by Hugh Fitzgerald
Palestinians are enraged.
In suspending six teachers – not firing them – UNRWA has done the absolute minimum in response to a devastating report from UN Watch, about 120 of UNRWA teachers who were found to teach murderous antisemitism in the classroom. Yet even this small step has enraged the Palestinians, who don’t want any UNRWA teachers to lose their jobs for urging their young charges to murder Jews. A report on this handful of suspensions, and the Palestinian response, is here: “Report: UNRWA suspends 6 staffers who incited violence against Jews,” Israel Hayom, June 30, 2022:
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has placed six employees on administrative leave following an NGO report implicating them in inciting violence against Jews, Israel Hayom learned Thursday.
A recent review of UNRWA operations in Palestinian schools funded by donor states to the agency by UN Watch found that six teachers had repeatedly and publicly called to [sic] murder Jews.…
UNRWA has not explained why it did not fire the six teachers, but only gave them temporary suspensions, and no doubt this “slap of the wrist” will be the end of it, as they are rehired, perhaps not as teachers in the classroom, but in some administrative capacity, where no one can accuse them of “engaging in murderous incitement of pupils.”
UNRWA’s first reaction was to try to discredit UN Watch, calling in a “politically motivated organization” that tries to “delegitimize the work of the agency. UNRWA is an agency fully committed to upholding United Nations principles and values and has a zero tolerance to hate speech and incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.”
UNRWA dared to try to discredit the UN Watch report, which was full of detailed information about exactly which teachers said exactly what. Instead of addressing those charges and the evidence for them, UNRWA simply claimed that UN Watch is trying to “delegitimize the work of the agency.” That is not an answer to the mountain of evidence UN Watch presented, but merely a shooting-the-messenger avoidance of the accusations. UNRWA did the absolute minimum: instead of firing outright the six teachers implicated in teaching murderous antisemitism, UNRWA chose to subject them only to temporary suspension.
Still worse, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch says that in its investigations of UNRWA, the NGO has found a total of “more than 120 UNRWA teachers and other staff who praise Hitler, glorify terrorism and spread antisemitism, and UNRWA has not given the name of a single one who has been fired,” We can assume, then, that none of them was fired. And the only ones even to be suspended have been these, the latest six.
The agency’s Deputy Commissioner-General Leni Stenseth added, “The actions of this organization and the coordinated comments by satellite organizations, demonstrate yet again the real intent. They seek to destroy, not build, to invite conflict, not build a lasting peace.”
A nauseating reply. Attack UN Watch, because it has the crazy idea that it is right and proper to expose the violent antisemitism that is being taught in UNRWA schools. And for taking up this task, UNWatch is subject to Leni Stenseth’s grotesque inversion of reality, when she accuses the group of seeking “to destroy, not build, to invite conflict, not build a lasting peace.” How can you build a “lasting peace” if one side (the Arabs) inculcates murderous hatred of the other (Israeli Jews), as some Palestinian teachers do in UNRWA schools?
In a statement published on its website, UNRWA said that its senior executives briefed donor states about “allegations of hate-speech recently levied against several Agency staff members” which it said “were timed to disrupt the annual UNRWA pledging conference at United Nations headquarters in New York.“
Oh dear. Just imagine. That sinister organization UN Watch has over time presented hundreds of examples of antisemitic hate speech in UNRWA schools, hard evidence, not mere “allegations,” and – how terrible of it — times the release of its report so as to “disrupt the annual UNRWA donor conference.” There is no evidence that this timing was deliberate but even if it had been, so what? Why shouldn’t UN Watch want to make sure that UNRWA donors know exactly what is going on within that organization, by presenting them with the considerable evidence UN Watch has accumulated that shows the widespread teaching of antisemitism in UNRWA schools? And the “hate speech” UN Watch has uncovered has not only been by “several” UNRWA staff members, but by 120 teachers. 120 is not “several.” 120 is a “large number.”
According to UN Watch, the suspensions sparked outrage from Palestinian groups.
