26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future

What UNRWA hath wrought in Jerusalem: From a documentary film made by the Center for Near East Policy Research [Click YouTube to view it now]

(UPDATE: After reading this post, you may be interested in this follow-up piece of ours: "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...")

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Nowi przywódcy Hamasu w Gazie i co to oznacza dla edukacji ku coraz gorszej przyszłości") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

One of the ugliest dimensions of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel is the tight, bear-hug relationship that exists between the oddest of United Nations agencies - UNRWA - and the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. There's fresh and disturbing evidence today for those willing to look, as opposed to those who systematically look away, preferring not to know.

The United Nations has a major stake in taking care of the world's refugees. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is based in Geneva and has won two Nobel Peace Prizes (1954 and 1981). Its origins were not so auspicious. It began life as a creature of UN General Assembly Resolution 319 (IV) in December 1949 with a mandate to operate for three years. That was later broadened by additional UNGA resolutions until today. Its mission is

to provide, on a non-political and humanitarian basis, international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions for them... [source]

A person would have to be especially mean to object to goals like those. Giving support on a humanitarian, non-political basis - what could be more appropriate? Providing them with protection, and especially for their children - the most helpless of the helpless - is often the thing that fragile, dispossessed people most lack. And seeking a solution? Well - obviously.

Which brings us to the Palestinian Arabs who, uniquely among all people of the world classified as refugees, are not served at all by UNHCR.

Is this a screaming injustice? No. That's because they, and only they, among all the world's unhappy people with a deep grievance, have a "refugee" agency all their own. And, as we noted in an earlier blog post ["14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"], what an agency it is. Just to highlight some key points:

• The odd distinction: UNHCR deals with all the world's refugees except for those addressed by UNRWA. UNHCR has by far the larger work load but a staff (of about 9,700) that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's.
• The astounding disparity in resoources: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]
• The sheer vastness of the UNRWA payroll: UNRWA's latest headcount was "over 30,000... most of them Palestine refugees and a small number of international staff, in two headquarter offices (Gaza and Amman), five field offices (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and West Bank), and in four Representative/Liaison Offices (New York, Geneva, Brussels and Cairo)" ["Working at UNRWA" - accessed this morning]. It's an open secret that many, probably most, of those on the UNRWA payroll do essentially nothing. It's a welfare scheme designed to subsidize Palestinian Arab indolence and lack of productivity - on the West's nickle. Until this decade, almost no Arab money ever arrived at UNRWA.
• Calculated opacity: Almost all other U.N. agencies report to an executive board, allowing at least some chance of functional oversight. UNRWA reports directly to the entire 193-member General Assembly, where responsibility is broadly dispersed and easily avoided. According to a paper in 2010 by the agency's own chief of legal affairs, Lance Bartholomeusz, UNRWA enjoys the added flexibility of having no clearly defined mission: "its mandate is not conveniently stated in one place and must be derived from all other relevant resolutions and requests."
• Perpetual non-motion: Thus unencumbered, UNRWA has ensured its own survival by transforming itself into the patron of Palestinian grievance, conferring refugee status down the generations... ["The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas", Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal, August 07, 2014] 

Beyond all the anomalies and the waste, corruption and inefficiency in this truly grotesque picture, there's also the matter of the identity of interests shared by (a) UNRWA and (b) the Islamist terrrorists of Hamas. This again is something about which we have written in numerous past blog posts. See for instance "30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?" and the references there to UNRWA's official spokesperson, the unlovely Chris Gunness, who

frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Gunness comes in for well-deserved excoriation in an important 2014 review by researcher David Bedein in the Jerusalem Post analyzing what UNRWA's schools actually impart to the Gazan Arab children who suffer the misfortune of falling into their clutches:

UNRWA’s 30,000 employees make no pretense of neutrality. UNRWA employees are organized in professional unions without any affinity to organizations that advocate peace. In Gaza, the UNRWA workers union and the UNRWA teachers union have elected Hamas in successive elections to lead their unions since 1999, with 93 percent voting for Hamas in the 2012 elections. A mantra that [UNRWA spokesperson Chris] Gunness repeats frequently, most recently on Fox News, is that “there is no evidence that Hamas terrorists are on the payroll of the UN.” However, the European Parliament funded a study that documented Hamas takeover of the UNRWA unions in March 2009... ["One for the Gunness Book of Records: The myth of an UNRWA policy of peace that does not exist", Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2014]

Now for some new revelations, courtesy of a bulletin issued this past Thursday by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.

