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The UNRWA Meltdown
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
JNS.org – If anything illuminates the insanity and moral bankruptcy of our times, it’s the reaction to Israel’s decision to act against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Laws passed this week by the Israeli Knesset, which will come into force in three months’ time, ban UNRWA from operating in either Israel or Gaza, prohibit state officials from having any contact with the agency or its representatives, and enable Israel to arrest and prosecute any of its employees with terrorist connections.
The evidence is overwhelming that UNRWA is indeed an active partner of Hamas.
Israel has claimed that dozens of UNRWA officials and staffers directly participated in last year’s Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel, when 1,200 were murdered and more than 250 kidnapped into Gaza.
Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who led the murder and kidnapping of Israelis hiding in a roadside bomb shelter on that terrible day, and who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces last week in Gaza, had been employed by UNRWA since July 2022 while serving as a Nukbha commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion.
Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, who led Hamas in Lebanon and was killed in an Israeli airstrike there in September, doubled as the head of Lebanon’s UNRWA teachers’ union. A school principal, he oversaw 65 schools and roughly 40,000 students. He had also been responsible for coordinating terror activities between Hamas and Hezbollah; procuring weapons and recruiting terrorists; and using social media to incite attacks.
The IDF repeatedly discovered terrorist infrastructure sited in and around UNRWA schools, hospitals and other facilities. Back in February, Israeli forces found below UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza City a subterranean data center that was hooked up to the electricity supply in the UNRWA facility above.
According to the curricula monitoring organization IMPACT-se, UNRWA’s school curriculum has had a “central, radicalizing influence on generations of Palestinians” and teaches children that the Jews are liars and fraudsters” who “spread corruption.”
Despite all this and more such evidence of UNRWA’s terrorist ties, there has been hysterical outrage over Israel’s ban. There have been claims that it will deepen the humanitarian crisis with Gazans now on the brink of starvation—a claim that’s been made repeatedly during the war but has always proved untrue.
In reality, hundreds of aid trucks enter Gaza every week, but Hamas continues to steal the aid and sell it on the black market at hugely inflated prices that Gaza residents cannot afford. Hamas has seized an estimated $500 million in foreign aid since the war began.
Most of the assistance coming in isn’t even being distributed by UNRWA. Israeli officials have said that aid agencies such as the World Food Program, World Central Kitchen and UNICEF have a bigger role in distributing Gaza’s aid supplies.
None of this is acknowledged by those claiming that the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza are starving and UNRWA is irreplaceable. Other aid agencies, they say, don’t provide health and education services.
But UNRWA’s schools have taught generations of Gaza’s children to hate and murder Jews. According to the IDF, every single UNRWA hospital and clinic has been used as a terrorist hub, with clinical staff doubling as Hamas members.
In any civilized universe, how can such a provision be deemed “irreplaceable”? Shouldn’t the appropriate response to the organization that has facilitated such terrorist assistance be to shut it down?
Moreover, why should Israel be held responsible for providing Gaza with humanitarian assistance? Israel has been under bombardment from the coastal enclave for two decades. Gaza’s population elected Hamas to rule them. Opinion polling consistently reveals that even among those who now hate Hamas, the vast majority support the killing of Israelis.
Thousands of those civilians took part in the Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel and grossly abused the Israeli captives when they were dragged into Gaza. The IDF subsequently found evidence of ties to Hamas in virtually every house.
In what conceivable moral universe is a country targeted for such a remorseless and genocidal attack expected to look after the welfare of its murderous attackers?
The United Nations says that Jerusalem has an obligation under international law to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza because Israel is the occupying power. But this is totally untrue. Israel is not occupying Gaza. It withdrew from it altogether in 2005.
It’s the United Nations that has failed to live up to its own international obligation not to fund and support violence. For years, the world body has turned a blind eye to UNRWA’s ties to terrorists. So have America, Britain and other countries. They still refuse to acknowledge this problem.
In a statement this week expressing “grave concern” over the Israeli ban, the foreign ministers of Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom claimed that UNRWA was tackling its employees’ support for terrorism by pursuing the recommendations made in last April’s independent review by the former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna.
That review was a travesty. Before the report was even written, Colonna said that her goal was to “enable donors … to regain confidence, when they have lost it or when they have doubts, in the way UNRWA operates.” Her report was drafted to achieve precisely that rather than stop the rot.
