New York Times "Correction" Fails to Correct Blumenthal Error
After publishing Max Blumenthal's anti-Israel rant, The New York Times unsurprisingly had some errors to correct. But at least one of the corrections failed to redress the error, and only served to put the newspaper's own fingerprints on Blumenthal's misinformation.MELANIE PHILLIPS: The ‘humanitarian’ weapon of war
3) After correspondence with CAMERA, a third "correction" was made to Blumenthal's article.Original: Marzel is a leader of Lehava, a group funded in the past by the Israeli government that campaigns against romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs.Amended: Marzel is a leader of Lehava, a group indirectly funded in the past by the Israeli government that campaigns against romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs.Editors updated the correction line to note: "Correction: An earlier version indicated that the Prawer Plan had been fully implemented and that Lehava had been directly funded by the government."But the Israeli government has never funded Lehava, either directly or "indirectly." It has funded Hemla, a separate organization with a separate mandate, and the funding was earmarked for a specific project at Hemla related to "treatment, support and personal and social rehabilitation" of at risk girls staying at the hostel.
The reality is that UNRWA simply could not operate in Gaza without mutual cooperation with the Hamas administration. And Gaza’s children are being indoctrinated into hatred and war by Hamas supporters teaching in UNRWA schools.Rising above personal attacks, the time has come to examine UNRWA policy
Mamoun Abunaser is a deputy principal at an UNRWA school in Syria. His profile picture on Facebook says: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Luay Shehab is a UNRWA school principal in Nablus.
He shows photographs of Israelis in burial shrouds and coffins on his Facebook page, with a caption reading: “Oh Allah, make the number of their dead as [every time a Muslim says] “Amen”! And several UNRWA teachers are known to be highly connected Hamas supporters.
Gunness says UNRWA guards its neutrality.
Yet enraged by an article in this paper by Bassam Eid, Gunness last week tweeted a call to boycott The Jerusalem Post. Clearly, he employs as creative an approach to the word “neutrality” as he does toward the word “refugee.”
Gunness categorically states there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN. Yet successive reports of the US Congressional Research also show that UNRWA, which receives $300 million per year from the US government, reports that UNRWA has never vetted its staff to see if UNRWA employs members of Hamas.Syrian Refugees Get Resettled But Not Palestinians
Meanwhile, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas’s takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009. The pro-Hamas al-Resala newspaper, right before the September 2012 UNRWA union elections stated that, “It is noteworthy that Hamas has controlled the UNRWA staff union in the elections since its inception....”
Al Quds, a Fatah-leaning paper, wrote after the elections: “According to multiple sources within the Election Commission...that the ‘Professional’ slate of Hamas won 25 seats out of 27, divided by 11 seats out of 11 in the teachers’ sector and 6 out of 7 in the labor sector elections, and 8 seats out of 9 in the services sector election.”
Gunness states that whenever there are allegations of UNRWA employees violating UNRWA’s neutrality policy, “They are always investigated and disciplinary action is taken up to and including dismissal.”
Yet in March 2013, in my presence, Gunness told staffers of the US Congress that Hamas leader Suhail Hindi, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Gaza, had been dismissed.
However, Hindi was suspended for less than a week. Hindi functions in his capacity to this day.
So much for removing Hamas on staff.
Though UNRWA operates as if it is a humanitarian agency, its purpose has always been primarily political. The population of Arab refugees from the former Mandate of Palestine was created by the war waged by those acting in the name of those Arabs to strangle the State of Israel at its birth. Rather than accepting the UN partition of the land into what were explicitly called Jewish and Arab states, the Arab and Muslim world chose to wage war to prevent the creation of any Jewish state, no matter how small its territory. With a few exceptions, several hundred thousand refugees fled because of the spread of the war as well as the explicit instructions from some Arab leaders that they flee in order to ease the path of invading Arab armies. When the War of Independence ended with the new Jewish state alive, albeit existing in truncated and unsafe borders, the tactics of Israel’s opponents shifted. From that point on, their efforts sought to highlight the plight of Arabs who had fled in order to promote a military or diplomatic attempt to continue the war. Indeed, even as Syrian refugees in camps in neighboring nations are allowed to resettle elsewhere, Palestinians still stuck in Syrian refugee camps remain in place unable and unwilling to budge from the site of their misery.
The result of this policy was not merely to render all efforts to make peace between Israel and the Arab world impossible; it also ensured that the Palestinians would live in misery in increasing numbers and growing squalor. At the same time, a nearly equal number of Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Arab world as pogroms and discrimination made their plight intolerable. But while UNRWA kept the Palestinians in place to suffer, Jewish groups ensured that their refugees would not suffer in this manner and all were resettled in Israel or the West.