It’s long been joked about that the UN has more interest in funding terrorism than eliminating it. Strongly worded Israel resolutions make up a bulk of the UN’s business, and a resolution calling suicide bombing a war crime never made it through the General Assembly. Never has the UN condemned the Palestinians without condeming “both sides,” yet Israel is a favorite target of condemnation, often without the caveat that things must be corrected on both sides.
The Security Council has members like Syria, and the Human Rights Commission was lead alternately by Iran and Libya.
Iran and Libya.
Note the complete lack of outrage in the pages of the New York Times and their elitist ilk?
Anyway, what is going on at the UN right now is even worse than the subtle non-condemnation of terrorist nations. It would appear that the UN is hiring Hamas members as humanitarian workers. This little tidbit arrived in my inbox this morning, and contains the following:
The head of the UN administration in the West Bank and Gaza admits Hamas members are on his payroll. Media outlets ignore it.
Peter Hansen, Commissioner-General of the UN agency in Gaza and the West Bank, made a startling admission in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday (10/4):
I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime… we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.
Imagine that. Hamas, a group responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians and an avowed terrorist organization whose goal is to “push Israel into the sea” is just a “political persuasion.”
I hardly know how to react to this, but I find it hard to believe that the UN can even think to be taken seriously when it employs terrorists because, well, it’s just a different point of view. This kind of attitude from the UN is endemic of its biggest problem: That it incorrectly believes that all points of view are equal and must be heard, whether they come from democracies like France, Germany, or the US, dictatorships and theocracies like Iran and Cuba, or terrorist organizations like the PLO and Hamas.
A proper reaction to this news that there are Hamas members bankrolled with UN funding would have been to investigate and remove those people from the payroll immediately. Instead, we get a dodge covered in a dismissal.
In an editorial in the Chicago Sun Times from October 25, 2004, we read the following:
Yes, it’s possible that among these members of Hamas there are individuals who have never killed anyone, abetted in killing or even endorsed it. But this is one case in which there is guilt by association: Hamas has massacred hundreds of men, women and children and wounded thousands, many in suicide attacks. This is the organization responsible for the atrocious mass murders on buses and in nightclubs and, infamously, at a Passover seder.
In hiring members of Hamas, the U.N. gives it a made-to-order cover for its bad deeds. There are numerous documented cases in recent years of Palestinian terrorists working for the UNRWA or using its facilities and vehicles to carry out attacks.
The UN would be wise to heed this warning if it ever wants to repair its tarnished reputation. Between the Oil for Food program scandal, the genocide in Darfur, and their inaction in Rwanda, the UN is teetering on the brink of being irrelevant. Hiring terrorists for humanitarian purposes and not even caring about it because a terrorist organization is just a “political persuasion” is irresponsible and dangerous and is not the hallmark of an organization whose purpose is to defend human rights, world freedom, and international security.