its vehicles for terrorist getaways?
(UNKNOWN): UNRWA has a very poor idea of where its resources are used or -- for example, whether its vehicles are used in terrorist attacks. We have seen tapes of vehicles clearly marked on their roof as UNRWA vehicles with RPG weapons being loaded to carry out attacks.
So the U.N. is directing our tax dollars to decorate offices and fund ambulance ridealongs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Mark Kirk, a senator now from Illinois, was a congressman then. When did you interview him? Do you remember how many years ago?
HOROWITZ: God, no.
LAMB: I mean, if you started in 2006 with all this, you were done with it when?
HOROWITZ: We were done with it in 2010. I think that's right.
LAMB: And how long has it been out and available for people to see?
HOROWITZ: It came out June 1st in theaters, and then it came out on video-on-demand and DVD like a month ago.
LAMB: Did you give the Tim Turner, Tim Wirth group at the U.N. Foundation a chance to talk during this documentary?
HOROWITZ: I had somebody reach out to them to do a screening. And I have not heard back.
LAMB: But did you offer them a chance to have a rebuttal in the movie itself?
HOROWITZ: Inside the movie?
LAMB: Yeah. (LAUGHTER)
HOROWITZ: No. No.
LAMB: Why not?
HOROWITZ: It's my movie. Listen, we -- the entire movie, I mean, we -- there's a tremendous amount of -- listen, I think half the interviews are probably U.N. people kind of, you know, giving their say. But like I said, this was not meant to be sort of an evenhanded, here's my point of view, here's your point of view. Like I said, it's a polemic. And I came in saying this -- you know, this is my thesis, and here's how I'm going about proving it.
LAMB: Did you ever talk to...
HOROWITZ: I'd be happy to debate them, you know, on a show such as this, but never had them just kind of part of the movie itself.
LAMB: Did you ever talk to Michael Moore about documentaries? And what was his reaction if you did?
HOROWITZ: I did. Michael actually and I had become very friendly, oddly enough, through this process. And he was very honored that I -- he was an inspiration to make the movie. Michael -- yeah, we've spoken extensively about it. He disagrees vehemently with the premise, in the sense that he -- you know, in his words, we can't give the U.N. enough money. He thinks they're doing a great job with it.
He was very excited that -- first of all, he's always believed that it's really important for conservatives to make movies. I think he's thought -- and he's right -- that the documentary format has really been owned by the left. And I think the right's making a huge mistake not creating, you know, compelling documentaries, because I think the left made the same exact mistake with talk radio. When talk radio first came out, they didn't get involved. They ceded it to the right, and now it's a really dominant form of the political conversation, and they can't get a foothold back into it. They've tried, and now they've failed. It's too late.
And I think that -- I think the right is making the same mistake with documentary and the film art form. And if they don't kind of wake up and say, we got to make high-quality, engaging, entertaining movies, then we're going to cede that to the left and in this -- you know, the way our politics are set up, that's a big part of the political dialogue, and it's a huge mistake.
LAMB: Where did you get your conservative views?
HOROWITZ: Oof. You know, I guess it was informed a lot by the way I was raised. My parents were both -- I would call them -- they were Reagan supporters. They were very much centrist, very pro-Israel, you know, very much -- I would say they were very socially moderate, but I think they were very hawkish when it came to foreign policy. I think they were very concerned about the way the U.S. spent their money. And it ended up being -- now that I think about, yeah, I got it from my parents in a lot of ways.
LAMB: Where were you born?
HOROWITZ: I was born in Los Angeles.
LAMB: And how long have you lived in New York City?
HOROWITZ: Oof, now I'm going to betray my age a little bit, but I've been there for, I think, 17 years.
LAMB: And where did you go to college?
HOROWITZ: I went to USC, University of Southern California.
LAMB: And when did mom come from Israel? And I assume she's still an Israeli citizen, and you are probably, too, technically?
HOROWITZ: Technically, yeah.
LAMB: Yeah.
HOROWITZ: In fact, I'm supposed to travel with Israel -- an Israeli passport, but I don't have one, so shh. Don't -- this is just -- there's nobody watching this, right?
LAMB: Right, no.
HOROWITZ: So my mom moved to the United States, I believe, when she was 22, or early -- very early 20s. I met my dad in Los Angeles, got married, and had me.
LAMB: Are they still out in... HOROWITZ: My father passed away a couple years ago, and my mother is still in Los Angeles, although we're trying very desperately to get her to move to New York.
