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Israelis Defend UNRWA Ban Amid US Rebuke, Say School Kids Better Off Without Agency’s ‘Poisonous Influence’

Security personnel work at the UNRWA headquarters, in Jerusalem, May 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Israel’s decision to ban the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants from operating in the country was necessary given the organization’s ties to the Hamas terror group and “poisonous influence” in the Middle East, according to an expert and Israeli officials, who argued that concerns over the move are overblown.

The US blasted its ally Israel for passing legislation on Monday that bans the the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating within Israeli territory and prohibits any Israeli authority from engaging with the agency.

The two laws passed overwhelmingly in Israel’s parliament, known as the Knesset, amid mounting revelations of UNRWA staff involvement in the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The legislation will close UNRWA’s operations in Jerusalem, where it services hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with education, health, and other aid. It will also limit the agency’s operations in Gaza and the West Bank, which relies on cooperation from Israeli authorities.

The Biden administration said it was “deeply troubled” by the move.

“Implementing the legislation risks catastrophe for the more than 3 million Palestinians who rely on UNRWA for essential services, including health care, and primary and secondary education,” the US State Department said. “We urge the government of Israel to pause and further consider implementation of this legislation to ensure UNRWA can effectively carry out its mission and facilitate humanitarian assistance.”

Marcus Sheff — CEO of the NGO IMPACT-se, which examines anti-Jewish and anti-Israel content in UNRWA’s educational materials — noted that numerous UNRWA-employed teachers were directly involved in the Oct. 7 massacre, while many others “openly celebrated it.” He cited a Wall Street Journal report from earlier this year that found that 23 percent of UNRWA’s male employees have ties to Hamas, a higher percentage than the average of 15 percent for adult males in Gaza. A further 10 percent of UNRWA’s school principals in Gaza and their deputies were leaders in Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group.

“These are not a few bad apples but representative of the whole rotten barrel,” Sheff told The Algemeiner.

Sheff downplayed the Biden administration’s warnings about potential “catastrophe” from shutting down the agency.

“Fifteen million refugee children are in school today around the world and 97 percent are being educated without the help of UNRWA. Even UNRWA head [Philippe] Lazzarini acknowledged that other aid agencies could replace UNRWA, but that the Palestinians refuse. So what can UNRWA possibly offer the next generation of Palestinians? More poisonous textbooks taught too often by extremist teachers?”

Sheff testified to a US congressional committee in January that textbooks supplied by UNRWA “teach that Jews are liars and fraudsters that spread corruption, which will lead to their annihilation. Students are taught about cutting the necks of the enemy, that a fire massacre of Jews on a bus is celebrated as a barbecue party.”

Fleur Hassan Nahoum, special envoy for Israel’s foreign ministry, assailed UNRWA’s “poisonous influence” in the Middle East.

“Eighty percent of the terrorists that committed the massacre on Oct. 7 were educated in UNRWA schools. And so not only do they not have legitimacy to do the work that they’re doing, they have actually been a poisonous influence in our region,” she told The Algemeiner.

Hassan Nahoum, who also served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said that the curtailing of UNRWA’s operations in the Israeli capital had already shown positive signs.

“In Jerusalem, by offering better opportunities with the Arab-Israeli curriculum, we have managed to move the needle by 20 percent of kids now abandoning the UNRWA school system and learning a curriculum of hope and opportunity,” she said.

UNRWA on Thursday confirmed that a Hamas Nukbha force commander killed in an Israeli strike a day earlier was a staffer. Muhammad Abu Attawi led the killing and abducting of hostages, including American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, from a roadside bomb shelter near the site of the Nova party in Re’im in southern Israel.

Attawi’s name appeared in a July letter that Israel sent to the Palestinian refugee agency, listing more than 100 staff members affiliated with terror groups, including Hamas. An Israeli foreign ministry official said the list was a “small fraction” of the total number of terrorists employed by the UN agency, but that the full list could not be disclosed out of security considerations.

CCTV footage captured the body of Yonatan Samerano, who was murdered by terrorists on Oct. 7, being dragged by an UNRWA social worker, Faisal Ali Musalem al-Naami, and eventually stuffed into an UNRWA marked vehicle.

Last month, Hamas confirmed that Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amin, the chairman of UNRWA’s Teachers’ Association, served as its commander in Lebanon.

In a recording released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) earlier this year, UNRWA teacher Youssef Zidan Suleiman al-Hawajara is heard bragging to a friend: “We have female hostages; I captured one!”

Following the Oct. 7 attack, 18 countries suspended their funding to UNRWA, including the US, which contributes about a third of the agency’s budget, but resumed the flow of money again in March.

