MESSAGE
| DATE | 2023-12-07 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Our friends at the UN
|
UN Staffer Holds Israeli Man Hostage in Gaza Attic for 50 Days, Report
Claims, and Senator Blackburn Demands Answers
ANTHONY GRANT
4–6 minutes
Senator Blackburn wants to know why a United Nations employee in Gaza
reportedly kept an Israeli man hostage in his attic for 50 days. The
man, who was recently released, had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on
October 7 and, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 13, said that
the UN staffer was a teacher employed by the global body’s Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
In addition, the freed hostage said that his captor was a father of 10
children and kept him in the attic with a minimum of food and no medical
attention. According to the same report by Israeli journalist Almog
Boker, another recently released Israeli captive said that a Gazan
doctor was holding him hostage even as the doctor was treating
children’s patients.
Attempting to sift through these reports and assign responsibility is
Senator Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, who this week sent a letter
to the relief agency head, Philippe Lazzarini, and Washington’s envoy to
the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, demanding an investigation.
In the letter of December 5, Ms. Blackburn noted that following the
initial publication of Mr. Almog’s report, the relief agency demanded
that the Israeli journalist “immediately delete the post.”
“The United States will not be complicit in propping up Hamas’
terrorism, and this report further proves why deep change is necessary
within Unrwa before we even consider providing another dollar to the
agency,” Ms. Blackburn wrote, adding that “these allegations hardly come
as a surprise given Unrwa’s history of antisemitism.”
This is not the first time that the relief agency, arguably the biggest
and most pointless self-perpetuating bureaucratic entity in the Middle
East, has come under fire. In 2018, President Trump decided to cut
funding of the organization — the year before, Washington had spent more
than $350 million on an agency that the State Department later described
as “irredeemably flawed.”
President Biden reversed Mr. Trump’s decision, a move the former
president sharply criticized. Mr. Trump previously stated that “When
Biden took office, one of the first things he did was reverse this
policy and ship $235 million American taxpayer dollars to the
Palestinians — despite warnings from within his own government that this
money would be used to fund Hamas’ terror campaigns.”
There is mounting evidence that the UN’s agency tasked with providing
“relief and human development” for more than five million “registered”
Palestinian refugees is complicit in activities linked to terror
emanating from Gaza. Over the weekend, to cite just one instance,
Israeli troops operating in the northern section of the Gaza Strip found
Hamas rockets under boxes inscribed with UNRWA labeling.
While the prospect of a Gazan teacher whose salary is essentially paid
by Washington holding an Israeli hostage may come as a shock to some, it
is also not altogether surprising considering what such instructors are
prone to “teach.” Even the European Parliament has called out
Palestinian Arab textbooks, underwritten by the relief agency, for the
“hateful” and antisemitic content they contain.
Equally newsworthy are the relief agency’s attempts to silence the
messenger. The day after Mr. Almog’s report surfaced, the agency asked
for “an immediate clarification of the claims” and for the report to be
deleted, even branding it as “defamation” — but failed to either address
the allegations or make any concrete pledge to do so in the future.
Yet in a statement on X, the agency appeared to dial back the defamation
claim, stating only that the allegations “may amount to misinformation.”
Mr. Lazzarini has so far stayed reliably on-message in social media
about the reports that one of his men kept an Israeli civilian hostage
by completely ignoring them.
The scandal is erupting amid mounting backlash against the so-called
international community’s deafening silence about Hamas terrorists’
sexual assaults on Israeli women and gender-based attacks during the
October 7 attack on Israel. At a press conference yesterday, Prime
Minister Netanyahu asked, “Where the hell are you?”
During a campaign fundraiser at Boston on Tuesday, President Biden
addressed the survivor and eyewitness accounts of what happened on
October 7 and forcefully denounced the by now well-documented Hamas
brutality against women.
--
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that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
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but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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