As if you needed more reasons not to trust the UN

While I am sure the UN is doing important work in such important places as Namibia, it becomes clearer and clearer that when it come to real problems, it has an interest only in making gestures and sits around hoping that no one notices what it is really doing.

Three things in the news lately.

First, oil for food money (which was being embezzled left and right by the higher ups at the UN was going from Saddam Hussein to the families of suicide bombers. I wonder if anyone at the UN knew about this, or was it like everything else there - shrouded in secrecy and official cover-up?

Second, they have apparently asked anti-Semites to write the official UN report on anti-Semitism. I hear a literary version of Durban here. (For those of you who remember, Durban was where a major UN conference on racism pretty much turned in to a Jew-hating fest.) The UN might want to consider asking people who are familiar with the being a victim of anti-semitism, not a perpetrator, to write the report. I am sure they would never ask Sharon to write the report of the Palestinian problem.

Lastly, there is the month-old issue that the UN is knowingly employing Hamas members to help with various routine relief projects.

I want to talk about this last thing. We all know that the UN has been complicit in aiding Palestinian gunmen (famous ambulance video here.). But this is far more insidious. Why? Because Hamas in the territories, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, derives some of its street credibility from their suicide bombings and other terrorist operations. However, most of their popularity comes from the fact that they are a social institution. Hamas (and Hezbollah) operate schools, Mosques, and welfare programs of all sorts. It is THIS that makes them popular, and feeds their campaigns for "votes", funds, and probably most significantly, "martyrs" for the cause. Employing members of Hamas to do welfare activities puts them in higher profile places where Hamas can take partial credit for the work that the UN is doing. Thus the Hamas membership rises, and the UN can claim that they are politically neutral.

It is this sort of activity that perpetuates terrorist popularity. Classic bait-and-switch. They lure you in with free food and education, and then get you to blow yourself up "for the cause". The UN is providing much of the bait.

UNRWA is largely supported by American and Canadian tax dollars (40 percent). The US has supported many bad causes in its day. Some because there was a higher political goal, some out of bad judgment, and some out of ignorance. What is our excuse for this one, and where are the big complainers?