Cut Off the UNRWA

Why Continue to Fund the Teaching of Hate?

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA, pronounced “un-ruh”) is a corrupt United Nations institution that has a long record of being associated with the most virulent antisemitism.
   Under the guise of “humanitarian aid” and “education of children,” this hate-infected agency, whose numbers include terrorists, murderers and their supporters, has schooled Arab children in Gaza and in Judea-Samaria’s Palestine Authority for 75 years to hate Jews—ever since Israel’s founding in 1948.
    UNRWA may well be most responsible, more than any other body, for the Gazan Arab effort aiming to destroy Israel, particularly since Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the region.
    Education is a powerful weapon. Yes, weapon. Consider: On the most intense day imaginable in Israel’s war against Hamas, Israel never did anything remotely comparable to what America and its European allies did to Dresden, Germany on one of their most intense days. Nor has Israel, in all its defensive wars combined, done anything remotely comparable to what America did in one single day in Nagasaki or in Hiroshima.
    Yet, today, Germans are closely allied with America. So are Japanese. How in the world did the Germans and Japanese ever forgive America for bombing their brains and lungs out?

    Education. Childhood education. Teen education. Adult education. That is the magic: educating people.
    Why is it that Americans, for the most part, always have opposed socialism and Communism? Education.
    By contrast, why did the public in the former Soviet Union stand for Communism? Partly because they feared that Stalin otherwise would shoot them or starve them to death, but in greater measure because they were taught to believe that drivel: Education.
    And why do so many in China support the Communism that destroys their individuality and leaves them with so much less freedom and possibilities than we enjoy? Education.
    And why do so many hundreds of thousands of Iranians march in support of the ayatollahs, terror, jihad and bloodlust? Education.
    When you take children and subject them to indoctrination, by golly it works. We are no better in DNA than anyone else. If you subject our brightest kids to a Socialist / Communist / Hate Israel curriculum beginning in first grade and running through college final year, then they will come out as brainwashed as anyone else. The only places where 90% of the people think alike are at certain universities and in a Putin or Ayatollah election.
    Education matters. We need only look at what the UNRWA has done in Gaza and in the Arab parts of Judea and Samaria (the “Palestine Authority”) to see how toxic education poisons.
    For 75 years since Israel was founded, UNRWA has been leveraging toxic textbooks and teachers to inculcate a murderous hate of Jews into children under their care. Those kids grow up determined to murder Jews, acting as “Shahids” (martyrs destined for heaven and the 72 virgins) or to support those who do it. Females aspire to birth many shahids and later celebrate when their kids blow themselves up with suicide bombs^.[1]
    It is foreign to our Western mindsets, but they teach a Culture of Death. They did it the first generation of UNRWA back in the 1940s-1960s. Then UNRWA created a second generation from the ’70s  to the ’90s. And then a third generation.
    Is there any surprise that some wards of the UNRWA’s third generation of schooling  have grown to slaughter women and children, behead babies—as many as 40 babies in one nursery room—put live babies in ovens to bake them alive, cut fetuses out of the bodies of living pregnant mothers and then stab the mothers and babies to death? UNRWA literally has allowed them to be dehumanized.
    Indeed, why is the UNRWA running “refugee” camps for people who claim to be living in their own land? If Gaza really is their land, how can they be “refugees” there?  And why is the United States bankrolling these camps when wealthy Arab oil sheikhdoms barely contribute?
    According to U.N. records, the United States now finances more than one-third^[2] of the cost of operating the UNRWA. Here are some of the U.N.’s 2022 numbers

    Why does the United States give 28-32 times the amount Kuwait and Qatar do? Or 13 times the amount of Saudi Arabia? And where are all the other Arab countries on the list? What do they know that Americans, the Germans, and the European Union are too foolish to grasp?
    All the world’s other refugees are lumped together and served by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR serves the needs of more than 35 million^[3] refugees in 135 countries.^[4] By contrast, Arabs in Gaza and Judea-Samaria alone get their own agency, UNRWA.

Antisemitism, anybody?
    They live in the land they claim is theirs, yet present as “refugees.” That’s like saying that Gov. Newsom is a California refugee. Today’s Gazans are not refugees. At most, they are the grandchildren of refugees.
    At that rate, I am a refugee from Poland and Russia (as a grandson of refugees from the tsar). Which U.N. agency is out there to support me and the other 5 million American Jewish third-generation refugees from the tsar? Or the 250,000 American Sephardic Jewish refugees from Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Inquisition?
    The UNRWA’s largest budget item is its school system, comprising 58% of its budget^[5] and some two-thirds of its staff. We now know^[6] that at least 10% of that staff^[7]—1,200 staffers—are associated with Hamas, 190 are active terrorists, and many were involved in the Oct. 7 massacres and seizing of hostages.
    Between 1947 and 1950, approximately 900,000 Jewish refugees^[8] were driven from Arab countries in the Middle East. There was no United Nations agency to serve their needs. Rather, they were absorbed directly into the Israeli polity, and today they even comprise leaders of Israel.
    Throughout the current Hamas-Gaza War, these Arab “refugee camps” under United Nations auspices have emerged as terror centers where Hamas, Islamic Jihad and related terrorists ran wild, stocking arms, building bomb-making factories, drilling 500 miles of underground terror tunnels, and recruiting and training children educated at UNRWA schools to detonate themselves.
    And the American taxpayer is the chief bankroller.
    It is unfathomable that America continues pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a U.N. program that has institutionalized dependency among four generations of Arabs while the oil princes barely contribute. Why do Westerners throw away all those tax dollars? 

 Anyone? Anyone?^[9]
    The United States and a host of other countries including but not limited to^[10] the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Finland, Italy, France, Canada, Australia, Iceland, the Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Switzerland, and New Zealand, acted to suspend their UNRWA payments.
    That is not enough. They need to terminate—not just “suspend”—those payments and cut off UNRWA immediately. It will be more humane to cut off UNRWA funding than to continue funding their schools that
teach children to cut off people’s heads.
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References
1. Mothers celebrating their sons blowing themselves up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJFzj0OsUno

2. United States now finances more than one-third..
https://www.unrwa.org/how-you-can-help/how-we-are-funded

3. …more than 35 million refugees…
https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-protect/refugees

4. ..135 countries…
https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr5. …58 percent of its budget…
https://www.unrwa.org/how-you-can-help/how-we-spend-funds

5. …58 percent of its budget…
https://www.unrwa.org/how-you-can-help/how-we-spend-funds

6. … We now know…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA_October_7_controversy

7. … ten percent of that staff..
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/at-least-12-u-n-agency-employees-involved-in-oct-7-attacks-intelligence-reports-say-a7de8f36?mod=hp_lead_pos1

8. … 900,000 Jewish refugees
https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-israelis-are-refugees-from-arab-lands-middle-east-history-9cf540f6

9. Ben Stein’s “Anyone, Anyone…” Vodoo Economics lecture in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA

10. … countries including but not limited to…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA_October_7_controversy 

Rabbi Dov Fischer is rav of Young Israel of Orange County, Vice President of Coalition for Jewish Values, and senior contributing editor at The American Spectator. To join any of his online classes, email him at rabbi@yioc.org.