REPLACE UNRWA!

"There's a substantial difference. More than fifteen countries representing more than half a billion dollars have frozen their funding." 

"In our ten years of documenting this, there's not one instance where one of the friends on Facebook, their peers -- most of whom are fellow UNRWA staff, teachers, employees -- said, 'Whoah, Ahmed, I'm shocked that you just glorified Hitler and that you praised the terrorist attack."

"There's not one instance of that. It's the complete opposite, and we've documented that in videos where they liked it, endorsed it, praised it."

"This line about twelve bad apples is just so preposterous."

Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

"[UNRWA took] the recent allegations very, very seriously."

"There's about two million people who depend on our assistance. We have 150 shelters that have become home to a million people who have been displaced."

"We bring food and medicine; we bring medical teams."

Juliette Touma, spokeswoman, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

 

Since October 7's horrors of unrelieved barbarity was visited on the civilian population of Israel; Jews mostly but also Bedouin and foreign farm workers, a sadistic savagery visited upon infants, children, women, men and the elderly, fully revealed in all its macabre, gory details by videos that the perpetrators themselves proudly took of tormenting, mutilating, raping, killing, no one can be ignorant of the Hamas marauders pogrom on southern Israel across the border from Gaza, nor the plight of the abductees taken into Gaza as hostages.

 

Hillel Neuer, a practising lawyer specializing in international law became aware of an opening at UN Watch in 2004. Born in Canada, he attended McGill Law School and became an acolyte of the university's human rights program led by Irwin Cotler who served as Canada's Attorney General under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Mr. Cotler's passion for human rights ignited a similar flame in Mr. Neuer.

 

"I very much wanted to follow in his path and be a defender of human rights and [to] advocate for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and to defend their rights", he said in a recent interview. That is precisely what he does, has been doing for two decades, revealing the hypocrisy within the international body that has become his focus in life. Where the world's most obvious and criminal regimes have sway and head UN positions on human rights; the most serious violators of human rights sitting in judgement on nations with impeccable human rights records.

 

Mr. Neuer's critiques over continual, unending sanctions against one tiny country among the 193 nations of the world highlight the absurdity of a world body dedicated to justice, human rights and peace directing its ire against a nation that is as close to upholding those values as any other upstanding member of the United Nations, highlighting the power of blocs like the unaligned nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Two of the world's most blatant human rights abusers, Russia and China, sit on the five-nation Security Council. 

In February on the 20th anniversary of Hillel Neuer's leadership of UN Watch one speech, "Where are  your Jews?" in a challenge to Arab UN delegations to address the evacuation of ancestral Jewish communities from their ancient homelands within the Arab nations of the Middle East was seminal, right-to-the-point, and went unanswered. 

 

 

Weeks following the Hamas invasion of Israel a report documenting close to two dozen UNRWA staffers celebrating the atrocities on social media was released by UN Watch. In January an analysis of a group on the Telegram social media site that features thousands of UNRWA educators in Gaza, found widespread support for terrorism. "May Allah grant them victory" wrote  Shatha Husam Al Nawajha responding to a teaching colleague's comment that Hamas operatives were "breastfed Jihad with their mothers' milk".

Following the 1948 Arab-Israel war when joint Arab-nation militaries attacked the nascent Jewish state and were defeated, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created to look after the needs of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled the contested area. At the very same time, with the creation of the State of Israel, Arabized Jews who had lived for millennia in the Middle East and North Africa were expelled, their belongings transferred to state ownership.

While the exiled Jews found refuge in Israel or in a wider diaspora, the Palestinians were placed in refugee camps in Arab countries that refused them citizenship, leaving them to live in squalor. They were meant to represent a living, breathing sore on the body politic in the claim that Israel was responsible for their plight; a people who had been promised by those Arab states that they could return once Israel was annihilated, neither of which aspiration met with reality.

Ever since, in the 70 years that followed, the world has regarded the Palestinians, through the auspices of the United Nations, as refugees, a status of permanency never before encountered with the many huge pools of refugees caused by civil wars, nation-to-nation conflict, natural disasters or any other globally unsettling cause. The leaders infuse them with rage over the creation of a Jewish state in an ancestral Judaic geography, inciting Palestinians to 'resist' the 'oppression' of a Jewish presence with unadulterated lethal violence.

UNRWA, conceived with the purpose of maintaining Palestinian 'refugees', nurtured their belief that they would some day return. In fact, many never left, and today, totalling over two million, they are citizens of the State of Israel; those who fled or were forced out in 1948 whose issue -- children and grandchildren are now counted among the 'refugees' will never return -- now total 7 million; an absurdity in and of itself.

