Why It’s Time to Defund UNRWA | 1.12.25
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Since the Hamas October 7 terror attack against Israel, a highly controversial Palestinian aid group has come under intense scrutiny. The United Nations Relief and Work for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA, has been revealed to have terrorist leaders and supporters among its staff. The Biden administration directed over a billion dollars to the group before pausing funds last year.
In this episode, we talk with the executive director of UN Watch, which has documented UNRWA's terrorist ties and says it's high time to shut the group down. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, January 12th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss the controversy surrounding UNRWA is the executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer. Hillel, thank you so much for coming on. So your organization has been watching very closely the actions of the United Nations, including UNRWA, which has come under a lot of scrutiny for good reason in the last year. First, what prompted your team to investigate UNRWA's radical ties?
Well, you know, we've been tracking UNRWA to some degree over the past 10 years. I would say every year, a couple of times a year, we would take a look at who the teachers are, what they're up to on their social media, because UNRWA has operations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and so forth. And I don't have immediate access to those places, but on social media, you can actually see who the teachers are and what they're saying. And we discovered over a period of 10 years, this is going back to 2015, that unread teachers regularly were glorifying terrorist attacks glorifying Adolf Hitler, calling to slaughter Jews, jihad against the West. So this was regular stuff that's being put out by UNRWA teachers. So that's the background we were exposing for 10 years. And in the past year, it reached the next level. The October 7th massacre, we learned, included among the people perpetrating the massacre from Gaza were actual UNRWA employees, UNRWA social workers, UNRWA school principals, And that's when we took an even deeper dive.
And I'd say we've been intensely focused on that agency for the past year. And what we discovered is actually astonishing and despicable.
Tell us more about that. What did you learn over this last year?
Well, we learned, just to give a few examples, that one of the heads of UNRWA's education system, one of the leading figures as a gentleman in Lebanon, whose name is Fatri al-Sharif, he was the principal of a major school belonging to UNRWA outside the city of Tyre in Lebanon. He was head of the teachers' union for UNRWA in Lebanon. So, I mean, he was overseeing 2,000 teachers. And we began to take a look at him and we saw that for the past decade, he's been inciting to Hamas terrorism on a regular basis. He's been posting pictures of himself with jihadi leaders and even including al-Qaeda offshoot figures in Lebanon on a regular basis. And we sent it to UNRWA and they didn't want to deal with it. They got some complaint maybe from Israel and they suspended him.
They gave him a slap on the wrist, but they wouldn't fire him. And actually, all of UNRWA's staff, thousands of staff in Lebanon, went on strike this last year from March until the end of May in support of Fatih al-Sharif, who we could see was some kind of Hamas figure. We sent this information to UNRWA. They didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to deal with it. And then it emerged that in September, Fatih al-Sharif was eliminated by an IDF missile And he was taken out. And the day that he was killed, Hamas put out an announcement saying, our leader was killed. Okay, so they put out a video of Fatih al-Sharif, the head of the Honorary Teachers Union in Lebanon, principal of a major school. They said he was our leader.
And they put pictures of him with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. They said we praise his jihadi education. So just to give one example of what we found is a major figure. And by the way, we're paying for this. The United States, up until March, was giving well over $300 million a year. The Biden administration gave them over a billion dollars in the past three to four years.
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