It refers to elections recently held for the Hamas politbureau, Hamas' peak institution in the Gaza Strip. We wrote ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"] about the identity of the jihadist who emerged as Hamas' new head of operations in that process.

Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan Al-Hindi addresses a protest rally directed
against UNRWA in Gaza, October 2016. The subsequent strike led to
a settlement with UNRWA management. Al-Hindi is flanked
by other Hamas figures [Image Source]

The Amit Report notes that Sinwar was one of fifteen people elected to lead Hamas, and that their ranks are

dominated by members who hold extremist views.

One of those newly-elected extremists, Dr. Suhail Ahmed Hassan al-Hindi, has for the past five years been chairman of UNRWA's staff union in the Gaza Strip - a union controlled by Hamas, and one that has demanded, and gotten via sanctions, strikes, riots and shutdowns, major concessions from UNRWA's management.

Confronting UNRWA on resource issues, budgets and salaries amounts to confronting the donors who fund it. UNRWA's funding throughout its seven decade-long history has been overwhelmingly - almost exclusively - provided by the governments of Western countries, led by the United States. [For background: "05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from?"]

In the most recent such round of demands against UNRWA management in October 2016, Al-Hindi - flanked by key Hamas figures - announced a series of demands including a general strike [see Alreselah (Arabic) October 25, 2016]. That confrontation eventually resulted in a December 2016 "fundamental understanding with UNRWA [that] ended its protests and sanctions" [Amit Report quoting gazaonline.net, December 20, 2016]

The reality of Hamas infiltration of UNRWA gets some minor degree of media attention from time to time, but generally is resolved by the Hamas side being bellicose and noisy and the UNRWA side backing down. In 2009, for instance, John Ging, an Irish lawyer serving as director at the time of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, threatened to fire UNRWA employees who belonged to Hamas or organizations with similar terrorist agendas [background here] after those affiliations emerged and got some attention. The threat was never carried out and he left the position. (He has been at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York since February 2011.)

This is relevant to Dr. al-Hindi. In addition to his labor relations position at UNRWA, he holds down a day job as principal of an UNRWA education facility, Palestine Boys' Elementary School. An October 5, 2011 report on the English-language Ma'an News Agency website mentions his key role

Al-Hindi stands outside UNRWA headquarters in
Gaza on October 5, 2011 as he leads a teachers'
strike against the UN agency  [Image Source]

Thousands of teachers on Wednesday protested at UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City over the dismissal of a union official, a Ma'an correspondent reported. The Local Staff Union called for the general strike on Wednesday, the second such action in a week, to protest at UNRWA's suspension of the head of the union, Suhail al-Hindi. Hamas sources said the UN agency had accused Hindi of meeting with Hamas political officials. Buses took some 7,000 teachers employed at UNRWA-run schools to UN headquarters in Gaza city where they held a sit-in, calling for an end to "UNRWA political punishment of employees." "Death rather than humiliation" read a banner held by striking teachers. "Deception, lying and hypocrisy have become the core values of UNRWA," read another.
The strike affected all of UNRWA's 243 schools in Gaza. Hindi told the teachers he would stand against "oppression and injustice" but added that Palestinians saw UNRWA as a symbol of the cause of refugees and that its role should be preserved "until the Israeli occupation is removed" ...Chris Gunness, UNRWA's chief spokesman in Jerusalem, said disputes should be resolved internally and not through actions that undermine agency operations and services to refugees in Gaza.