UN Watch's findings, following the news that ten percent of UNRWA's workforce is tied to Palestinian terrorist groups were presented in January in testimony before the U.S. Congress by Mr. Neuer. Prior to that an Israeli intelligence dossier revealed that 13 UNRWA members comprised of seven primary and secondary school teachers along with math and Arabic instructors, had taken part personally in the October 7 massacres in Israel.

Revelations that electrified major donors of the UNRWA program, including its largest donor, the United States. Among others, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom saw fit to suspend their funding of the UN agency. Mr. Neuer predicts that funding will be reinstated by UNRWA donors even with promised reforms neglected. UNRWA, given its disastrous performance, he feels, will be dismantled, its mandate replaced by other bodies of the UN.

Enough is enough. UNRWA must be dissolved and replaced. UN Watch

Authoritarian Tyrannies: Russia ... Canada?

"People who exterminated Jews, Russians and Poles are alive. And the president, the current president of today's Ukraine applauds him in the Canadian Parliament, gives a standing ovation."

"Can we say that we have completely uprooted this ideology if what we see is happening today?"

"The Canadian Parliament introduced a man who, as the Speaker of the Parliament said, fought against the Russians during the World War II. Well, who fought against the Russians during World War II? Hitler and his accomplices."

"The president of Ukraine stood  up with the entire Parliament of Canada and applauded this man. How can this be imagined?"

"The president of Ukraine himself, by the way, is a Jew by nationality."

Russian President Vladimir Putin

"It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, 'What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much'?"

"'Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him'?"

News host Tucker Carlson

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Feb. 6. The interview aired in Russia early on Friday morning. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters)

 

Well, actually, no, Mr. Putin. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian by nationality.  He is, by virtue of his ethnic origins, a Jew. For someone who is quite particular about facts and figures to support a thesis of Russian entitlement and ownership to a geography claimed by its national inhabitants as sovereign, your grasp of origins and heritage leaves much to be desired. But then, conflating Nazism and Jewry seems to fit well in your puzzle of a Greater Russia. 

The Stalin who presided firmly over an eastern Europe that was forced to surrender autonomy and sovereignty to the concept 'all for one and one for itself' under the hammer and sickle also thought so highly of Jews many of whom engineered the social and political structure of Communism that he sought to butcher them all. And you yourself in emulation, focus not merely on individuals of a whole, but a whole nation of those individuals, aligning yourself with the vector of that nation's extermination.

From reality, fiction embellishes the truth and you are a past master at embellishing fiction to resemble the reality. Every nation has its diehard fascists, and although it's difficult to discern where socialism leaves off and fascism takes up, they both target Jews through everlasting hatred and contempt. Designing a campaign of occupation under the rubric of 'saving Ukraine from neo-nazism' suited the special military operation' otherwise known as a land-grab.

The man hungering for greater notoriety and admiration as an icon of interviewing prowess catered to your bruised ego most professionally, Mr. Putin, as you silenced  his queries and launched your professorial lesson in aggrieved heritage and history with its outlines of reality enhanced by deceptive claims of authenticity. What more could be asked for than having an American whose reputation also has been bruised to unctuously play to your paranoia?

According to Dmitry Peskov the interview with Carlson was agreed to, since "he has a position which differs" from other Western media. Where, according to Tucker Carlson, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a mere "border dispute" the outcome of which fully revealed America's hatred for Russia. The Jewish-Ukrainian Zelenskyy characterized as a "dictator, a dangerous authoritarian". The Russian dangerously authoritarian dictator fully approved.

But then an embarrassing and completely avoidable incident useful as an example of the perfidy of the West and the revelation of Zelenskyy's true political nature was revealed to Mr. Putin's satisfaction in the Ukrainian President's being confronted in the Canadian House of Commons with the presence of a venerable old Ukrainian-Canadian -- in fact a veteran of the SS Galicia Division of the Waffen SS -- as a WWII hero. 

The Parliamentary Speaker of the House resigned in disgrace following the revelation of 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka's wartime exploits with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, involved in massacres and war crimes, including the deaths of European Jews, Roma and Poles. "This was a mistake that has deeply embarrassed Parliament and Canada. All of us who were in this House ... regret deeply having stood and clapped even though we did so unaware of the context. It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust", confessed Justin Trudeau.