Far from tackling the agency’s terrorist ties, its commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has batted them away. He claimed implausibly that UNRWA didn’t know about the Hamas data center underneath its Gaza headquarters.
He denied that it employed terrorists and said this claim was part of a “large-scale campaign aimed at undermining the agency.” Having suspended the teachers’ union head Abu el Amin under pressure over the revelation of his Hamas role, Lazzarini reinstated him three months later under pressure of a strike by UNRWA teachers supporting their union’s head.
As for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, he appeared to blame Israel for the Hamas Oct. 7 pogrom by saying it “did not happen in a vacuum” and has repeatedly parroted Hamas talking points.
Instead of holding the U.N.’s and UNRWA’s feet to the fire, Israel’s supposed allies in America and Britain have been threatening to cut off the Jewish state at the knees.
Having told Israel earlier this month that it must take steps within 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on US military aid, the Biden-Harris administration threatened it with “consequences under U.S. law and US policy” over its UNRWA ban.
In Britain, there have been reports that the government may suspend further arms sales to Israel as punishment. The U.K. ambassador to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward, said that Israel must “ensure UNRWA can continue to provide essential services to those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank.”
But UNRWA’s role is not as a dispassionate provider of essential services. It was actually created in 1949 as a weapon to delegitimize the State of Israel. While refugee status for all other peoples is considered a temporary measure, it’s permanent for the Palestinian Arabs. Under UNRWA’s unique designation, it’s passed down from generation to generation.
That’s why the number of Palestinian Arab “refugees” has ludicrously increased from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today—an ever-growing running sore whose toxicity is vastly increased by the hatred of Israel taught in UNRWA schools.
The pretense that UNRWA exists to provide for the suffering was finally ripped apart by the part its employees played in the Oct. 7 atrocities and in the war that has followed.
Israelis are no longer prepared to tolerate people who are trying to kill them and destroy their country while parading as humanitarian relief workers. Yet the United States, Britain and the United Nations are pressuring Israel to continue to keep this malign farce going.
Such people aren’t appalled by UNRWA. They’re appalled by the ban on it. That tells you everything you need to know about the war against Israel by the so-called civilized world.
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Trump Nominates Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel
Mike Huckabee looks on as Donald Trump reacts during a campaign event at the Drexelbrook Catering and Event Center, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, US, Oct. 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to serve as the next US ambassador to Israel, adding another staunch ally of the Jewish state to a senior role in his incoming administration.
“I am pleased to announce that the highly respected former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, has been nominated to be the United States Ambassador to Israel,” Trump wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
“Mike has been a great public servant, governor, and leader in faith for many years. He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East!” Trump continued.
Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has long been a stalwart ally of the Jewish state. He has repudiated the anti-Israel protests that erupted in the wake of Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7 and criticized incumbent US President Joe Biden for sympathizing with anti-Israel protesters during his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC). The incoming ambassador also lambasted the anti-Israel encampments at elite universities, stating that there should be “outrage” over the targeting and mistreatment of Jewish college students.
Huckabee has defended Israel’s right to build settlements in the West Bank, acknowledging the Jewish people’s ties to the land dating back to the ancient world.
“There is no such thing as the West Bank — it’s Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee has said, referring to the biblical names for the area. “There is no such thing as settlements — they’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
During Huckabee’s 2008 US presidential campaign, he stated that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” and that land for a potential Palestinian state should be taken from other Arab states and not Israel.
Huckabee will replace the current ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew.
Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel during his first term, David Friedman, praised the president-elect’s selection of Huckabee.
“I am thrilled by President Trump’s nomination of Governor Mike Huckabee as the next Ambassador to Israel. He is a dear friend and he will have my full support. Congrats Mike on getting the best job in the world!” Friedman wrote on X/Twitter.
During Trump’s first term in office, his administration helped foster the Abraham Accords, a series of landmark normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump promised to resume efforts to strengthen the Abraham Accords upon his return to the White House. He has also urged Israel to move faster with its military campaign to eradicate the Hamas terrorist group from the Gaza Strip.
The post Trump Nominates Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Suspect Remanded Without Bail for Attempted Kidnapping of Jewish Boy in New York City
Masked male attempts to abduct Orthodox Jewish child in broad daylight in New York City on Nov. 9, 2024. Photo: Shomrim Crown Heights Rescue Patrol/Screenshot from social media
The man who was charged for attempting to abduct an Orthodox Jewish child in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York City this past weekend will remain in jail until he faces a judge again next month.
