The Patriot Post® · Time to End U.S. Funding of UNRWA
It recently came to light that at least 12 employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees had participated in the murderous October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas (backed by Iran) on Israel. That revelation shone a bright light on an organization that has painted itself as a humanitarian relief organization but in reality is little other than a jihadi terror-sponsoring outfit.
Roughly 10% of UNRWA’s total staff in Gaza are believed to be members of Hamas. That’s 1,200 out of 12,000 UNRWA staff.
This revelation has led to several UN member nations suspending their funding of the agency, including Australia, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The U.S. has also paused its funding, stopping a mere $300,000 of more than $1 billion in American taxpayer dollars doled out by the Biden administration since January 2021. Donald Trump rightly ended UNRWA funding in 2018 when he recognized that the organization was not a “humanitarian relief” agency but a jihadist front group.
The Biden administration should have immediately and permanently ended all funding to this terrorist organization. Instead, Team Biden simply hit pause, apparently waiting for the outrage to blow over, to then quietly restart funding as if nothing happened.
This, of course, has everything to do with Joe Biden seeking to appease the radical anti-Semitic faction of the Democrat Party. This is further demonstrated by the Biden administration’s reportedly looking at a policy change that would unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) blasted the notion of the White House endorsing a unilateral two-state solution as “the worst betrayal of our strongest ally in the Middle East, a reversal on decades-long U.S. policy, and a reward to Hamas terrorists who committed the most barbaric attacks against the Jewish community since the Holocaust.”
Once again, we see Biden’s foreign policy weaknesses and failings in sharp relief. At the same time, we see a region of the world where Trump’s progress in bringing peace and stability through American strength and leadership has been almost entirely reversed.
This is what happens when party politics trump genuine consideration for putting the nation first. Biden administration players have continuously vilified every accomplishment of the Trump administration because they fear that giving Trump credit for anything would prevent people from seeing him as a supposed existential threat to democracy.
Yet all it has done is expose Biden’s feckless leadership in the face of genuine evil. Republican congressional leaders and candidates need to hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire on UNRWA. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy argues, “Congressional Republicans should demand that the Biden administration designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization,” which “would make it politically untenable for the United States government to provide one more dime of American taxpayer funding to UNRWA, and to provide funding to any entity, including the U.N., that supports it.”
Indeed, revelations like these cause one to question the value of the United Nations writ large. U.S. taxpayers pony up more than $12 billion annually to the UN. And for what?