Thursday December 14

I know that I said I would give you part 2 of my diatribe against Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in today's post, but the UN's resolution for a ceasefire (and Canada's complicity in that) has been on my mind. I've written a bit about the UN here and here, but I decided that the only way to process some of my rage against it was to unload a bit more of what I know about the UN here, for those of you who may still be under the impression that it somehow serves as a neutral agency dedicated to humanitarian needs and goals around the world. I want to tell you that it is not. At all. For whatever good its commissions and agencies may do for some, the damage it has done and still does, and the danger it continues to pose globally to values and principles that democratic western nations hold dear, is incalculable. And Trudeau's ongoing support of it, in the form of millions of our tax dollars to UNRWA and voting for a ceasefire resolution this past week that seeks to delegitimize Israel's right to defend itself and fails to condemn Hamas's actions on October 7th and their ongoing responsibility for the devastation in Gaza, is unconscionable. For countries that espouse the need to eradicate terrorism and support human rights and dignity across the world, ongoing participation and complicity in the UN's completely lopsided resolutions, directives, commissions, and reports needs to be seriously examined and questioned.

For western governments like Canada to be so out of touch with the facts on the ground, or to continue to wilfully ignore them (nothing I have posted on my blog in the past couple of days -- about the PA, about the media -- or the past couple of months -- about the history of Israel/Palestine, BDS, UNRWA, etc. -- is kept secret from our government. Neither, I'm sure, are the daily occurrences here in Israel; if Trudeau wants to know about it, he is far more capable than I am in finding it out) is beyond belief. 

I’m not sure how aware most of you are, if you’re not here in Israel, that there is daily rocket fire on the southern and northern borders, and fairly regular fire on Tel Aviv and environs as well. I don’t see that reported anywhere, but I can tell you it’s a fact. Hamas and Hezbollah are dropping rockets on Israel pretty constantly. You may have seen reported that Houthi rebels are attacking ships in the Red Sea that are bound for Israel. I doubt you’ve read that just about every other day, a Hamas-inspired terror plot in the West Bank is foiled and police and the army find weapons and hear the confessions of those they arrest. These are the facts of life here, every day. In Jerusalem, the families of the 135 men, women, and children who are still being held hostage in Gaza, who haven’t been heard from for 68 days, have been holding vigils in tents set up outside of the Israeli parliament, begging the government to do something to bring home their loved ones. They are there, or in the newly renamed “Hostages Square” in Tel Aviv, rallying alongside supporters and trying desperately to remind the government and fellow citizens of their anguish. As I’ve written already, posters of their faces and lists of their names are everywhere you look, all over Israel.

Every morning after I wake up, I sit down with my breakfast and read the news. And every morning, without fail, the headlines on all of the mainstream sites – AP, Reuters, CNN, NYT, even Yahoo news – are the same: lamenting the widespread destruction and deaths in Gaza, angrily blaming Israel for going too far; for “retaliating,” for a lack of “proportionality,” for “genocide.” “Humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza.” “Biden: ‘Indiscriminate’ bombing costing Israel support.” “Western nations rethink stances on Israel defense as Gaza crisis grows.” Then I turn to the Israeli news sites. I read about how, in trying to avoid civilian deaths, when they were fired on from a heavily populated area, Israeli troops went into the building to find and kill the perpetrators instead of simply bombing the whole thing. The Israeli soldiers were blown up by a booby trap. Their comrades went in after to try to help them. They too were blown up. Then it repeated a third time. By the end of the attempt to eradicate the source of those who had fired on them without causing collateral damage, 9 Israeli soldiers were dead. Hamas’ human shields worked for them once again. And 9 young Israeli men – mostly the ages of my own children, though a couple were older with children of their own – have had their lives abruptly ended. I switch to another article, about the Israeli hospital that is treating an injured Hamas terrorist. And another, in which an Israeli doctor expresses horror at finding that one of the young female hostages was given ketamine for weeks by her captors. And then I read yet another – these are daily fare – about Hamas gunmen who fired guns and RPGs at Israeli troops from a UN school (or the designated humanitarian zone, or a hospital, or mosque, or civilian apartment building – take your pick). So it’s no surprise when later in the day there is an Al Jazeera article titled “Displaced people ‘killed point-blank’ in Gaza school” and an Al Jazeera YouTube video titled “Footage shows bodies piled up after Israeli attack on Gaza school,” following on the heels of the one they published the day before, “Israeli forces blow up UNRWA school.” The worlds of the actual war here in Israel and Gaza, and the reporting on that war to everyone else, couldn’t be further apart.

