Jennifer Hanin . com

The United Nations has a long­stand­ing pas­time that is vir­tu­ally unknown. It’s not a noble one like elim­i­nat­ing blood­shed in the Congo, or restor­ing law in Soma­lia or even peace­mak­ing in Kash­mir. It’s not focused on con­demn­ing coun­tries with appalling human rights abuses like China, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Ara­bia, Sudan and Zim­babwe. Oh, no. It has noth­ing to do with enforc­ing inter­na­tional law, secu­rity, eco­nomic devel­op­ment, social progress, peace or pro­mot­ing dia­logue. The hobby that the UN has cham­pi­oned for the last five decades is demo­niz­ing and dele­git­imiz­ing a tiny demo­c­ra­tic coun­try called Israel.

And guess what? Israel has more col­lege grad­u­ates per capita than any other coun­try in the world. It is also the most attrac­tive coun­try in the Mid­dle East for ven­ture cap­i­tal and pri­vate equity investors accord­ing to a recent sur­vey by Ernst & Young. So why is the UN tar­get­ing a pro­gres­sive coun­try nick­named “the Sil­i­con Val­ley of the Mid­dle East” for its life­sav­ing med­ical and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments? Meet two pace­set­ters in our nation’s cap­i­tal that are pas­sion­ate about expos­ing the UN’s scape­goat­ing of Israel and Jews for what it is: anti­semitism on steroids.

Part 4: Daniel Pol­lak and Joshua Lon­don, Zion­ist Orga­ni­za­tion of America

Daniel Pol­lak and Joshua Lon­don spend their days strength­en­ing U.S. – Israeli rela­tions through edu­ca­tional activ­i­ties, pub­lic affairs pro­grams, sup­port­ing pro-Israel leg­is­la­tion on Capi­tol Hill and com­bat­ing anti-Israeli bias in the media, text­books and cam­puses. In their roles at the Zion­ist Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­ica (ZOA), Pol­lak and Lon­don are call­ing atten­tion to a num­ber of issues affect­ing Israel and Jews worldwide.

One issue ZOA loudly opposed was the appoint­ment of an anti-Israel can­di­date to one of America’s top intel­li­gence posts. Due to his rela­tion­ship with the Saudi gov­ern­ment, ties to other total­i­tar­ian regimes like China and prej­u­dice against the state of Israel, the ZOA opposed the selec­tion of Chas W. Free­man as chair­man of the National Intel­li­gence Coun­cil (NIC). Had he remained, Free­man would have had tremen­dous influ­ence shap­ing our National Intel­li­gence Esti­mates (NIEs). His record shows favor towards the Arab world, against sanc­tions on Iran, and sym­pa­thy with sev­eral repres­sive regimes. In his state­ments fol­low­ing his speedy with­drawal, Free­man specif­i­cally men­tioned ZOA as one of the rea­sons that pre­vented him from con­tin­u­ing this job.

In late March 2009, Pol­lak and Lon­don along with ZOA activists urged the United States Con­gress to tighten sanc­tions on Iran and place con­di­tions on U.S. aid to Pales­tini­ans. The ZOA stated that Con­gress should make Pales­tini­ans com­ply with com­mit­ments to “end incite­ment and arrest ter­ror­ists” before receiv­ing the $900 mil­lion that the U.S. pledged in finan­cial assis­tance. But the ZOA faced strong oppo­si­tion from Amer­i­can Israel Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee (AIPAC), whose goal was to pre­vent fur­ther incite­ment. The ZOA calls for greater trans­parency when issu­ing Pales­tin­ian aid so Amer­i­cans know that their tax dol­lars are not lin­ing the pock­ets of terrorists.

Other recent exam­ples of leg­is­la­tion Pol­lak and Lon­don sup­port through ZOA include the Sen­ate approved Com­pre­hen­sive Iran Sanc­tions, Account­abil­ity, and Divest­ment Act of 2009 and the act that pre­vented US fund­ing to the Dur­ban II conference.

