Defund the U.N.

The communique issued on March 9, 2011 by the President of the sixty-fifth session of the United Nations General Assembly, Joseph Deiss, declared he had “the honor” of hosting the U.S. premiere of the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian film Miral at the General Assembly Hall.

In lending his office’s sponsorship and providing the General Assembly hall for the red-carpet showing of this film, Mr. Deiss provided the world stage to the a fictional screenplay by Arab-Israeli writer, Rula Jebreal, awarding it with credibility and legitimacy.

Miral‘s protagonists include a sympathetically portrayed Hindi Husseini, sister of former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al Husseini. The film includes reference to false Palestinian accounts of the battle of Jewish defense forces with the Arab population of Deir Yassin, which served as a weapons and an attack-launching center of Jewish villages and neighborhoods in Jerusalem. The Arab blood-libel claiming the Jewish forces massacred the whole village has become a staple of the Arab anti-Israeli campaign ever since.

The implicit endorsement of the lies portrayed in the film is but the latest U.N. support of the Arab/Palestinian hate-generating machine to delegitimize the Jewish state.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) support of Hamas institutions was most recently cited in May 2009 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report includes UNRWA’s admission that it does not screen prospective staff or aid recipients for ties with terrorist organization other than al Qaeda:

“According to UNRWA, the UN Security Council has various working groups for terrorism-related issues, but the Sanctions Committee’s UN 1267 list is currently the only such UN terrorist screening list available….the list is limited to those individuals or entities affiliated with Al-Qaida and the Taliban and thus does not specifically include major regional groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which the United States has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.”

UNRWA has always denied links Palestinian terrorism, more recently Hamas, or downplayed the significance of the relationship. As UNRWA’s former Commissioner, Peter Hansen, told the Canadian Broadcasting Cooperation in October of 2004: “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll, and I don’t see that as a crime.”

Not surprisingly, among other ties, UNRWA has heavily subsidized Hamas through the agency’s unions. In 2003, Hamas won more than 90 percent of the votes in the workers union in the UNRWA refugee camp in Gaza. Last available figures showed that in 2007, UNRWA employed more than 29,000 Palestinians organized in unions directly controlled by Hamas. Through another affiliate, the Islamic Bloc, Hamas also controls the UNRWA teachers union and UNRWA-funded schools in Gaza, that relentlessly indoctrinate Palestinian children to hate the Jews, Israel, and the United States.

In January 2011, Gaza’s Nursing Association elected Hamas announced it won 70.5 percent of representatives vote. Their competitors, another U.S. designated terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad (IJG), won 29.5 percent. UNRWA – an organization that receives 30% of its budget from the U.S. taxpayer – pays these salaries as well.

UNRWA facilities and personnel have also been tied to numerous terrorist attacks on Israel. Its schools have been used as meeting places for Hamas terrorists and weapons storage, and UNRWA’s Hamas-affiliated staff members have used UNRWA equipment to transport arms for use in terrorist activities. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces captured documents and evidence during Operation Cast Lead in 2008, showing that the UNRWA school compound across from the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis was used by Hamas to launch rockets into Israel, and that other UNRWA schools were used to store weapons and to hide Hamas operatives.

Maintaining UNRWA meets with the Arab agenda to condemn Israel, an agenda the U.N. has helped to pursue. Over the years the UN has set ample precedent for the type of anti-Israel sentiment that screening Miral so obviously evidences.

Adding insult to injury, the screening of this inflammatory fiction closely follows the heinous massacre of a Jewish family in the Israeli town of Itamar. Instead of condemning this atrocity and its public celebration by Palestinians in Gaza, Mr. Deiss and the U.N. have set out to promote falsity and bias that could well lead to future attacks on innocent Israelis and their rights to live peacefully on their land.

In addition to furthering the Arab agenda to destroy the only unvarying ally of the U.S. and the single democracy in the Middle East, this latest U.N. promotion of a Hollywood commercial fueling the Palestinian hate propaganda, should encourage Congress to finally defund the organization.