Tuesday, April 25, 2023
From Ian:
Daniel Greenfield: Israel is Fighting the World’s War
UN Watch: Your Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Teach Hate
Daniel Greenfield: Israel is Fighting the World’s War
The Muslim world convinced the international community to pressure Israel by promising that the Jihad would stop there. “Give us Israel and it will end,” they urged. Despite all those promises, the Islamic war against civilization has spread across the world. Most of the world’s major nations and some of the minor ones have their own Islamic insurgency that plays by the same rules: alternating political demands with brutal massacres in the name of Islamic rule.
Generations of Israelis have gone to an endless war, sacrificed sons and daughters, to hold back the tide. They did it in defiance of the ignorance, hostility and pressures of the world.
They did it because they believed, they did it because they refused to die and they did it because surrendering to an enemy that gleefully butchers children was unthinkable.
Despite everything that has happened in the last generation, the world has learned little. But the Israelis have learned that peace is an illusion and that all they can do is hold the line.
When the torches are lit and loved ones weep, when the ‘blood of the maccabees’ blooms, a nation reckons again with the price that it pays for survival. Whatever myths pacifists may harbor and anti-war activists preach, there is no escape for any nation from paying that price.
Some nations have it paid by others, as the United States of America has done for so much of the globe, but in a world where evil is a reality writ in the black ink of the Koran, there can only be temporary refuges from the reckoning.
Israel still relies on a draft army. The price paid for war is a shared burden, but so is the price paid for appeasement. The fallen and their families come from all walks of life. These men and women, grandmothers, sisters, sons and nephews, have paid the world’s price in tears. They did not do it for the world, but their nation’s memorial day is nonetheless a lesson for the world.
Paying the price for freedom has long since become a cliche. Israelis do not pay the price for freedom. They pay it so that their children, their loved ones and their people are not eradicated from the earth by a brutal enemy that has no concept of mercy and worships barbarism.
The Israelis have come up against a choice that we will all have to make sooner or later. They chose not to die. The day will come when we may face that choice as starkly as they do.
Let us hope and pray that we choose well.
UN Watch: Your Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Teach Hate
UNRWA knows it has a problem, and its method of dealing with the problem not only doesn't solve it, but it reveals how deep the rot is. In response to a previous report in 2022, UNRWA's response was a brief suspension of six teachers and no subsequent action.Bassam Tawil: Palestinians: The Real Human Rights Violations
In 2018, following an earlier report on the violent and bigoted online activity of UNRWA's teachers, the organization put out a fact sheet, "UNRWA and Neutrality," touting its new social media policies and training. But as our new report shows, that training focused on encouraging staff to "limit online exposure" by "taking advantage of privacy and other settings."
In other words, antisemitism and support for terrorism don't disqualify a teacher from working at an UNRWA school, but teachers are taught how to avoid getting caught for it.
And not even taught well. From what we were able to turn up for our report, the picture is dire indeed.
Among UNRWA teachers we can find Riad Nimer in Lebanon liking a post praising a gruesome mass murder in a synagogue and Arwa al-Najjar Umm Islam, a math teacher at a West Bank UNRWA school praising a teenager who, with his brother, went on a stabbing rampage in Jerusalem. Another West Bank UNRWA teacher, Nizar Khalil Abu Shaheen, shares a complex antisemitic conspiracy theory about wealthy Jews controlling the United Arab Emirates. An UNRWA employee in Syria, Labibeh Iskandarani, calls on Hitler to "wake up" because "there are still some people you need to burn."
Though UNRWA angrily dismissed the latest report as "an attempt to sensationalize" and "overstate" the problem, the organization did suspend Nimer—only to then quickly reinstate him after news of the suspension led to a teacher walkout in its Lebanese facilities. There were no confirmed reports of any other actions against other teachers mentioned in the report. Iskandarani deleted pictures of Hitler from her Facebook profile and one other teacher adjusted his privacy settings to hide his inflammatory posts.
But the problem isn't just online. UNRWA routinely deflects criticism of antisemitism in its educational materials with the excuse that it is only using material from its "host countries," specifically the approved textbooks of Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority. It's a wholly inadequate excuse for an organization that derives all its funding from donor countries like the United States, Canada, and the European Commission, and it's not even true.
A 2021 study showed that UNRWA's own material used during the coronavirus pandemic was rife with bigotry and glorification of terrorists, including the infamous Dalal Mughrabi who carried out the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis. UNRWA's response then was typical: denial followed by verifiably false claims that the problem had been rectified, peppered throughout with criticism for those organizations doing the hard work they refused to do and uncovering the problems in their curriculum and hiring practices.
Other UNRWA-created materials promote "armed struggle" against Israel and encourage "martyrdom." Textbooks routinely demonize Israelis and Jews, and one even describes the firebombing of an Israeli bus as a "barbecue party."
A separate discussion is needed about UNRWA's mandate and its mission and whether so many Western governments should be funneling so much money into an organization with the sole purpose perpetuating, rather than mitigating the conflict in the Middle East.
In the meantime, as long as governments are funding UNRWA to the tune of over $1 billion a year, they should be demanding both accountability in its hiring and an educational curriculum that lives up to their promised neutrality.
When Palestinians commit human rights violations against Palestinians, the European Union and the UN are beyond indifferent. It is only when Israel takes a decision to defend itself against terrorism that we hear their supposedly righteous cries.
The Europeans and the UN seem to be more concerned about the rights of organizations that are affiliated with terrorism than the rights of organizations that speak out against human rights violations perpetrated by Palestinians.
The PFLP, in fact, has long been a headache for Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA). That is why the closure of PFLP-affiliated organizations in the West Bank actually serves the interests of the PA: it weakens its political rivals.
Recently, even Abbas himself decided to punish the PFLP, which is part of his own Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He cut off all funds to the organization.
While he has been accusing Israel of targeting Palestinian NGOs, he has ordered his security forces to crack down on Lawyers for Justice, an independent Palestinian group of lawyers based in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians.
Lawyers for Justice works to support Palestinian human rights activists and political prisoners detained by the Palestinian Authority. It also monitors and documents human rights violations committed by the PA security forces.
In one of its recent reports, Lawyers for Justice revealed that the number of Palestinian political activists arrested by the PA has significantly increased, while peaceful demonstrations and assemblies were being suppressed.
It is no wonder, then, that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are trying to get rid of Lawyers for Justice.