Pretty clearly, Gunness and UNRWA were aware then, six years ago, that Al-Hindi was a leading Hamas figure. But they had no problems taking him off suspension, and retaining his services in all the years since then.

Al-Hindi's name appears on the list of the members of Hamas' newly-elected political bureau published this month in the Palestinian media. The Amit Report calls this mention "reliable" (attributed to a "senior Hamas source" and quotes the Quds Press news agency in support), which says the same thing. But look what happened:

After his election had been publicly announced, Dr. al-Hindi issued a series of vigorous denials, claiming he had not been elected to the bureau. He even claimed he planned to sue those responsible for the reports. So far, Hamas has not formally related to the issue of his election... His vigorous denials may be the result of the fact that publicizing his election will make difficulties for him (and Hamas) in dealing with UNRWA. In the past UNRWA objected to its staff belonging to Hamas or other organizations, although the agency never took decisive action to enforce its objections. [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

The report makes some important observations about what this means in terms of the future of Gaza's children:

The election of Dr. Suhail al-Hindi to Hamas' political bureau in the Gaza Strip is another illustration of Hamas' deep penetration into the Gaza Strip's educational system and of the great power of its activists in UNRWA institutions in the Strip. That allows Hamas to systematically indoctrinate Gazan school children with its extremist Islamist ideology. In addition, Hamas' great influence on the educational system in the Gaza Strip enables it to hold paramilitary activities within schools, training young children to join Hamas and the ranks of its military wing. Since Hamas is the power ruling the Gaza Strip, its ideological and military activities in the educational system are not curbed either by UNRWA... or by the Palestinian Authority(which is formally responsible for the educational system in the Gaza Strip, but as in many other governmental areas, its actual influence is limited). [Amit Report, February 23, 2017]

UNRWA itself declares proudly that it operates 252 schools in the Gaza Strip, serving more than 240,400 school students:

These children grow up in bleak conditions, frequently surrounded by poverty and violence. School provides them with one place where they are able to learn the skills for a better future.

We believe the numbers but the "better future" claim is preposterous as we have noted over and again when referring to the culture of terrorism, murder and suicide that is now deeply and very evidently ingrained in the lives of Gaza's children. See "27-Oct-16: Who put those knives into the hands of these two little Palestinian Arab boys?" and "10-Feb-15: The Islamists of Gaza: Yet again preparing children to kill and be killed" and "15-Jan-14: When a society praises itself for turning its children into human bombs, whose problem is that?"

UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees in reality serves as a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news. By their own reckoning, UNRWA's people and budget play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.

As misconceived, camouflaged and fraudulent as UNRWA's role in the disaster happening daily in Gaza's education system is, UNRWA does not deserve all the blame for the horror. Other contributors, including UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, Save the Children, Arab Council for Childhood Development deserve long-overdue attention for the unforgivable and complicit silence and apathy that serve as their indictment.

22-Mar-16: Speaking human rights truth to power at UNHRC

The Human Rights Council in Geneva
[Image Source: UN/Jean-Marc Ferré]

Kay Wilson had two minutes to speak to an assembly of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday (Monday). Here's the text, slightly modified from an article on the Israel National News website today, and a video below it.

I’m Kay Wilson, an Israeli Jewish tour guide and educator for StandWithUs. In December 2010, I was gagged, bound and held at knife-point for half an hour by two Palestinian terrorists, then butchered 13 times with a machete while watching my American Christian friend, Kristine Luken, hacked to death before my eyes because her executioners thought she was Jewish. The United Nations Human Rights Council immorally whitewashes terrorism as helplessness and frustration. As a survivor, I know that to be shackled in perpetual victimhood is not kind, helpful, moral or true. Personally, I’ve not also taken out my frustrations by holding Arabs hostage, tying them up and hacking them to death. Through the likes of their social media and educational institutions, the Palestinian Authority incites people to believe that Jews are unworthy of life. The incentive: American and European taxpayers’ money given to the Palestinian Authority, who rewards incarcerated murderers with monthly execution stipends.
Avoiding duty, and with pathological bias, you blame Israel, a Jewish democratic state of thriving coexistence, in which an Israeli Arab Muslim surgeon saved my life. Gagged with prejudice, bound with bigotry or held hostage by hate, and ineffective to do the goodness that will enhance people’s lives, may this council be set free, liberated to embrace both the integrity and impartiality needed to make our region a better place.

