Pressure increases on UNRWA to act responsibly

The more you look at Chris Gunness, UNRWA's spokesperson, the worse he appears.

I have been proving that Gunness lied on Israeli TV when he claimed:

Where we find credible allegations of neutrality violations among our staff, we investigate and where it's appropriate we take disciplinary action up to and including dismissal. And that process is audited by our major donors.

Yet there is no evidence of UNRWA ever taking the many, many examples I have uncovered of UNRWA staff bias, support for terror, antisemitism, and pro-Hitler comments seriously. On the contrary, all we have seen is lots of attempts at obfuscation, coverups and more baldfaced lies by trying to distance UNRWA from its own employees. Gunness cares about UNRWA's reputation, to be sure, but he doesn't give a damn about the hate that is endemic in the agency itself.

And neither does his boss, Pierre Krähenbühl.

But pressure is starting to build up against Gunness, and Gunness is starting to act erratically as a result. in just the last week he lashed out at UN Watch and NGO Monitor, asking his fellow Israel-haters to help him find dirt on those organizations. He gave friendly PR advice to someone who calls Israelis "ZioNazis." (He removed that tweet after I slammed him for it, without apology or explanation.)

Now, there are new efforts to remove Gunness from his position.

A petition was started on Saturday night for the UN to investigate Gunness.

Unfortunately, UNRWA has fallen prey to increasingly polarized and biased rhetoric, pushed more and more often by its own spokespersons. While Israel has raised concerns about Mr. Gunness in the past [2], there has been no action taken to ensure that Mr. Gunness is returned to the realm of unbiased behavior befitting a human development agency whose mandate, he admits, must include neutrality.

Hundreds have signed on so far.

UN Watch, meanwhile, has publicly called on Pierre Krähenbühl to fire UNRWA officials who espouse hate based on a small sample of the evidence i have discovered:

UN Watch today expressed alarm at Facebook posts by UNRWA officials (see sample below) that openly incite to antisemitism and terrorism, and urged UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl to take immediate action by terminating the officials, and issuing an apology.

“The pattern and practice of UNRWA school principals, teachers and staff members posting antisemitic and terror-inciting images suggests a pathology of racism and violence within UNRWA that must be rooted out, not buried, as UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has attempted to do by calling for boycotts of newspapers or NGOs that report these incidents of hate,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a non-governmental Geneva watchdog organization.

“The UN must recognize that these disgusting posts, published on Facebook accounts run by people who identify themselves as UNRWA officials, constitute a gross violation of Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits “incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” said Neuer.

“Enough of the UNRWA strategy of impunity, denial and deflection. It’s time for the perpetrators to be held to account. They must be fired, immediately.”

And I have many more examples of UNRWA staff acting against UNRWA's neutrality principles. Not all of them are as egregiously antisemitic, but many call for violence, supportterror and show the desire to destroy Israel, all against UN positions.

If Gunness continues on his path of cover-ups and denials, he is setting UNRWA up to look even worse than it does. But clearly Chris Gunness has no desire to actually fix the problems.

Because he knows that if UNRWA would fire every employee who supports terrorism and violence against Israelis and Jews, there would be a severe shortage of staff left at UNRWA altogether.

But in the end, as Gunness' tweets, show, the UNRWA spokesperson supports the goals of its employees to destroy the Jewish state, which is why he will never do anything to help fix the agency. UNRWA's entire goal is to perpetuate the myth of never-ending refugee status among millions of people who cannot properly be called refugees. The reason is because UNRWA itself wants to see the destruction of Israel via the so-called "right to return" and it has no interest in solving the problem of statelessness among its "refugees."

As long as that is true, we cannot expect any real change at UNRWA. All we can do is shine light on its hypocrisy and tolerance for hate among its own people.