A coalition that includes the PA, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, known as the Joint Committee for Palestinian Refugees, called on UNRWA “to immediately rescind its procedure of suspending six employees, and not to respond to US-Israeli pressures and dictates.”
Note that even the so-called “moderate” PA joins Hamas and Islamic Jihad in calling on UNRWA to at once “rescind” the suspension of six employees, not because they aren’t guilty as charged by UN Watch, but because it shouldn’t matter. UNRWA should always be treated as beyond suspicion. To behave otherwise Is to do the bidding of the hated “Zionists” and the Americans.
Walid Al-Awad, head of the Palestinian National Council’s refugee committee, said UNRWA’s suspension of six teachers was “unacceptable and must be dropped immediately.”
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, Canada and the European Union, demanded the teachers’ suspensions be reversed, saying it “will not in any way allow UNRWA’s acquiescence to Zionist pressure and incitement.”
And how exactly does the PFLP, or PIJ, or Hamas, plan to prevent UNRWA from suspending those six teachers? Will its armed operatives escort those teachers back to the classroom? Will it keep armed guards in those classrooms to make sure those teachers can continue to teach violent antisemitism? Couldn’t’ this lead to a dangerous and violent confrontation between the PFLP (or PIJ, or Hamas) members and UNRWA security men, who would arrest them as armed trespassers in UNRWA schools?
Israel has been very critical of UNRWA’s operations, accusing the agency of anti-Israel bias and of perpetuating the Palestinian refugee narrative.
One need only look at the UNRWA textbooks, full of violent antisemitic passages. UNRWA has promised its donors for years that it would revise its texts, taking out the offending passages, but has never done so. Isn’t that the surest proof of “anti-Israel bias”? And the presentation in UNRWA history books of the “Palestinian refugee narrative,” the one where colonial-settler Zionists arrive from Europe to “steal Arab land,” and the 3000-year connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is completely ignored, has rightly been criticized by the Israelis and their supporters.
The agency’s data has also come under question, as many studies have found that it is inflating the number of Palestinian refugees worldwide it claims to represent.
UNRWA rolls constantly expand, in the first place, because the status of “refugee” is passed down as an inheritable trait to children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. It is only Palestinian refugees, among the hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide, who enjoy this unique treatment. The 30,000 Palestinian employees of UNRWA naturally have a stake in exaggerating the number of refugees they look after; the more they claim to be aiding, the larger their budget. Another way that UNRWA keeps its rolls large is to be deliberately lax in removing the names of dead refugees; instead, their relatives keep them on the rolls as long as possible, so as to receive benefits – such as ration cards that can be used for food or energy, and housing allowances – that continue to be sent to the dead, and are used by the deceased’s relatives.
Donors to UNRWA have now been supplied with the UN Watch report about the Agency’s teachers inculcating their students with violent antisemitism. Let them judge if UNRWA’s response was adequate – the suspension, not firing, of only six teachers when at least 120 were found guilty of the same behavior.
Questions for the Director-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini:
- When did you become aware that murderous antisemitism was being taught in UNRWA schools? When was the first UN Watch Report sent to UNRWA?
- Did you ever conduct your own investigation of the problem within the agency, or were you waiting to see what UN Watch discovered?
- What did you do when you first read the UN Watch report on UNRWA schools? Did you call in teachers to discuss the charges against them? Or did you simply dismiss those charges, and hope that the media would lose interest and the matter would go away?
- Why in the end did you “suspend” rather than fire outright, six teachers?
- Given that 120 teachers and staff were mentioned as inculcating violent antisemitism in previous UN Watch Reports, why did you at UNRWA only suspend six of the 120? Why did you elect not to demand a new study, conducted by UNRWA, of all 120 teachers who are cited in the UN Watch reports?
That’s a start. He won’t answer, of course. He’ll only go on the warpath against that indispensable organization, UN Watch. But some people in high places – even, one hopes, in Congress and the State Department — will read the latest report, and do the only thing that will get UNRWA’s attention: cut its funding.
Hugh Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/unrwa-suspends-six-teachers-hugh-fitzgerald/
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