(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)
The Trudeau government is funding an organization whose members include neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and public figures who openly call for violence against Jews.
Last Friday, the government announced it would send $50 million of taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an organization that is supposed to provide much-needed social services to Palestinian people.
Operating under the auspices of the United Nations, UNRWA has become a rogue agency. It fails to uphold basic UN principles, refuses oversight and due diligence over its spending, and continues its close and overlapping relationship with the Islamist terror group Hamas.
UNRWA has a well-documented and sordid history of supporting terrorism.
Since at least the early 2000s, UNRWA has used its operations as a cover for Palestinian militants, using UN ambulances to smuggle weapons to fighters and hosting terrorist meetings in UN buildings.
After a UN ambulance driver was caught carrying weapons and admitted to working for Hamas, UNRWA promised to change.
In 2014, however, UNRWA was once again caught aiding and facilitating Hamas terrorism. International journalists filmed Hamas terrorists launching rockets beside UN buildings and storing weapons in UNRWA buildings in Gaza.
Hamas is a banned terrorist group in Canada; its leaders incite violence against Jews, pay cash rewards to terrorists who kill Jews, and repeatedly rejects any peace proposal with Israel.
Hamas doesn’t merely stand in the way of peace, it actively engages in war and prolongs the conflict that keeps the Palestinian people living in misery.
Sadly, the problems with UNRWA run even deeper than its ties to Hamas.
As reported by the independent organization UN Watch, UNWRA staff members have been caught posting praise to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
“Despite its claims to neutrality, if you see their regular social media posts on Twitter and Facebook, it’s clear UNRWA has become the largest and most energetic anti-Israel agency,” said UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.
“UN Watch research has exposed dozens and dozens of UNRWA teachers and staffers celebrating the terrorist kidnapping of Israeli teenagers, cheering rockets being fired at Israeli civilian centres, endorsing various forms of violence, erasing Israel from the map, praising Hitler and posting his photo, and posting overtly anti-Semitic videos, caricatures, and statements,” said Neuer.
UNRWA denies these accusations. But UN Watch released a report, Poisoning Palestinian Children, that provides evidence to back these claims.
“Hitler our beloved,” wrote one UNRWA teacher with a glorified photo of the Nazi leader. “Hitler the great,” wrote another.
A third UNRWA teacher posted a photo of Hitler with the quote: “I could have killed all the world’s Jews, but I left some so that the world would know why I killed them.” An UNWRA principal replied, “Should not have left any of them.”
Canada cut all funding to UNRWA under the previous Conservative government, but under Trudeau, Canada has reinstated its funding to the tune of least $75 million since 2016.
It appears that Trudeau is willing to overlook UNRWA’s grotesque behaviour and reinforce the standard that Palestinian leaders can get away with violence, terrorism and anti-Semitism.
If a group of people including neo-Nazis and anti-Semites were operating in Canada, Trudeau would not hesitate to condemn and chastise this organization, rightly so.
But thanks to Trudeau’s confused moral relativism and his government’s obsession with identity politics, Palestinian Islamists get a pass.
When it comes to funding Islamist extremists and jihadist terrorists, as we’ve seen time and time against, it seems there’s no group too…(READ MORE)