Here's the two minute video:

We have had reason to comment in the past on how Kay "passionately and articulately walks her audience through the before, the during and the after of being murdered - and surviving." See our post: "16-Jun-15: Kay Wilson's revenge". Also this: "30-Dec-13: Pretend walls, twisted messages: praising evil, condemning the innocents". 

The UNHCR defines its role as being

responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe and for addressing situations of human rights violations and make recommendations on them [UNHCR website]

Around the globe might be an extravagant way of describing its actual focus. Since UNHCR's creation in 2006, it had managed to condemn one country, Israel, 62 times; that's more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world combined [source]. The council's monthly agenda includes one specific item - what it terms the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied territories” - every single month. That makes it the only region in the world getting that kind of attention. How well this safeguards "human rights around the globe" is a mystery.

Its membership is currently Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bolivia, Botswana, Burundi, China, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Togo, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Venezuela, Viet Nam.

Ponder the list as you note that, in the UNHCR's own words, the members

are elected by the majority of members of the General Assembly of the United Nations through direct and secret ballot. The General Assembly takes into account the candidate States’ contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights, as well as their voluntary pledges and commitments in this regard.

Note also that Saudi Arabia, a chronic abuser of human rights, a place where 47 people were judicially beheaded in a single day some weeks ago, a seat-holder at the UNHCR because of a secret vote-fixing deal with the United Kingdom, and (absurdly) the elected head of UNHRC's Consultative Group, sees itself as the UNHCR's next president and no one within the organization seems to see that as a bitter joke.

And a reminder to all of us that the very most basic of human rights is the right to stay alive.

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

From "How We Are Financing the Suffering of the Palestinians"
Click here to view the video

One factor beyond all others ensures that the Palestinian Arab cause manages to sustain its momentum nearly seventy years after the UN decision to split the compact British-occupied territory of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael into two countries: the existence of UNRWA.

An expose published a few days ago in an Arab publication, Al-Araby al-Jadeed (published in London - we were made aware of its existence by the invaluable Daily Alert), takes a sympathetic look at the price being paid by UNRWA's existence - who loses and who wins (and there are plenty of winners). Some extracts from "The Nakba profiteering cliques", authored by Samer Jaber:

• The word [profiteering] refers to the practice whereby seemingly unfair profits are made through exploiting certain conditions of vulnerability. Profiteering does not necessarily involve manipulative or corrupt activities, but can simply occur by virtue of being in the right place at the right time...
• The foremost of these is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is a direct provider of services to refugees. UNRWA employs more than 30,000 people, including 28,000 Palestinians, and has a two-year budget of $1.4 billion for 2014-15. A large percentage of this comes from Western European and North American countries on a voluntary basis - which enables them to indirectly influence UNRWA policies. 
• For UNRWA to sustain its funding it has to maintain the principle of neutrality, which really means maintaining the status quo..
• [T]he decision-making ranks and most middle-line administrators are comprised of international staff assisted by local middle class personnel. The managerial ranks have developed vested interests, including high salaries and generous perks based on UN standards.
• UNRWA has, however, been suffering chronic budget shortages - though these tend not to affect the higher management ranks. Funding shortfalls almost always seem to lead to cuts in services to refugees.

It has to be said that it's refreshing to see some core truths about this bizarre, malevolent and damaging institution exposed, and by a Palestinian Arab analyst at that.

We would have appreciated some focus on the fact that budgetary funding for the billion-dollar UNRWA colossus has come almost exclusively from Western countries, which begs the question so rarely asked: if Arab states claim the Palestinian cause is dearer to them than life itself, why are they not at the forefront of ensuring a little less suffering by their Palestinian Arab cousins? [Some background on the money aspect here.]