Rewind to the UN. Of all the issues Israel faces, the most reoc­cur­ring con­cern is the United Nations dis­parate treat­ment of Israel. ZOA is call­ing atten­tion to UN bod­ies formed solely to extort the Pales­tin­ian cause, con­tinue con­flict in the region and place mas­sive sanc­tions on Israel at every turn. For exam­ple, the UN’s Gen­eral Assem­bly enacted the 22^nd anti-Israel res­o­lu­tion dur­ing its 61^st Ses­sion (2006 – 2007) while not a sin­gle res­o­lu­tion on Sudan’s geno­cide in Dar­fur passed. The bias against Israel in bod­ies like the Gen­eral Assem­bly is palat­able. Each year the Gen­eral Assem­bly passes some 19 res­o­lu­tions against the Jew­ish State and none against mem­ber states that are the most repres­sive regimes in the world.

Con­stant attempts to cen­sure and dis­credit Israel have resulted in the mother of all biases: the Gold­stone Report. Pol­lak and Lon­don along with the ZOA are speak­ing out against the dis­tor­tions and mis­use of evi­dence in this highly con­tro­ver­sial work. Any read of this report shows that it’s yet another fee­ble attempt by the UN to put a stamp of legit­i­macy on its ongo­ing scape­goat­ing of Israel.

On Octo­ber 16, 2009, Colonel Richard Kemp, the for­mer com­man­der of British forces in Afghanistan, spoke up at the UN Emer­gency Ses­sion on the Gold­stone Gaza Report to say just that:

“Dur­ing Oper­a­tion Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safe­guard the rights of civil­ians in a com­bat zone than any other army in the his­tory of warfare.”

Kemp stated, “Israel did so while fac­ing an enemy that delib­er­ately posi­tioned itself and its mil­i­tary capa­bil­ity behind the human shield of the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion.” We know this is true because Hamas on nearly all occa­sions brought women and chil­dren into com­bat zones as soon as they learned Israel planned to strike back. And defense mea­sures were sorely needed con­sid­er­ing that Hamas sent some 50 mis­siles a day into Israel affect­ing 1.5 mil­lion Israelis. Where were Judge Gold­stone and the UN spe­cial com­mit­tee when Hamas forced Israelis and their chil­dren to evac­u­ate sev­eral times a day due to unpro­voked mis­siles that tar­geted civil­ian homes and schools? Talk about vio­lat­ing the Geneva Convention.

Kemp also dis­cussed the extra­or­di­nary mea­sures the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) took to warn Gazan civil­ians by drop­ping over 2 mil­lion leaflets in Ara­bic and mak­ing over 100,000 phone calls. The IDF not only gave away their abil­ity to make sur­prise attacks (which is unheard of in war­fare) but they aborted many mis­sions that could have immo­bi­lized Hamas mil­i­tary capa­bil­ity to pre­vent civil­ian casualties.

This also brings up the fact that there was never a “Gold­stone Report” for casu­al­ties of other major wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet­nam… It again sets up a dou­ble stan­dard where the world can judge Israel dif­fer­ently than any other coun­try defend­ing its bor­ders and cit­i­zens. As Kemp added,

“War is chaos, and full of mis­takes.  There have been mis­takes by the British, the Amer­i­cans and other forces in Afghanistan. And in Iraq. Many of which can be put down to human error. But mis­takes are not war crimes. More than any­thing, the civil­ian casu­al­ties were a con­se­quence of Hamas’s way of fight­ing. Hamas delib­er­ately tried to sac­ri­fice its own civilians.”

For many Israelis, the biased report seemed like busi­ness as usual at the UN. But with mount­ing crit­i­cism over the way the UN con­ducted the Oil-for-Food scan­dal, ignored geno­cide in the Congo, Kash­mir and beyond, and to this day know­ingly spon­sor Hamas-operated Gaza schools, the UN is head­ing the line for human rights abusers. And while the Human Rights Coun­cil replaced the Com­mis­sion on Human Rights (CHR), not much has changed. Recent UN actions once again prove that its long­stand­ing hobby of Israel bash­ing is still fair game. Score?