Let's go back to the documentary. This particular section is oil-for-food program scandal. Let's watch.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HOROWITZ: I don't know what I'm missing here. Why was a stop not put to it when they immediately saw that there was corruption rife in it and it was working exactly the opposite way they intended it to?
(UNKNOWN): We're talking about an extremely mismanaged operation. Our senior managers were not on speaking terms with each other. So when issues like that came up, issues like indications that there was a kickback mechanism, it would be very easy for these things to get stuck in the system.
(UNKNOWN): I have, in my mind, little to no doubt that the failure to move aggressively to clean up the program was because there was enough money being made by those who had a stake in the program continuing that, in fact, the clean-up never occurred.
(UNKNOWN): (inaudible) any resignations?
KOFI ANNAN, FORMER U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL: I don't anticipate anyone to resign. We are carrying on with our work.
(UNKNOWN): Do you feel it's time for the good of the organization to step down:
ANNAN: Hell no.
(UNKNOWN): At the U.N., no one has gone to jail, no one has even been fired for the biggest scam in the history of humanitarian relief.(END VIDEO CLIP)
HOROWITZ: Why -- why would anybody resign?
LAMB: That's Claudia Rosett, who's done a lot of reporting on...
HOROWITZ: She was -- yeah, she was the one of the major driving forces on covering...
LAMB: Who was the gentleman that you were first talking to?
HOROWITZ: A guy named Michael Soussan. Michael was one of the first whistleblowers on the oil-for-food program.
LAMB: Worked for?
HOROWITZ: He worked directly for the head of the oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan. He worked with him, and he wrote an extremely funny book on his experience, called 'Backstabbing for Beginners," about his time at the United Nations, and it was -- it reads as a comedy, because the whole thing -- and the whole thing of the U.N. -- that's why we decided to focus on a lot of comedy in the movie. That's why we hired, like I said, Michael Moore's writers and the guys from The Onion, because it -- the whole thing, as sad as it is -- and it's tremendously sad -- it's just rife for satire and humor, because it's so ridiculous. And that scene there says it all, right? The biggest humanitarian scandal in the history of the world, and to say somebody is going to resign, his answer is hell no. It's ludicrous.
LAMB: Do you have an opinion of Kofi Annan?
HOROWITZ: You know, it's funny. I thought when we started the movie that he would be kind of like the bogeyman in the film. And what I ended up finding, the more we started talking to people and researching and shooting, was he really isn't. He's not a bad man. I don't think he was corrupt. I don't think so. I just think he has the same moral blindness that a lot -- that infects a lot of these -- a lot of these U.N. diplomats.
I mean, the real evil guy and the real bogeyman that comes out in the movie was Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
LAMB: Who was 10 years the...
HOROWITZ: Is that two Boutroses or three Boutroses? I can't remember.
LAMB: Boutros Boutros.
HOROWITZ: Boutros Boutros, yeah, so he was -- Boutros-squared, we call him. So he was there for, yeah -- no, four years. He was secretary general for four years. I think he had one term, if I'm not mistaken, and I don't believe I am. Am I wrong?
LAMB: I'm not -- I don't have the list in front of me.
HOROWITZ: OK, I believe one term.
LAMB: But I looked at the list, and Ban Ki-moon -- what's your opinion of him?
HOROWITZ: I was really excited when he was first elected. In fact, I was worried he might ruin the movie, because, you know, here's a South Korean, an ally of the United States, and I thought he would really hopefully make some changes. This is not Boutros Ghali. This is not Kofi Annan. And, you know, it's funny about him. The first -- really soon after he was put in place, I remember that they hung Saddam Hussein. And he had -- he came out with a statement, which I thought was going to change the tenor of the United Nations, that people really attacking the Iraqis for hanging some -- basically, applying capital punishment to this butcher.
And he made a statement maybe the next day, and he said, you know, maybe we shouldn't focus on Saddam's death, but let's focus on the fact of how many he killed. And I said, this guy gets it. This guy may actually be a -- he may bring -- he may be a harbinger for change.
And the next day, they got to him, because the next day he made another statement saying, don't misunderstand what I was saying. The fact that they killed him was terrible. I speak out against it. It's not the way we should be doing things. And he changed the way he was viewed.
LAMB: Did you talk to him?
HOROWITZ: We did not. I came close at a Knicks game, and I was walking up to him to introduce myself to him, and two burly bodyguards pushed me away.
LAMB: Here's more from your documentary.(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(KEN CAIN): Hell yeah we knew in Rwanda. Hell yeah they knew. Mr. Annan's office knew. Clear line of access from General Dallaire, saying here's what's going to happen, and here's modest authority I request, operational authority, doesn't need Security Council approval. And one of them was just literally to protect and seize an arms cache. That's a pretty modest military operation.