Stephan Stowe, 28, reportedly a gang member with 33 prior arrests, was arrested early Sunday and subsequently charged with attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child. Citing court documents released on Monday, CrownHeights.info reported that a judge refused bail for Stowe and ordered him to be remanded to Rikers Island prison until his next court date on Dec. 9.
The legal action came after a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children on Saturday afternoon, in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. The assailant put the child down.
This video is shocking. A perpetrator grabbed a Chasidic child who was walking with his father today at approximately 3:30pm on Kingston near Lefferts Ave.
Something is clearly going on in Crown Heights—there have been incident after incident over the past two weeks.… pic.twitter.com/7nIkZWhssk
— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) November 10, 2024
The video was widely circulated online and fueled concern about a wave of violent crimes targeting Jews in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Following news of the arrest, a local Jewish leader praised what, for now, appears to be a victory for law and order advocates and a Jewish Brooklyn community reeling from a spate of hate crimes in recent weeks.
“The perpetrator has been arrested,” Yaacov Behrman, a liaison for Chabad Headquarters — the main New York base of the Hasidic movement — posted on X/Twitter. “Known to police, the perpetrator has allegedly been arrested over 30 times. He is under 30 years old and has also been arrested in [the] past for criminal possession of a weapon. What is wrong with our legal system? What is wrong with our society? How is this possible?”
Behrman also noted on Sunday that he spoke to the father, who expressed his appreciation for local police and Crown Heights Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group. According to Behrman, the father also said that his kids were doing well.
Saturday’s attack was the fourth time in less than two weeks 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.
Last Wednesday, a middle-aged Hasidic man was chased and beaten by two assailants after he refused to surrender his cell phone.
Earlier that week, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish.
Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner at the time. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
The problem has become acute 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.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Suspect Remanded Without Bail for Attempted Kidnapping of Jewish Boy in New York City first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Renowned Figurative Painter Frank Auerbach, Jewish Refugee Who Fled Nazi Germany, Dies at Age 93
A painting by Frank Auerbach, J.Y.M. Seated II, 1992, estimate £600,000 – 800,000 during a photocall at Christie’s auction house showcasing the highlights of 20th/21st Century Evening Sale in London, United Kingdom on October 06, 2023. Photo: WIktor Szymanowicz via Reuters Connect
German-born British artist Frank Auerbach, who was sent to England as a child fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany and became a leading figurative painter, died on Monday at the age of 93.
The gallery Frankie Rossi Art Projects, which focuses on post-war artists like Auerbach, said the Jewish painter “died peacefully” early Monday at his home in London. “We have lost a dear friend and remarkable artist but take comfort knowing his voice will resonate for generations to come,” said Geoffrey Parton, the gallery’s director.
Auerbach was born in Berlin in April 1931 and came to England in 1939. He was an only child and arrived in London as a refugee from Nazi Germany as one of six children sponsored by the writer Iris Origo. Auerbach’s father, a patent lawyer, and mother, an artist, were both killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.
“[I was] at no point shocked or overwhelmed [when] it was gradually leaked to me [that] they’d been killed, taken to a camp and killed,” Auerbach said years later about the murder of his parents, according to The Art Newspaper. “I don’t know which one, Auschwitz probably.”
Auerbach attended Bunce Court in Kent, a boarding school for Jewish refugee children, and then studied at London’s St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1948-1955. He lived and worked in the same studio in North London from 1954 until his death. His career spanned seven decades, his work has been shown around the world, and he was awarded the prestigous Golden Lion prize at the 1986 Venice Biennale.
Auerbach’s signature style was having an excessive amount of paint on his works, which was created by him repeatedly scraping off paint from previous versions he was unhappy with, and then starting again until the finished work was loaded with layers of paint. He was known for his portraits and city scenes in North London. He once told The Guardian that he estimated that 95 percent of his paint ended up in the garbage. “I’m trying to find a new way to express something… So I rehearse all the other ways until I surprise myself with something I haven’t previously considered,” he explained.
Auerbach is survived by his son, filmmaker Jacob Auerbach.
The post Renowned Figurative Painter Frank Auerbach, Jewish Refugee Who Fled Nazi Germany, Dies at Age 93 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.