Out of 11 ses­sions of the Human Rights Coun­cil, 5 focused on Israel

Yet the UN allowed some of the world’s worst human rights abusers — China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Ara­bia, Sudan and Zim­babwe — to go unscathed. Heck, they even let Libya serve as the CHR Chair­man in 2003. So how can any­one believe a UN spon­sored report that claimed Israel tar­geted civil­ians? At best, the com­mit­tee pock­marked the report with dis­crep­an­cies and the authors delib­er­ately ignored pub­licly avail­able evi­dence that refuted its conclusion.

Per­haps the most damn­ing state­ment about the Gold­stone Report is Judge Goldstone’s own remarks in the NY news­pa­per, The For­ward in Octo­ber of last year. Judge Gold­stone said,

“If this were a court of law, there would have been noth­ing proven.”

By admit­ting that, Judge Gold­stone called the report what it is: a 574-paged one-sided account that no judge would take seri­ously. It sets the stage for yet another moral inver­sion where read­ers are primed to believe that Israel is the antag­o­nist in this Israeli-Palestinian epic and Hamas is the pro­tag­o­nist. But the facts don’t sup­port this fantasy.

There are plenty of incon­sis­ten­cies with the Gold­stone report. Wit­nesses who came for­ward were not cross-examined. And there is enough proof to show that some of the tes­ti­mony that Goldstone’s col­leagues heard was not accu­rate. In fact, much of the recorded tes­ti­mony con­tra­dicts state­ments by Hamas or by Pales­tin­ian Islamic jihad.

And where was the inter­na­tional body formed by the HRC when Hamas was fir­ing 150 rock­ets daily into Israel? It’s inter­est­ing that HRC popped up to judge a coun­try defend­ing itself against ter­ror­ists and remained silent when Hamas blasted Israel civil­ians with mor­tar fire and missiles.

Israeli states­man, Dore Gold, dis­missed the notion that IDF killed non­com­bat­ants as the Gold­stone report indi­cated in an inter­view with David Frost on Al-Jazeera on Octo­ber 16, 2009. Gold’s ana­lysts at the Jerusalem Research Cen­ter of Pub­lic Affairs iden­ti­fied every Pales­tin­ian that died in the Gaza war. They found that 91 per­cent of those killed were com­bat mem­bers of Hamas units like the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade and oth­ers so claim­ing that these were non­com­bat­ants is not only false but proves Gold­stone got sloppy.

Let’s face it. The UN has a his­tory of dis­pro­por­tion­ately deal­ing with Israel so what does it do? It ignores the 800-pound gorilla — the fact that Hamas hides among civil­ians on a reg­u­lar basis even to the point of launch­ing rock­ets from schools and homes, con­ve­niently revers­ing the blame on the IDF. This is no dif­fer­ent than say­ing Jews are Nazis. It’s the worst kind of moral inver­sion that exists in our soci­ety today and it is anti­semitism at its great­est. Israelis on the other hand went to extra­or­di­nary lengths that included knock­ing on doors to warn civil­ians to leave before the IDF attacked. How many ter­ror­ists groups do that?

It’s impor­tant to know that the U.S. Con­gress voted 344 to 36 to con­demn the Gold­stone Report. Coun­tries within the UN were not so gra­cious. Note that all of the Arab oil pro­duc­ing coun­tries voted to approve the report as well as those that ter­mi­nated trad­ing rela­tion­ships with Israel due to the oil embargo of the 1970’s like African coun­tries. Many of these oper­ate total­i­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ships and are well-documented human rights abusers. Let’s review the coun­tries who voted to approve this uncon­ven­tional and flawed report:

UN Vote to Approve Gold­stone Report by Coun­try

Bottom-line? The UN has gone to great lengths to lynch the Jew­ish State ever since its Gen­eral Assem­bly voted in favor of cre­at­ing Israel in 1947. Most famil­iar with that vote would agree that the UN expected the seven invad­ing Arab armies to dec­i­mate Israel so it was more of a PR move than a vote of con­fi­dence. In fact, it cre­ated three spe­cial enti­ties ded­i­cated to fur­ther­ing the Pales­tin­ian cause at Israel’s peril. The old­est is the Spe­cial Com­mit­tee to Inves­ti­gate Israeli Prac­tices Affect­ing the Human Rights of the Pales­tin­ian Peo­ple and Other Arabs of the Occu­pied Territories.