And yet, the UN’s razor sharp and undeterred steady focus on Israel remains, with yet another resolution being passed, with yet another failure to unequivocally condemn Hamas’ actions on October 7th, and yet another inability to demand the return of Israeli hostages immediately.

What’s going on in the rest of the world? COP 28, a new president in Argentina, a new government in Poland, the Ukraine is being abandoned… that’s what’s being reported. In the meantime, try to find out what is going on, say in Syria, where 72 civilians were killed by their own government during the month of November (including 14 children and 7 women, one of whom died from excessive torture); or in Nigeria, where 85 civilians were killed in a drone attack a couple of weeks ago for no apparent reason, and villages are regularly raided by armed gangs who shoot indiscriminately and carry out mass kidnappings; or in Iran, where the torture and murder of their own people has been proceeding unchecked for 45 years (the case of Mahsa Amini did spark some protests, but there was no official UN condemnation); or in China, where Uyghur Muslims are being tortured, raped, and ethnically cleansed (an accurate use of the term for once) in concentration camps since 2017 – you won’t find any news on that, not even in Muslim countries. In fact, in October 2022, 19 nations, including Muslim-majority countries, blocked a UN Commission on Human Rights debate that would have discussed China’s crimes against the Uyghurs. There is a lot of money that flows between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and China. No one cares about Nigeria, and no one sees the point in upsetting Syria or Iran over how they handle their own populations. Instead, the focus of the international governing body of the world, charged with ensuring human rights and the maintenance of international peace and security, is singularly focused on “Israel’s war on Hamas.”

As I was writing this, my dad sent me this article – here are some highlights:

More than 350,000 people have been killed in the Syrian Civil War, largely due to atrocities committed by the Assad regime and the Islamic State group. Yet there has been near-total silence from those who are now championing the Palestinian cause.

According to the Foundation for Political Innovation, as of 2021, al-Qaida had been responsible for over 14,000 deaths. The Taliban had killed 69,303 people. And since the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021, it has slaughtered at least 1,000 people. Where is the outrage over the Taliban on the streets of Middle Eastern and western cities?

In Sudan, an estimated 200,000 people were killed in a mass genocide that took place between 2003 and 2005. Yet the Muslim world hardly took notice.

The pattern of this selective rage shifts slightly if the U.S. is involved and reaches its peak when Israel is involved. We saw it when U.S. forces were rooting out terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, there was almost total silence when Russian President Vladimir Putin was annihilating Muslims in Chechnya.

In northwestern China, the Uyghur Muslim population has been the victim of a cultural genocide perpetrated by Communist authorities. Their religious and human rights have been stripped and many are being held in concentration camps. Yet again, the Muslim world remains silent.

There is another interesting paradox. When Muslim regimes like Iran, Turkey and other Persian Gulf states abuse the human rights of their citizens, almost all Muslim governments choose to side with the regime instead of the victims. But when the U.S. or Israel is involved in any conflict in the Muslim world, the same regimes take cover behind international human rights laws that they have scant regard for.

The point of this article is that Muslim nations support the Palestinian cause because they are afraid that if Israel is permitted peace and security, its democratic values will spread and endanger the theocracies and monarchies of its neighbors. Looking at the same evidence, my argument is a different one, and simple:

The fact that the UN still has any credibility and authority at all is ridiculous.

Honestly, and this is a separate point, the fact that Trudeau continues to have any credibility and authority is just as ridiculous; he defended Canada’s vote for a ceasefire without any call for Hamas to surrender itself or the hostages, by explaining that there is simply no “perfect balance” for his government to strike in this “conflict” – “There is too much pain… to be able to find a mythical fine line of a balanced position.” 

May as well vote for a ceasefire that would only advantage Hamas then. Who needs to take a moral stance when there just isn’t a mythical fine line of a balanced position to be found?

Unlike Trudeau though, the UN is dangerous.

I have already written about the problem of UNRWA, the temporary refugee agency created specifically for Palestinians that is now 74 years old. Their official mandate in 1949 was to handle the problem of resettling Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. What they have done instead, with the full support of the Arab League from the beginning, is to encourage and maintain the illusion that the Palestinians were in fact not in need of resettlement and would be able to return to their pre-1948 homes because the state of Israel was temporary, and would be eliminated. The agency has an annual operating budget of about $1.2 billion, made up of handouts from governments around the world (i.e., our taxes), and a permanent staff of 30,000 people. I won’t repeat more of what I’ve already written, but I will add a few details.

