As if the participation of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) employees in the Hamas rape and beheading festival in Southern Israel Oct. 7 weren’t enough, there’s this from the Times of Israel of Feb 10:
“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip—Beneath the Gaza Strip headquarters of the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known commonly as UNRWA, the Hamas terror group hid one of its most significant assets, the Israeli military has revealed.
“The subterranean data center — complete with an electrical room, industrial battery power banks and living quarters for Hamas terrorists operating the computer servers — was built precisely under the location where Israel would “not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.
“The revelation of the server farm comes amid other accusations of UNRWA collusion with the Gaza-ruling terror group and the entanglement of the UN body that provides welfare and humanitarian services for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and their descendants.”
The photographs of this Hamas data center displayed by the Times of Israel are worth a look. This is no third-world operation and is as up-to-date as you might find at many universities.
The UNRWA is rushing out its denials via its commissioner general (how’d you like that job these days?) Phillippe Lazzarini on X. Among his tidbits we are supposed to believe:
“UNRWA did not know what is under its headquarters in Gaza.”
Translation:
“We only hire the deaf.”
And then there’s this howler:
“UNRWA is a Human [caps his] development and humanitarian organization that does not have the military and security expertise nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or might be under its premises.”
Translation:
“We only hire paraplegics who cannot walk downstairs.”
Meanwhile, the UN Watch organization is reporting as follows:
“WASHINGTON, January 29, 2024—A new UN Watch report exposes a 3000-member Telegram chat group of UNRWA Teachers in Gaza who cheered and celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre while at the same time asking when their UNRWA salaries will be paid.
“Entitled ‘UNRWA’s Terrorgram,’ the new report focuses on 30 UNRWA teachers who among other things called for the execution of Israelis, shared instructions on how to aid Hamas’ efforts, and proclaimed they would like to emulate the teachings that the October 7th terrorists received with their own children.”
But enough. Anyone paying attention knows UNRWA has been in cahoots with terror organizations literally for decades - only now they have been caught with their pants down, so far down they are in the process of falling on their faces.
This time let’s hope they don’t get up.
But they are only the tip of a poisoned spear. Besides being obsessed with Israel (and its destruction) to the extent of monomania, the United Nations has completely betrayed its idealistic origins and become arguably the world’s greatest global scam center.
As a good illustration, we need go back no further than the massive swindle some readers may remember known as the U.N. “Oil-for-Food Programme” (1995) that was intended to allow Iraq to sell oil on the free market but only for the true humanitarian needs of Iraqi citizens.
That’s not exactly how it turned out. It was the scam of scams—to date, the U.N. has not opened the books—with millions, sometimes billions, shipped off to various entities.
But let the late great, journalist Claudia Rosett, who broke much of it for the world, tell just part of the story:
“But at the UN, which ran this program, not a single employee has been prosecuted, or even fired, for the way Oil-for-Food was run—indeed, some have since been promoted. And then there’s the UN retiree, Benon Sevan, who was picked by Kofi Annan to run the program for more than six years—from October 1997 until it ended post-Saddam in November 2003. Sevan was indicted in the U.S. this past January on Oil-for-Food-related charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, following findings in August 2005 by the UN’s own inquiry that he had illicitly benefited from the program. But by then Sevan had already slipped out of New York, in early 2005, while Annan’s Secretariat was assuring the press that he was available to cooperate with investigators. Sevan remains a fugitive from U.S. law on his native Cyprus, protesting his innocence, on full UN pension.
“Kofi Annan, to whom, as Secretary-General, the UN Security Council assigned prime administrative responsibility plus that $1.4 billion budget for running Oil-for-Food, had by early 2006 spun UN transgressions under this program into the phrase ‘if there was a scandal.’ He is now reportedly living well in Geneva, has an office right down the road from the palatial UN complex there, was recently made an honorary knight in Britain, and seems to be collecting and handing out a lot of prizes.”
Today’s U.N. isn’t much different.
It’s not that long ago that its agency the World Health Organization (WHO) operated as a fiefdom of Communist China during COVID-19. The results have been horrific globally as billions have been made while who knows how many suffered. Many of the same people are still in charge.
As most readers know, the U.S. government, actually its taxpayers, is the biggest contributor to the United Nations—$12.5 billion in 2021. What do we, or anyone else for the matter, get for it? (Well, maybe Iran gets to sit occasionally on their Human Rights Council and Russian President Vladimir Putin brought up the U.N., as if it were relevant to anything, in his interview with Tucker Carlson.)
Years ago, at the beginnings of PJTV, maybe 2009, we made a now-vanished comic video called “The Trump UN” that advocated master hotelier Donald Trump take over the UN, paint the Secretariat building gold (we did—in the video) and declare it a luxury hotel for dictators like (then) Yasir Arafat and Mr. Putin to induce them to retire.
I still think it isn’t a bad idea. President Trump, however, has better things to do.