Don’t be fooled by the title of the Com­mit­tee. The ter­ri­to­ries ref­er­enced are not “occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries” but “undis­puted ter­ri­to­ries” that belong to Israel. Gaza (Samaria and Judea), the West Bank and the Golan Heights are ter­ri­to­ries of Israel and chang­ing their sta­tus is inac­cu­rate. How many times have you heard some­one refer to land dis­putes out­side of Israel as “occu­pied territories”? Perhaps, only Nazi Germany. Terms like “occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries” and “set­tle­ments” are pro­pa­ganda cre­ated by Arabs who wish to dele­git­imize Israel’s right to exist and den­i­grate it at the same time. Need proof? Try find­ing Israel on a map in Gaza or any other Arab con­trolled area. There is a good chance the Jew­ish State is notice­ably absent. Most Arab states still refuse to acknowl­edge Israel even though it offi­cially became a coun­try 62 years ago.

Fast for­ward to 1975 when the Gen­eral Assem­bly added the Com­mit­tee on the Exer­cise of Inalien­able Rights of the Pales­tin­ian Peo­ple. Sup­port­ing its work is the Divi­sion for Pales­tin­ian Rights. Lodged within the UN Sec­re­tariat, the Divi­sion boasts a 16 mem­ber staff and a bud­get of mil­lions. Unfor­tu­nately, the fund­ing pro­motes con­stant anti-Israel pro­pa­ganda through­out the world.

ZOA is expos­ing that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is bankrolling Hamas and they want you to take action. It’s high time that we ask our gov­ern­ment offi­cials why they are sup­port­ing ter­ror­ists. There is no doubt that giv­ing aid to those in dire need is heroic but not when the peo­ple hoard­ing your tax dol­lars are Hamas. So why did our gov­ern­ment – you know the one that just released an all-time high deficit of 3.8 tril­lion – announce an ini­tial con­tri­bu­tion of $40 mil­lion to UNRWA for Pales­tine refugees last Friday? That’s a good ques­tion and one that needs a real answer.

Those fol­low­ing the Gaza sit­u­a­tion know that UNRWA listed the orig­i­nal refugee pop­u­la­tion in 1950 at 900,000. Now, UNRWA solic­its world­wide fund­ing for a “refugee” pop­u­la­tion of more than 4.7 mil­lion. There is some­thing ter­ri­bly wrong with this num­ber as it sug­gests UNRWA is not help­ing refugees return to pro­duc­tive lives but instead cre­at­ing a bur­geon­ing pop­u­la­tion that can only exist on inter­na­tional hand­outs. Most aid orga­ni­za­tions bring in staff from out­side affected areas to reset­tle dis­placed indi­vid­u­als and help them inte­grate into soci­ety. This is not the case with UNRWA. In fact, quite the oppo­site. UNRWA recruits nearly 99 per­cent local Pales­tini­ans, which con­tributes to the cor­rupt environment.

Aid­ing refugees has become such big busi­ness that with more than 29,000 staffers, there isn’t a “hap­pily ever after” in sight

Besides the United Nations, can you guess who specif­i­cally has cor­rupted UNRWA? Bingo, if you guessed Hamas. It’s com­mon knowl­edge that Hamas seized con­trol of Gaza fol­low­ing the Israeli with­drawal in 2005. After dri­ving out the Pales­tin­ian Fatah in June 2007, Hamas is sit­ting on a gold­mine that includes two boom­ing main­stays: aid and terrorism.

