30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]

From the video

Someone ought to send a Whatsapp to the diplomats who deliver high-sounding pronouncements in those endless United Nations debates searching for peace and enhanced human dignity and refer them to the video clip below. It's produced by The Center for Near East Policy Research (there's more background on the YouTube page that hosts the clip).

It's new and focuses on a UN agency that is actually doing far more in relation to peace than all those speeches put together.

Trouble is, what the UN agency in question is doing in relation to peace is the exact opposite of seeking peace or making peace happen. It may, in fact, be the single most effective organization in the world for ensuring that deaths and extreme misery on both sides of the Arab conflict with Israel keep happening.

That agency, funded almost exclusively by Western countries to the tune of $1,200 million annually, is called UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Its continued existence, nearly seventy years after it was set up as a temporary fix for a relatively small problem, is part of a bizarre narrative in which a legion of UN insiders keep marketing it as part of the solution when in reality it is a core and essential component of the problem.



Anyone sincerely concerned to save the lives of the children who appear in this video will immediately appreciate that something is seriously, lethally wrong with the entire UNRWA operation. The fact that its official spokesperson has a penchant for ad hominem attacks on its critics (including nasty and largely misleading dismissals of the individuals behind the making of the video itself) is part of the problem. A non-trivial part, but just a part. This plot has many villains.

Diplomats and public officials of every one of the countries that pay lip service to what UNRWA does without facing up to the ongoing catastrophe that it perpetuates are as culpable as UNRWA's spokesperson and its 30,000 (yes) school principals, teachers and staff people.

That's just one of the factors that brought us to write this:

"19-Jun-13: We actually do understand why Arab states put almost no money in the Palestinian Arab "refugee" fund pot. We just don't get why the US does." 

And this:

"03-Jul-15: Misery, terrorism and money-making: a cynics' guide".

There is no hope for peace - absolutely none - until what UNRWA does daily is understood and stopped.