NYPost Editorial: Corruption on top of failure at the UN’s Palestine agency
President Trump cut off US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees last September because UNRWA is “irredeemably flawed.” In fact, it’s worse than he thought.Why is the UN so biased against Israel?
An internal ethics report leaked to the press this week exposed a corrupt UNRWA “inner circle.”
Hah! Other nations, mostly in Europe, had been stepping up to replace the $360 million hole that Trump blew in UNRWA’s $1.2 billion budget. Switzerland was the first to announce it would suspend future payments until the scandal’s resolved.
All this, on top of the larger issues that prompted Trump’s move: UNRWA workers have been caught with bomb-making materials and even throwing firebombs at an Israeli bus; its buildings have stored Hamas weapons.
It’s really no surprise to find that so politicized an agency is also thoroughly corrupt. As Trump’s former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, put it: “This is exactly why we stopped their funding.”
Last week, the United Nations against singled out Israel for condemnation and accusations of human rights violations, while regimes with lengthy histories of abuse and well-documented violations of human rights – like Iran – were ignored.
The UN's Economic and Social Council voted last week to condemn Israel – and Israel alone – as the only country in the world that violates women’s rights. The resolution passed with 40 out of 54 member-countries backing the move, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, the most notorious violators of women’s rights.
Nothing was said about the fact that millions of Arab women endure corporal and even punishment for the way they dress or behave; genital mutilation, honor murder, even in European countries.
By contrast, Arab women in Israel enjoy access to education, jobs, and political freedoms like any woman in any developed liberal democracy has come to expect.
Not many people around the world are aware of this, because the media conceals it from them, pushing the anti-Israel line instead.
The fact that this UN resolution is anti-Semitic goes without saying, but it is also an assault against oppressed women in Arab countries who continue to suffer away from the world's attention because everyone in the civilized world is busy condemning Israel.
MYTH – Palestine was heavily populated with Arabs before the Zionists arrived.
For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and malarial marshes. This was Mark Twain’s description when he visited in 1867:
A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse.
A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.
We never saw a human being on the whole route.
There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country (Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (London, 1881).
As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said (Melvin Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Bison Books: 1995 p. 29).
Take a look at some of the photos from the late 19th and early 20th century to see the desolation Twain talked about.