Reports cite Hamas using UNRWA schools and ambu­lances to con­duct ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There is lit­tle won­der why so many sui­cide bombers come from Gaza when you under­stand the cal­iber of UNRWA’s employ­ees. One of the UNRWA school head­mas­ters, Awad Al-Qiq, moon­lighted as the head of the Islamic Jihad’s engi­neer­ing unit that built bombs and Qas­sam rock­ets. But that’s not all. UNRWA uses anti-Israeli text­books that incite hatred of Jews. By omit­ting one of the great­est geno­cides of all time — the Holo­caust— the UN is per­pet­u­at­ing revi­sion­ist his­tory by pre­tend­ing or deny­ing the event took place. While UNRWA recently dis­cussed adding Holo­caust edu­ca­tion to school cur­ricu­lum, doing so is unlikely as Hamas has voiced strong oppo­si­tion. Adding Holo­caust edu­ca­tion seems moot until pol­i­cy­mak­ers force the UN to change its anti­se­mitic cur­ricu­lum that teach ele­men­tary math prob­lems like this:

“If I kill 3 Jews and you kill 2, how many does that equal?”

Teach­ing hatred and vio­lence to any child is unthink­able. Doing so with Amer­i­can tax dol­lars is unimag­in­able. But the US gov­ern­ment just agreed to give UNRWA a whop­ping $40 mil­lion ini­tially and that means a con­sid­er­able amount US tax­payer dol­lars are lin­ing the pock­ets of Hamas ter­ror­ists. Think of how that sup­ports their effort to con­tin­u­ally bomb Israeli citizens.

So far, the UN is one of the worst anti­semites in his­tory and now it’s rap­ing 38 coun­tries of over a bil­lion dol­lars annu­ally to sup­port 59 refugee camps in Gaza. The effort is the largest funded of its kind in the world, and it is has done lit­tle to stem hatred, teach self-sufficiency or prompt peace in the region. Tour Gaza and you won’t see the kind of infra­struc­ture that most areas have with this amount of fund­ing like schools, hos­pi­tals, pub­lic build­ings, parks, trees, sub­urbs, etc.

So what demo­c­ra­tic coun­try is set­ting an exam­ple for the world these days? Our north­ern neigh­bor for one. Canada recently with­drew funds from UNWRA cit­ing a report com­mis­sioned by the Euro­pean par­lia­ment that doc­u­mented UNRWA labor unions chose Hamas ter­ror­ists to admin­is­ter UNRWA facil­i­ties. Wake up Amer­ica! News orga­ni­za­tions uncov­ered that Hamas oper­ated Gaza refugee camps over a year ago and this ter­ror­ist con­nec­tion is far from break­ing news.

When will our admin­is­tra­tion come out of their coma? Hard to tell. It will be inter­est­ing to see how long UNRWA (err, I mean Hamas) can con­tinue amass a for­tune, cor­rupt young minds all while pass­ing arms through 300 smug­gling tun­nels snaking beneath the Gaza bor­der from Egypt’s Sinai Desert. And this doesn’t even count the mam­moth trucks with mis­siles that Egypt has allowed entrance at Israel’s expense. Many have con­demned Israel’s pro­tec­tion wall but few ever utter the fact that Egypt put theirs up first (and is still adding on). And why the brouhaha over Israel’s wall? There are 21 oth­ers in the world includ­ing the U.S. wall with Mex­ico. This bla­tant dou­ble stan­dard is why the ZOA is count­ing on you to voice your con­cern to Con­gress to pres­sure the United Nations into tak­ing steps to ensure UNRWA is not pro­vid­ing fund­ing, employ­ment or other sup­port to terrorists.

Get involved with a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion that The Wall Street Jour­nal calls, “the most cred­i­ble advo­cate for Israel on the Amer­i­can Jew­ish scene today.” The ZOA sup­ports anti-terrorism and pro-Israel leg­is­la­tion and its cam­paigns have defeated hos­tile crit­ics of Israel nom­i­nated for key gov­ern­ment posi­tions. Visit the ZOA site to learn more, sign up for email alerts and dis­cover other ways you can get help. Let ZOA hear from you via Face­book.

Related posts:

1. A Salute to Stand­outs Com­bat­ing Anti­semitism and Anti-Zionism
2. A Salute to Stand­outs Com­bat­ing Anti­semitism and Anti-Zionism
3. A Salute to Stand­outs Com­bat­ing Anti­semitism and Anti-Zionism
4. A Salute to Stand­outs Com­bat­ing Anti­semitism and Anti-Zionism
5. Trad­ing the United States Flag for a Cres­cent Moon and Star