And militarily, it would do what it would do, but more than that, it would send a signal that we in the U.N. know, and then he was told no. He was told stand down. And he was told, literally, quote, unquote, it's more important for you to protect the image of impartiality of the U.N. in the face of genocide than it is for you to take these rather modest operations.
HOROWITZ: Were you or the other members of the Security Council made aware of Dallaire's cable?
(COLIN KEATING): No, it was never brought to my attention. And I know, from talking to many of the other 15 ambassadors, that it came as a complete and horrifying surprise to them, as well. The Security Council was never apprised of this at all.
(ROMEO DALLAIRE): I literally felt that I had been chopped at the knees, that I had this thing in the bag, and that it had been taken away from me.
Kofi Annan and his team failed to act on this opportunity to stop the genocide before it started.(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Did you talk to Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who was in the U.N. peacekeeping group?
HOROWITZ: Did not. Couldn't get access to him, unfortunately. We tried a number of times. And we had a number of interviews that he gave that we were able to splice into the movie. I mean, he's really one of the few heroes of that very dark period.
LAMB: Did you go to Rwanda?
HOROWITZ: We did not.
LAMB: How far -- how many places did you go for the movie?
HOROWITZ: We were -- Africa, Europe, Asia, all over the U.S. We traveled around the world.
LAMB: And in the end, how many...
HOROWITZ: Two million dollars only gets you so far.
LAMB: Yeah. How many hours did you record?
HOROWITZ: Hundreds and hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of hours.
LAMB: Did anybody figure out what you were doing at the U.N. as this thing went along?
HOROWITZ: No, they never did. You know, I take it back. They did figure it out toward the end. And when I went to -- when I went to Geneva, when we opened that clip with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva, they were getting a sense of what we were about. In fact, I remember -- I recall, I was walking down the hallway, and we got our -- we were credentialed -- and walked down the hallway, and there was some guy eating a sandwich. He looked up at me, he worked for the U.N., and I saw his mouth drop that I was there.
And he runs up to me, and he goes, "Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Horowitz, why are you here?" I said, no, we're shooting -- you know, we just did -- we're just doing the tail end of shooting for the movie. And he goes, "You can't be here." And I said, "Well, I've got a credential that says I can be here." And then he runs off to, I guess, try to help try to revoke my credential, but they couldn't do it.
You can use their bureaucracy against them, which is what we were very good at doing that. So they ended throwing me out, you know, after that one stunt at the end, but, no, only at the end did they figure out what we were up to.
LAMB: And what did they do then?
HOROWITZ: They didn't do anything. What can they do? I mean...
LAMB: In the end, meaning when they saw the documentary?
HOROWITZ: No, no, no, no, I mean, toward the -- the end of -- we were already in editing at that point when we shot the Geneva part. The Geneva thing kind of just fell in our lap, so we stopped editing to go shoot this thing and we came back.
So during the -- what they call principal filming of the movie, they had no clue. But it was afterwards when they started getting a sense of what we were up to.
LAMB: If you -- knowing what you know about the U.N. and if you were pro-U.N. and sitting in that chair, what are some of the things you might say about this documentary -- I know you don't call it a documentary -- that would argue with your premise?
HOROWITZ: It's an interesting question. You know, I think I would say -- if I was them, there are a few things I would say. I would first say, you know, why didn't you give us equal time, right? Now, I mean, my answer to that is simply, it's not your movie. It's my movie, and I crafted it the way I wanted to. Like I said, it's a polemic. It's meant to be -- you know, proving my thesis. But I think they were -- you know, you can argue that.
I think, you know, the way -- the argument I hear most often is, yeah, we have problems, we have a lot of issues, but it's better than nothing, it's all we have. And that's not good enough for me. That's not an acceptable answer. We can be better. We have to be better. We deserve better, as -- you know, as a collective human race, we deserve better than what the U.N. is offering us, and the copout of it's all we have, it just doesn't cut the mustard for me.
LAMB: As you were going around the U.N. and talking to people, what do they think of the United States?
HOROWITZ: There's a real disdain for the United States. I think that they find this -- you know, unipolar world that we live in to be obnoxious to them. I think that they see the world as a better place and a safer place as a multipolar world. And I think this notion of American democracy, this notion of our focus on freedom is something they find distasteful, because their view is, not everybody wants freedom, not every country is going to be free, and we need to accept that.