The question gets magnified vastly when we take account of how parts of the Arab world have stratospheric cash resources, and ruling families, wealthier than almost anyone else on the planet, who can decide at the snap of a well-jeweled finger, to underwrite the education and health services that UNRWA keeps running out of cash to deliver. A recent article in Time Magazine ["Why Qatar is Spending $200 Billion On Soccer", July 11, 2013] gives some perspective on the sheer money power of Qatar's owners:

Qatar will spend 286 times more money per capita on the World Cup than Russia will on the most expensive Olympics ever, the Sochi games. The country will spent 1,852 times more capita to stage the same event that South Africa did in 2010. [Time Magazine]

The same article goes on to quote a Qatar expert from the University of Denver who says: "The World Cup is an amazing opportunity, and Qatar will do everything to make sure it works."

Where there's a will, there's a way. And when you want to preserve misery at all costs, leverage it to ensure a ready supply of human bombs and other terrorists, there's an ever-willing cast of international figures, NGOs and the many arms of the UN who are evidently only too pleased to be of assistance - or to be exploited by others with more detailed agendas. We touched on some aspects of this just a few weeks ago ["04-Jun-15: Exploding for decades: UNRWA needs more, more, more"], and dozens more times before that. And a recent video [click here] explains it reasonably well in a mere 3m40s.

Understanding the Palestinian Arab leadership's sociopathic obsession with terror requires some familiarity with the extremely shabby story of UNRWA [some background here].

(Here's a shout-out to to UNRWA's indefatigable "Spokesperson, Director of Advocacy & Strategic Communications", Christopher Gunness, to straighten us out and indicate a more UNRWA-friendly way of looking at this.)

19-Apr-13: Refugees, hypocrisy and unity: just follow the money

Syrian victims of Syrian barbarism: Bab al-Salam refugee camp
in Syria near the Turkish border January 10, 2013
[Image Source: Reuters/Abdalghne Karoofab]

The Arab-on-Arab bloodbath just across Israel's northern border goes on and on, and with it the incredible - and worsening - suffering of ordinary Syrians. That is, in significant ways, a function of politically-correct but morally repugnant decision making of the 'world community'.

The decades-long handling of the Palestinian Arabs as a uniquely deserving cause is revealed for the scam it always was. People are paying with their lives for the double-talk about the 'refugees'. Those people are not only Arabs, but in many cases they are also the close kin of the undeserving beneficiaries of the Palestinian Arab Victimhood industry.

Evelyn Gordon writes ("How UNRWA Steals Money from Those Who Need It Most") about the current threat by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to halt all relief operations in Syria and for the benefit of Syrian refugees. 1.3 million of them are being looked after until now; the number - given the ongoing unchecked savagery throughout Syria - is certain to grow.

$1.5 billion was pledged to the UN agency by donors earlier this year; only $400 million has turned up. That's a shortfall of more than 70%. What can we learn from this?

For anyone familiar with the way Arab national giving works, this is a constant: fancy rhetoric and high flying speeches about Arab solidarity and Arab unity and Arab generosity, followed by... not much. Is there a shortage of available cash in the oil-soaked Arab world? Not really. (We wrote about the phenomenon of $600 million recreational yachts a few days ago. See 10-Apr-13: "I cannot help but cry out long live the descendants of apes and pigs")

 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that unless more money arrives (read: unless the promises of funding are honored, which so far has not happened), UNHCR is going to stop distributing food to refugees in Lebanon from May. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with the largest population of Syrian refugees, has said it will close its borders to more of them; it cannot cope without aid.

Now pause. 

Evelyn Gordon writes about a different (a very different) UN agency that deals with refugees, one that

enjoys comfortable funding of about $1 billion a year to help a very different group of refugees–refugees who generally live in permanent homes rather than flimsy tents in makeshift camps; who have never faced the trauma of flight and dislocation, having lived all their lives in the place where they were born; who often have jobs that provide an income on top of their refugee benefits; and who enjoy regular access to schooling, healthcare and all the other benefits of non-refugee life... Their generous funding continues undisturbed even as Syrian refugees are facing the imminent loss of such basics as food and fresh water. I am talking, of course, about UNRWA.

