UNRWA school in Gaza employed terrorists

posted at 8:45 am on January 15, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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As if we didn’t know this already, but as Joel Mowbray reports for Fox News, the UN admits it, and has since 2004.  The UNRWA school hit by Israeli fire during the current conflict with Hamas employed known Hamas terrorists.  It also has used textbooks that teach anti-Semitism and radical Palestinian propaganda — and Congress wants to investigate the UN for all of the above:

The United Nations agency that administers a school in Gaza where dozens of civilians were killed by Israeli mortar fire last week has admitted to employing terrorists to work at its Palestinian schools in the past, has no system in place to keep members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad off its payroll, and provides textbooks to children that contain hate speech and other incendiary information.

A growing chorus of critics has taken aim at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in recent years, although momentum on Capitol Hill has been slow. But last week’s incident, which Israel maintains was prompted by Hamas operatives firing mortars at Israelis from a location near the school, has prompted some lawmakers to scrutinize the U.N. agency.

Rep. Steve Rothman, D-N.J., introduced a resolution in the fall calling for greater transparency and accountability at UNRWA. The bill called on the agency to make its textbooks available on the Internet for public inspection and to implement “terrorist name recognition software and other screening procedures that would help to ensure that UNRWA staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries are neither terrorists themselves, nor affiliated with known terrorist organizations.”

Rothman said he plans to re-introduce his UNRWA resolution in the coming weeks because, “as timely as this bill was before, it is even more timely now. It is urgent that Congress can be assured that U.S. taxpayer money is not being spent to support Hamas and its murderous activities.”

Oh, come on.  Let’s not overreact.  Maybe if we all plant organic gardens, the UN will magically cleanse itself of its terrorist connections.

Seriously, though, the UN has spent the last few decades sucking up to the worst elements.  The nonsense at the Human Rights Council should have made this clear, even if Oil-for-Food and the peacekeeping forces scandals didn’t.  The entire organization does little but support tyrannies and anti-Semitism.  After years of watching their human-rights organs (comprising the world’s worst human-rights abusers) ignore Palestinian terrorism while obsessing over every move that Israel makes, why should we profess even the mildest shock that the UN flat-out teaches anti-Semitism and harbors terrorists within its schools?

The UN stopped being a solution decades ago, and can’t even qualify as a benign non-entity any longer.  It’s become part of the problem.  Barack Obama and his team of internationalists won’t do it, but the US needs to re-evaluate its entire relationship with Turtle Bay.  And our first action in that re-evaluation should be the complete halt of all monies to the UN.

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