And I think they look at the U.S. with a tremendous amount of disdain. Not think, I know it. LAMB: And why is there such dislike of the Jews? I mean, and by the way, if you put it in context (inaudible) the 300 million-plus Arabs and like total 14 million Jews in the world...
Right.
LAMB: ... what's the disdain all about? Why do they hate the Jews?
HOROWITZ: The U.N. or the Arabs?
LAMB: Both.
HOROWITZ: OK. I don't think the U.N. hates Jews. I think it's -- there are times where I have noticed it becoming anti-Semitic, but I think as a general rule, it's really more anti-Israel than anti-Jewish.
LAMB: That's really what my question should have been.
HOROWITZ: It's an interesting question. I think a lot of it comes from -- you know, I've said before that, you know -- I was actually raised to be very respectful of the U.N., because I think, you know, we owe the U.N. a debt of gratitude, because Israel was created in the halls of the United Nations.
I almost feel like the U.N. looks at that as their original sin and have been trying to erase that problem ever since. I think that it never -- if it happened today, if it came to a vote again today, in a million years, it never would pass.
And I think that -- you said it. You have a very large bloc of the United Nations made up of Arab nations, and they will -- they will to their dying days, they will fight anything which they view as helping the state of Israel. And in fact, their agenda of being anti-Israel is really what dominates the U.N. agenda.
And if you're asking me, you know, a more -- you know, why the Arabs are -- and they are anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israel -- why that is, it's tough to say. I mean, you really have to go into the Arab psyche. I think a lot of it comes from jealousy. I think that they look at a small little country of 6 million people in the state of Israel and they see a tremendous success. And you look anywhere else in the region, and you see nothing but abysmal failure. Yet they have more people, more money, and they wonder, why not us? And I think a lot of it stems from that.
A lot of it's cultural. I think that's a big part of it. I think they have -- they have a long way to go for them to join modernity. And I think that, you know, they -- if we wanted to have a safer world, the Arab world has to join modernity.
LAMB: The last clip is with Jody Williams, but before we do that, who is she and why did you use her?
HOROWITZ: Jody Williams, she's a real kick in the pants. Jody Williams was a woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize -- I believe it was for mines. And she came to my attention because she was asked by the Human Rights Council at the time to go to -- to Sudan and come up with a, you know, a report of what's going on. I mean, the whole world knew what was going on, but they needed a report.
So they chose her, because she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, they didn't do much due diligence on her, because if they did, they wouldn't have chosen her. She is a plain-speaking firebrand. And while she's a bit crazy -- and I love her for that -- she speaks the truth, truth to power. That's what she's all about.
So they sent her out there, and she came back with a damning report, damning in terms of what the Sudanese were doing to their people, damning in terms of what the U.N. was not doing to stop it. And when she came in, they did whatever they could -- they read the report. They were doing whatever they could to stop her from presenting.
LAMB: Do the -- I don't know whether Jody Williams is right or wrong, but when you sit there and listen to her report and then you hear everybody else chime in against it, what's going on? Do those people really -- those representatives of those countries really believe what they're saying?
HOROWITZ: No, I don't think so. They're protecting their friends. That's what it is. They're -- they've got each other's backs. And, you know, I'm not sure if she said in the clip, but if -- if Iran is going to turn on Sudan, what happens when the world turns on Iran, right? Because Iran is doing maybe not quite as bad, but not that far away. Well, North Korea, right, which is a countrywide gulag.
So these people aren't going to condemn another evildoer because they're doing the same thing, only on a different level. But -- so they're all -- it's -- they're all trying to protect each other. It's -- that's really one of the main problems of the United Nations, actually.
LAMB: I don't know how much you've thought about this, but the National Security Council has 15 members -- I mean, the U.N. Security Council. Five of them are permanent, China, Russia, France, United States, and Great Britain.
HOROWITZ: Right.
LAMB: And then you have 10 additional that serve for two years at a time.
HOROWITZ: Right.
LAMB: And then you have the General Assembly, but the interesting thing about the General Assembly is that I think something like 3 percent of the delegates is all -- even though they don't have the money and they're not involved, could stop something.
HOROWITZ: Right.
LAMB: Did you talk to anybody about -- and, of course, the five permanent members of the Security Council can also veto a resolution.
HOROWITZ: Right. So there's a lot of -- there's a lot of ossification in the U.N. because of the way it's structured. And we did actually a lot on that, but we ended up not including it in the movie, because, you know, it's boring. Who the hell wants to talk about that?