People who have never heard this before think we're making this up, so please read carefully and verify: 

It has long been clear that UNRWA–which deals solely with Palestinian refugees, while UNHCR bears responsibility for all other refugees on the planet–is a major obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. Since, unlike UNHCR, it grants refugee status to the original refugees’ descendants in perpetuity, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from under 700,000 in 1949 to over five million today, even as the world’s non-Palestinian refugee population has shrunk from over 100 million to under 30 million. Moreover, while UNHCR’s primary goal is to resettle refugees, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee in its history... It has thereby perpetuated and exacerbated the Palestinian refugee problem to the point where it has become the single greatest obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement... Unfortunately for the Syrians, it seems that many of the world’s self-proclaimed humanitarians prefer harming Israel to helping those who need it most. [Evelyn Gordon]

Last year, we asked [in a post called "5-Jun-12: If there's one single thing about UNRWA that we wish people understood, it's this"] a question that, if it were to get an honest answer, might point to a genuine breakthrough in resolving our neighbourhood's problems:

If (to borrow the laughable claims made by its many supporters) UNRWA's work is so important, if it brings us closer to peace, if it restores dignity to the lives of dispossessed and destitute Arabs, then why, when you look at the top twenty list of donors to this agency that exists entirely from donations, do you see that only one is Arab (the Islamic Development Bank). What is it about UNRWA that the Arab states understand better than the nations and tax-payers of the West?

Allow us to restate this in a simpler way:

Arab leaders, many of whom preside over phenomenal cash resources, (a) simply don't give to the strange UN agency that exists specifically to support the most beloved cause that exists in the Arab world - the Palestinians. And (b) they fail to honour their pledges (as we noted above) to fund the one organization that can do something to relieve the genuine suffering of the Syrians, tens of thousands of whom have been killed in the past two years' Arab-on-Arab fighting and millions of whom are now desperate to find shelter.

The role of rampant hypocrisy in explaining what happens in global politics is under-appreciated.

2-Jun-07: Victimhood of Pal-Arab children... on film

From today's New York Sun:

In 2004, 24-year-old Brooke Goldstein spent her summer in the West Bank filming more than five hours of in-person interviews with terrorists — all of which she conducted without a bodyguard and without a weapon... She interviewed suicide bombers' families and children, who aspire to "martyrdom." The resulting film, "The Making of a Martyr," will screen as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival on Saturday and Tuesday. In the interviews, parents of suicide bombers sit in living rooms adorned with posters of their dead, and teenage terrorists sit with their hands tensely gripping machine guns that rest against their knees as they answer Ms. Goldstein's questions... The fanaticism was worse than she ever imagined. "The most shocking thing was reconciling the normal appearance of these kids and what was coming out of their mouths," she said. "I was holding these beautiful children in my lap, and my translator was translating words of hate."

Read it all.

In the recent past here in Jerusalem, we've had the opportunity to personally raise the appalling subject of what Palestinian Arab society is doing to its own children. The context was face-to-face private conversations with officials of the UN. (We have never written about these meetings before, but it's time we did.)

The most recent was with Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, in April.

A second was with Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last November.

The third, and by far the most disturbing, was with John Dugard, Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, two years ago (UPDATE February 2, 2008: I wrote about how that went).

All three individuals are intelligent, over-achieving professionals with impressive careers behind them. And all three produced not the smallest indication that anyone at the UN or anywhere else plans to do anything about catastrophic Arab abuse of its own youth.

Seems there are far more important issues on the agenda of these officials and their employer.

21-Jul-06: This war grinds on

Israel's firepower is huge as unfortunately it has to be. Thus, it strikes us that when the Israeli authorities say what they have done in the battlefield, they ought to be believed. Clearly they can do far more harm to individuals and property than they do; that they don't is because there's a moral conscience driving Israel's military decisions. So if they report on what they did, it's likely to be true. Anyone who has followed news reports for years, as we have, knows that over time, Israel's version of events usually turns out to have been the truthful one.

