10-Oct-06: No one at the UN reads this blog. Here's the proof

Ignore our posting from yesterday about the two Pal-Arab men intercepted yesterday with bombs strapped to their bodies at an Israeli security checkpoint.

Ignore our posting of the day before about another Pal-Arab man shot after trying to stab Israelis at another Israeli security checkpoint.

Ignore everything you've heard about Palestinian Arab gunmen, children with bombs strapped to their undersized chests, women with kitchen knives slipped into the folds of their robes, Red Crescent ambulances with explosives hidden behind false floors -- all intercepted at Israeli checkpoints, en route to their destiny with death. Sometimes their own death; always the death of Jews.

Ignore them just as the United Nations does. This report issued today puts that matter beyond doubt.

Number of Israeli roadblocks in West Bank up 40 percent in past year: U.N.

The Associated Press
Published: October 11, 2006
JERUSALEM The number of Israeli military roadblocks in the West Bank grew by nearly 40 percent in the past year, part of an increasingly sophisticated lockdown that disrupts all aspects of Palestinian life, a U.N. aid agency said Wednesday. The placement of these checkpoints and unmanned physical obstacles means the West Bank is increasingly being carved up into separate parts, with travel between them becoming more and more difficult, said David Shearer, head of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jerusalem. In all, there were 528 checkpoints and obstacles in the West Bank, up from 376 in August 2005, Shearer said, presenting new statistics. The West Bank's Jordan Valley is now entirely off limits to Palestinians who are not residents of that area, except for those with permits to work in the valley's Jewish settlements. The checkpoints are multiplying as Israel pushes ahead with the separation barrier it is building along — and at some points inside — the West Bank. Some 50,000 Palestinians find themselves on the wrong side of the barrier, meaning they are cut off from the rest of the West Bank, the report said. Israel has also deepened the separation between the northern, middle and southern parts of the West Bank, the report said. "We are seeing a continuing closing down, locking down of Palestinian areas," he said. Shearer said tight travel restrictions were also in place during the height of the Palestinian uprising, between 2000-2003, when dozens of suicide bombers carried out attacks in Israel. "Since then it's become much more systematic, much more sophisticated in terms of monitoring Palestinian movement and closing Palestinian movement," he said. "The West Bank, for example, is effectively being chopped up into three big areas ... and there are pockets within those areas where people also can't move." Capt. Adam Avidan, spokesman for the military's civil administration in the West Bank, said in a statement that Israel tries "as much as possible to preserve the Palestinians' way of life and to avoid hurting innocent civilians in its war against terrorism."

The office responsible for putting out this appalling piece of one-eyed, one-sided pseudo-analysis is the United Nations Office for Co-ordinating Humanitarian Affairs.

Their Jerusalem operation costs the UN $3 million a year. Evidently an insufficient sum, since they are unable to find the time, the resources or the wit to analyze the daily small and large acts of terrorism directed at Jewish Israelis and the IDF security checkpoints that are strikingly effective at slowing down, stopping and intercepting jihadist terrorists.

How can self-respecting UN civil servants sign off on a report to their employers and not mention this effectiveness? Not a word.

Do they find the effectiveness of IDF security measures a threat to their outlook on life and political convictions? Do they not consider the saving of Israeli lives a matter worth including in a report of this scope? Are they oblivious to the blood-soaked consequences of such highly selective, prejudice-laden moral outrage?

Shame on them, shame on David Shearer and shame on the UN bureaucracy that plays along with this pretend-objectivity without protest.