But ultimately, it does lead to a lot of problems. On the other hand, you could look at it and say thank God, get on your knees and thank God the U.S. has veto power, because if you think the U.N. is bad with what we have now, you should see what the U.N. will be like without U.S. veto power. I mean, it would be insane. It would -- the entire U.N. would be focused on the United States and their, you know -- their atrocities, quote, unquote, and Israel. So...
LAMB: All that, I mean, isn't that -- World Health Organization?
HOROWITZ: Those are good things. Don't get me wrong. I mean, and we talk in the movie, you know, at the beginning about some of the stuff they do right. And I certainly would not argue we should cut funding to those things. I think we should take a close look at what we're doing in terms of security and human rights. And I think that's what we should really take a laser beam approach and say, if they're not doing it right, we're going to pull funding.
Now, I wouldn't -- I wouldn't suggest pulling funding on any of the things you just mentioned before.
LAMB: You came from the investment banking world, Lehman Brothers for five years. Did you -- are you glad that you left that business and came into this business?
HOROWITZ: Is that a rhetorical question? Of -- God, Jesus, I'm flying around the world, making movies, it's phenomenal. It's great. It doesn't pay quite as good, but...
LAMB: Yeah, but you lost money.
HOROWITZ: This is true. This is true. But my -- my fun quotient in life has gone up significantly. It's -- I could not imagine doing anything different. I would rather slit my wrist than go back to banking.
LAMB: How many children?
HOROWITZ: Two girls.
LAMB: How old are they?
HOROWITZ: Eleven and eight.
LAMB: What do they think?
HOROWITZ: They think it's cool. Their dad's making movies, yeah, they think it's very -- my wife, on the other hand, is different.
LAMB: Where'd you meet her?
HOROWITZ: We met in school...
LAMB: Where?
HOROWITZ: ... in Israel. We went to -- we spent a year at the University of Jerusalem. She's from New Jersey. I was from L.A. And she's been very -- thank God, extremely supportive wife. I mean, how many wives would be willing for their husbands to take this kind of risk financial, physical? But she's been great. You know, for her, it's a little bit -- she thinks I've gone a little off -- off the deep end.
LAMB: At any time, did the writers -- which you say are mostly liberals -- object to any of the content of your documentary?
HOROWITZ: No. In fact, a lot of them were pushing me to go further. I think -- these were all issues they were not well versed in at all. This was a universe they were just getting introduced to, and they were shocked. They were shocked. They felt betrayed, because they were -- they were -- like I said, they were all left-winger, and they all were raised and inculcated with the notion that the U.N. was making the world a better place.
And particularly when you start seeing around security issues, human rights issues, what the U.N. is really doing, they thought we weren't pushing the envelope enough. Yeah, they -- they were blown away.
LAMB: Is there going to be a second documentary from Ami Horowitz?
HOROWITZ: There will probably be a second documentary, but I can promise you this. It will not be "U.N. Me Part II." If I never hear the words United Nations again, it'll be too soon.
LAMB: Why?
HOROWITZ: Ugh, I'm just sick of it. It's just -- you know, you spend so much time on one topic and one issue, it's -- it's really difficult to keep going. And also, it just -- it just drives you insane. I don't know how the people who cover the U.N. full time could do it. The insanity of that place drives you to the brink of madness.
I mean, it's -- every time you see it, they do something so unbelievably ridiculous that it just -- it makes you -- it just drives you to the edge of insanity.
LAMB: Those who want to see the full documentary, "U.N. Me," "U.N. Me," can find it where?
HOROWITZ: Theunmovie.com. And...
LAMB: How much is it?
HOROWITZ: I think it's a pretty good deal. I think it's $15 bucks. I think it's like $14.99. I think for this day and age, it's a pretty good price.
LAMB: And what's the best thing anybody's done because of this documentary to you or you -- you know, you've observed?
HOROWITZ: You know, a lot. There's a lot going on, on Capitol Hill now around the movie. We've screened the movie now for congressmans and senators. We screened the Hill now twice. And we're seeing a lot of action, not just from Republicans, but I've had Democrats walk up to me and -- and use the words like -- and these are literal words -- you've opened up my eyes. It's been really -- it's been gratifying to see that we're starting to make some movement, because I think we're in a situation that we just can't afford to throw money away anymore. And I think that if we can use that money to better the world, then we should do it. And if we can't, then we just need to start looking about reallocating those resources into something else, and maybe even, you know, a competing organization, one where whose ideals and -- are shared by -- by all, you know, one that is based on freedom, a democracy-based organization. And maybe that's where we need to be looking.
LAMB: We thank you, Ami Horowitz. We're out of time.
HOROWITZ: I thank you.END