The UNRWA is the only refugee relief agency dedicated to a particular group of people. All other refugees around the world fall under the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR’s mandate is “Seeking long-term solutions for refugees… Once it is safe to do so, we help families and individuals return to their homeland. For those who cannot return because of continued conflict, war or persecution, UNHCR helps them to settle and make a positive contribution in a third country or integrate into a host country.” UNHCR operates in 130 countries and has a staff of 11,000 people. These 11,000 people managed to resettle 1,015,644 refugees between 2003 and 2018. UNRWA, on the other hand, has managed to multiply (by changing the very definition of "refugee status") the 750,000 refugees with whom they were charged in 1949 to 5.6 million (and counting) today.

The fact that UNRWA employs 30,000 people on a permanent basis should itself give anyone pause; what happens if the end of their mandate, “a just and durable solution to [the Palestinians’] plight,” is found? That’s a lot of people – mostly Palestinians themselves – who will be suddenly out of work. Unlike the PA and Hamas, who are known to pay very little to their workers and sometimes withhold wages altogether, UNRWA pays very well. Is it any wonder that UNRWA has dedicated itself to teaching generation after generation of Palestinian children that Jews are “inherently treacherous and hostile to Islam and Muslims”? Or that UNRWA teachers post antisemitic conspiracies and admiration for Hitler on social media? Or that UNRWA staffers (including teachers) openly praised the October 7th massacre? Or that graduates of UNRWA schools participated in it?

During the past two months alone, Hamas has been caught firing rockets from UNRWA schools, playgrounds, and hospitals, using them as terrorist headquarters and weapons storage facilities, and UNRWA workers have kept Israeli hostages. But none of this is new (except the hostages) – UNRWA has been in cahoots with Hamas ever since Hamas came to power. The world has known about the tunnels under UNRWA facilities for years. UNRWA even admitted having weapons stored in their facilities in 2014, and to Hamas firing missiles from their schools in 2015. The UN’s own audit of UNRWA found corrupt financial practices five years ago. What is new is how evidence of UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas is smacking every consumer of news about this war in the face on an almost daily basis (can you spot UNRWA in this Hamas-released footage of an Israeli hostage? If you don't have Instagram: the hostage is lying mostly naked with his hands bound, on top of a pile of UNRWA supply sacs labelled "for distribution to Palestinian refugees"), and everyone is simply turning the other cheek, or rather a blind eye. Why is there no outrage? Why instead, are all of the headlines concerning UNRWA about how much more aid they need to get to Hamas Gazans?

We all watched footage of Hamas marching hostages right into Al-Shifa hospital, past nurses, doctors, and hospital staff alike. Can anyone really defend the idea that UNRWA employees had no idea that Hamas was operating directly out of the hospital?

An UNRWA school in Nablus, the West Bank, posted a video on Facebook of elementary age children celebrating the October 7th “jihad” against Jews in Israel. Hamas regularly steals humanitarian aid coming into the strip, even this past week at gunpoint. UNRWA serves time and time again as a mouthpiece for the suffering of Gazans under “Israeli occupation,” rather than pointing the finger at Hamas for using UN funded aid to build tunnels instead of bomb shelters, buy weapons instead of infrastructure, supply terrorists instead of civilians. Just the other day, the UNRWA accused Israel of “inflicting collective punishment on over 2 million people, half of whom are children,” alleging that Israel is not allowing enough supplies into Gaza. The Israeli agency that coordinates and facilitates the entry of aid, COGAT, responded, pointing the finger right back at the UN. (And as Hillel Neuer of UNWatch quips, Gaza seems to have a chronic shortage of everything, except for rockets and hostages.)

Unlike the mandate of the UNHCR, the UNRWA website states that “UNRWA does not have a mandate to resettle Palestine refugees and has no authority to seek lasting durable solutions for refugees.” Yes, you read that right. The temporary refugee agency created to resolve the problem of Palestinian refugees following the 1948 war claims that its mandate is not to actually do anything for the refugees other than sustain and protect them. In the early 1980s when Israel tried to resettle refugees in Gaza into permanent housing within Gaza itself, UNRWA workers told the refugees to refuse because permanent settlement would mean they would lose their “right of return.” The UNRWA site explains that “The Agency’s mandate has evolved over the years… to accommodate the changing needs and political situation of Palestine refugees, including with respect to protection activities.” It is the UN General Assembly that defines and updates UNRWA’s mandate. So let's take a look at the UN.