In 2018, the Trump administration cut all funding to UNRWA, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed,” a decision reversed by the Biden administration soon after taking office.

Israel has long called for permanently shuttering UNRWA, citing the agency’s ties to terrorism as well as its mandate, which according to Israeli officials perpetuates the conflict. Palestinian refugees are unique in that they pass their status to descendants, regardless of their age and country of residency, a practice Israel claims fuels demands for a “right of return.” The return of over 5 million Palestinians to Israel would destroy the Jewish state by demographic means, critics argue.

UNRWA faced scrutiny in 2019 when a leaked report accused its leadership of corruption, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement. The agency’s own report found that Palestinian terror groups had stored weapons in several empty UNRWA schools in Gaza and that rockets were “probably” fired at Israel from two of these schools during the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict.

Speaking ahead of a Security Council meeting on Monday, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said, “There is no longer any plausible deniability regarding UNRWA’s infiltration by terrorists. Nor are there any excuses left.”

The post Israelis Defend UNRWA Ban Amid US Rebuke, Say School Kids Better Off Without Agency’s ‘Poisonous Influence’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Treasure Trove salutes the Jewish-Canadian woman who made the first Remembrance Day poppies

The poppies that we wear at this time of year are our visual pledge to remember the brave Canadian soldiers who served and sacrificed to preserve and defend our democracy.  […]

The post Treasure Trove salutes the Jewish-Canadian woman who made the first Remembrance Day poppies appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Hasidic Man Attacked in Third Antisemitic Assault in Brooklyn in Eight Days

Illustrative: New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on Oct. 13, 2024. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect

An antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York struck its latest victim on Wednesday, wreaking an “excruciating” beating on a middle-aged Hasidic man.

According to Yaacov Behrman, a liaison for Chabad Headquarters — the main New York base of the Hasidic movement — the victim was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery.

“The victim is in excruciating pain and is currently in the emergency room,” Behrman tweeted. “The police are investigating the incident.”

The perpetrators were two Black teenagers, according to COLlive.com, an Orthodox Jewish news outlet.

Tuesday’s attack was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. In each case, the assailant was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.

On Monday morning, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish Crown Heights neighborhood

Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.

Numerous antisemitic hate crimes have occurred in Crown Heights in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.

According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Algemeiner review of New York City Police Department (NYPD) hate crimes data, 385 antisemitic hate crimes have struck the New York City Jewish community since last October, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas perpetrated its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish hatred unlike any seen in the post-World War II era.

Beyond New York, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US spiked to a record high last year, and American Jews were the most targeted of any religious group in the country, according to a report published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Hasidic Man Attacked in Third Antisemitic Assault in Brooklyn in Eight Days first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘Huge Victory’: Netanyahu Calls Trump to Congratulate Him on Election Win

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with US President Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, Sept. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called US President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory in the US presidential election earlier this week.

“Netanyahu spoke to President-elect Donald Trump and was among the first to call to congratulate him for his victory,” the Prime Minister’s office said on Wednesday. “The conversation was warm and cordial, and the two agreed to work together for Israel’s security and discussed the Iranian threat.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration had a “maximum pressure” policy with regard to Iran, aimed at making it more difficult for the country to make a nuclear weapon and fund its terror proxies — such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — across the Middle East.

However, some observers are concerned the incoming US administration will not be as strong on the Iranian threat as it was in its first term. Late last month, US Vice President-elect JD Vance said on a podcast that the US and Israel can at times have conflicting interests and warned that Washington should seek to avoid a war with Iran, the Jewish state’s chief adversary in the Middle East.

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct — like sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran,” Vance said.

He then argued that a war with Iran “would be [a] huge distraction of resources; it would be massively expensive to our country.”

In addition to the phone call, Netanyahu’s office will also reportedly announce “the appointment of a new ambassador to Washington who will work with the new Trump administration” within the next 24 hours, according to Axios reporter Barack Ravid.

Netanyahu was the first world leader to congratulate Trump on his victory.

“Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he wrote on X/Twitter. “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

He added, “This is a huge victory!”

During Trump’s first term, he and Netanyahu were close allies, working together to sign the Abraham Accords and move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. However, their relationship reportedly strained when Netanyahu congratulated then-US President-elect Joe Biden on his victory against Trump while Trump was still actively disputing the results of the election.

“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with,” Trump reportedly said at the time. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.”

“I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty,” he added. “The first person to congratulate Biden was Bibi. And not only did he congratulate him, he did it on tape.”

Heading into Trump’s second term, there have not been indications that this tension still lingers.

The post ‘Huge Victory’: Netanyahu Calls Trump to Congratulate Him on Election Win first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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