So in view of the know-nothing imagery exemplified in our last posting, and taking account of howls (such as from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) about wanton destruction of property and lives by the IDF, it's appropriate for us to place the IDF's version on the record. Since so few other sources seem to be doing that, and since we get the IDF's press releases, we'll share what we know.

On Thursday July 20th, more than 50 Katyusha missiles were launched by Hezbollah's terror

forces on Israel's towns, cities, settlements and inidividuals. Not one, as far as we can tell - and this is not the IDF speaking - was directed at or struck a single Israel military installation. For the Nasrallah storm-troopers, this has never been about inflicting strategic damage on the IDF, but on terrorising Israeli society.

More than 900 missiles have so far landed in Israel (about the size of Rhode Island) in the seven days since Thursday July 13th.

The IDF says it carried out about 150 aerial attacks on hostile targets yesterday (Thursday). These included:

• 16 different Hezbollah headquarter facilities, structures and bases
• 3 Hezbollah ammunition warehouses
• 6 Hezbollah missile launchers
• More than 100 "access routes used by the Hezbollah" to use the IDF's press release language. (This presumably means roads and bridges. If it were up to us, we would be more forthcoming and less shy about stating in plain language what needs to be stated. Hezbollah's main weaponry is military-use missiles that are being used to rain terror down on civilian settlements. These need to be moved from place to place by heavy truck, and if the road or bridge is taken out or otherwise rendered unusable, mobility of missiles is diminshed. End of story.)
• 21 vehicles that served Hezbollah for the launching of missiles. This included one vehicle believed to a Fajer 3 launcher. (It's the Fajer 3 which Nasrallah means when he speaks of "surprises" waiting for us Israelis.)

One further development: a wedding took place inside one of the hundreds of Israeli bomb-shelters. Mazal tov to Maya Lougasi and her groom Shlomi Bouskila from Kiryat Shmona, pictured in the snapshot above. In Israel, life is always preferable to death. (Nasrallah says openly that he takes the opposite view.)

The southern front has not been quiet either. Four missiles were fired at IDF forces and Qassam fire was directed at an Israeli town in the western Negev area near Gaza, wounding an Israeli civilian who was hospitalized. The IDF has been firing on Qassam launch sites in the northern Gaza Strip during the past 24 hours. Between Thursday night and Friday morning, IDF forces confirmed hitting 10 armed Palestinian Arabs, some of whom were part of two groups of anti-tank missile launcher cells, and a group of Arab gunmen targeted in aerial attacks as they were attempting to reach and attack IDF forces operating in the area.

Far from the cameras and writing pads of foreign journalists, Israel has been ensuring food and fuel are quietly delivered to the Arabs of the Gaza Strip via the Nahal Oz and Karni crossings (both of which have routinely come under terror attack, with significant loss of Israeli life). Here's what was delivered yesterday, July 20th 2006.

• At Karni crossing: 146 truckloads of basic food items.
• At the Nahal Oz fuel terminal: 370,000 liters of diesel, 90,000 liters of gasoline, 175 tons of natural gas for cooking.

The spokesperson for the coordinator of Israeli government activities in the Territories, Shlomo Dror, was kind enough to make his cell phone number available for anyone wanting to know more. We'll gladly pass it along to anyone willing to write about Israel's ongoing humanitarian concern. There's nowhere near enough light thrown on the incompetent, kleptocratic leadership in Gaza and the catastrophic state of the society in their care.

Remember the headlines last month about the Palestinian Authority tottering on the edge of collapse, unable to pay the salaries of the tens of thousands of make-work "employees"? Now imagine how things might look if a fraction of the enormous funds Hezbollah has tied up in its arsenal of missiles and weaponry had been diverted to the struggle of their Palestinian brothers. No, not that struggle. We mean the struggle to give their children a better life, education, health, a future. Right, that struggle.

Just imagine.