In 2016, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opined that the UN has had a “disproportionate focus on Israel” that has "foiled the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively.” He explained this as being a result of “decades of political maneuvering [that] have created a disproportionate number of resolutions, reports and committees against Israel.” (You can see more about that disproportionality here.) Not than anything has been done about that, but at least it was recognized.

In 2018, UN Watch noted that the outgoing High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, had not made a single statement condemning antisemitism during his four-year term, although in the previous year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had promised to act against a rising tide of antisemitism around the world, stating that “a modern form of antisemitism is the denial of the right of the State of Israel to exist.” On the other hand, al-Hussein was known to quip about what he saw as the similarity between Palestinian refugee camps and Hitler’s concentration camps.

It has long been known that the UN disproportionately targets Israel while blissfully ignoring the ongoing and egregious human rights violations in China, Iran, Syria, etc. A handy chart shows the UN’s record from 2012-2022:

I won’t bore you with further details of the UN’s unbelievably one-sided and ongoing focus on delegitimizing Israel on the world stage, but if you’re interested, you can read about it here. I’ll just give you a brief excerpt:

Debates on Israel abound, and the Council has repeatedly condemned the Jewish State. But not once has it adopted a resolution critical of the PLO or of Arab attacks on Israel. What takes place in the Security Council “more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving,” declared former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.15

The Arab League contingent on the Council has been reinforced by members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and “nonaligned” governments that do not recognize Israel. Since the end of 1991, leading nonaligned nations such as India and China have established diplomatic ties with Israel; the Soviet Union, which broke off relations with the Jewish State after the Six-Day War, was replaced on the panel by Russia, which has full diplomatic relations with Israel. Though it was hoped this might result in a more balanced handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict by the Security Council, that has not been the case as Russia has continued to vote consistently against Israel.

In 2003, Israel sought to gain support for a resolution of its own, the first it had introduced since 1976. The resolution called for the protection of Israeli children from terrorism, but it did not receive enough support from the members of the General Assembly to even come to a vote. Israel had introduced the resolution in response to the murder of hundreds of Israeli children in terrorist attacks, and a similar resolution was adopted on November 6, 2003, calling for the protection of Palestinian children from “Israeli aggression.” Israel’s ambassador withdrew the proposed draft after it became clear that members of the nonaligned movement were determined to revise it in such a way that it would have ultimately been critical of Israel.16

Lastly, for any of you reading this who may be puzzled as to what (beyond basic good old fashioned Jew-hatred, much of which continues to be sponsored and disseminated as it long has been, by Russia... more on that in a future post, but I will note that they are in good company with Iran and many of the Arab states) motivates such blatant and continuous prejudice against Israel, I will note also that the UN partners with, and receives money directly from, known funders of terrorism. And this money, along with the threats from wealthy oil-rich nations against those nations who depend on them, seems to be the key to understanding how the UN sees the world going 'round.

Given all of this, the UN’s response to October 7th – from the condemnation of Hamas that came a full 2 months after the mass rape, butchery of human bodies, and general slaughter-fest - to the condemnation specifically of the sexual violence against Israeli women and men (and I’ll include the insight from Instagram notable @rootsmetals that this condemnation came only after a hostage testified that they were held in the attic of a UNRWA doctor) – should not be any surprise. Nor should the fact that there has been no formal resolution voted on, or even considered, against Hamas’ actions. As UNRWA’s complicity with Hamas has come increasingly into the spotlight (even with the reluctance of mainstream media outlets to publicize it) and more enlightened nations start to pull their funding (not Canada of course), the UN’s response has been to pass a resolution for an immediate ceasefire. That is: be it resolved that Israel should stop its war against Hamas, while Hamas continues to hold onto 130+ hostages (dead and alive) and continues its daily bombardment of Israel with rocket fire,  so as to bolster Hamas' pursuit of its sworn mission to repeat October 7th over and over again until all Jews are dead.

So those are some of my thoughts on the UN that I wanted to share. I will try to finish and post the rest of the Abbas/PA tirade tomorrow, but may be delayed: not only are we moving apartments tomorrow, but it is my daughter's 20th birthday and I am trying to come up with creative ways to lift her spirits. So if you don't hear from me, that's why -- I'm busy lifting spirits! (Sorry you all don't benefit from that ability of mine here.)