Who seems fond of speaking of the Holocaust as a world-shaking event exemplifying man's inhumanity to man, decrying the institutionalized, planned and executed murder of millions, yet somehow overlooking that the Holocaust is specific to the Jewish experience. As when Canada finally erected a Holocaust memorial, where the official plaque somehow was etched to read regret over the deaths of millions of children, women and men, yet never did the word 'Jew' appear.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tours the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Wednesday, September 27, 2017. The monument's dedication plaque didn't mention the six million Jews killed during the Second World War genocide. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

The House speaker resigned in responsible disgrace. "This only confirms our thesis that one of our goals in Ukraine is denazifiction", Putin said. Justin Trudeau apologized, while his government claimed Anthony Rota, the Speaker, was solely to blame. Only much later was it revealed to the public that the same former volunteer for the SS Galicia Division, Mr. Hunka, had been invited by the Office of the Prime Minister to a Toronto reception for Mr. Zelenskyy.

"He [ Putin] will, of course,  use whatever propaganda he can engage in. But I can tell you Canadians will not be fooled. So we will continue to be there with Ukraine for as much as it takes for as long as it takes."

"Unfortunately, we see the lengths to which Russian propaganda will go to try and impact public opinion to try and twist things the way [they] want to."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Mr. Trudeau would know all about propaganda and spreading false information. He is himself quite expert at it. And Canadians have been fooled. Much that has been promised to Ukraine has been well publicized, yet never actually delivered. As for propagada and influencing and impacting public opinion, there is never any end of it to suit Mr. Trudeau's agenda in Canada; dividing Canadians, justifying abandoning the nation's natural resources, creating massive upheavals in Canadian heritage and culture through inappropriate mass immigration of people whose culture and values are inimical to Canada's; and forcing an agenda of Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, along with Transgender issues.

For Canadian Jews, this is a time of huge destabilization, when the spectre of past antisemitic assaults on the Jewish community has flared into life with a passion of hate manifested through labour unions, academic institutions, and on the streets of cities across the nation with hordes of 'pro-Palestinian' protesters marching in condemnation of Israel for responding to an obscenely sadistic slaughter of Israelis by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7. Where calls to exterminate Israel are chanted and Jews are taunted and confronted, with no anti-hate laws enforced by authorities.

A man stops to take a photo of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument following its official opening ceremony in Ottawa, Wednesday September 27, 2017. (The Canadian Press)

Destroying Hamas, the Ultimate Goal

"It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah."

"On the contrary, it is clear that intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians evacuate the areas of combat."

Office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Palestinians inspect a car hit by an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 10, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

The Israeli military was ordered on Friday to prepare a twofold plan of immediate action. The first, to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah, the densely populated southern city in Gaza. Once that process has seen completion a ground invasion by the Israel Defense Forces is expected to take place. The order, given by the Prime Minister of Israel arrived despite international criticism, particularly from the highest levels of the U.S. government who foresee military action by Israel in Rafah as a disaster-in-waiting.

 

The decision was made, however and is meant to proceed expeditiously after four months of intense fighting between the IDF and the terrorist group Hamas, alongside other Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Ground forces are prepared to move into the city bordering Egypt. The prewar population of Rafah was about 280,000. The United Nations states that Rafah now shelters about 1.4 million people living with relatives, in shelters or sprawling tent camps, having fled the fighting taking place in other areas of Gaza.

 

It is a moot point whether it is Israel's responsibility in a time of violent conflict to protect a civilian population thrown into the path of retribution and removal of an existential threat to the population of Israel, or that of the terrorist group which governs the Gaza Strip and which receives majority support from that civilian population. Which by the expedient of surrendering to a military tasked to prevent it from any further assaults within Israel, could spare Palestinians from war's ongoing dangers.

 

Hamas leaders  have made it abundantly clear, speaking in very public fora that nothing will deter them from mounting one deadly attack after another on Israel. The October 7 assault that struck southern Israel in a sudden influx of violent marauders -- who set out to slaughter Jews, to mass-rape Israeli women, to murder their elders and their children, to take hundreds of civilian hostages in a show of savagely barbaric force with its horrific component of sadistic pleasure -- initiated the current war.

 

Displaced Palestinians, who fled their houses due to Israeli strikes, take shelter in a tent camp, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at the border with Egypt, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 8, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

It was never difficult to find ample evidence of the entertainment and pleasure taken by the terrorists since body cams were expressly used for the purpose of 'public relations' by a people lacking a moral code, to express their celebratory joy with the success of their mission in executing helpless people, setting fire to their homes consigning entire families to a horrible death, mounting an attack on a holiday music festival with thousands of Israeli youth in attendance to slaughter hundreds and take others hostage.

Actions have consequences, and actions of depraved maleficence in particular have consequences of wholesale dread consequences for those on the receiving end of punishment for unconscionable villainy. Rafah is now considered by the Israeli military and its government to represent the final stronghold for Hamas in Gaza, following four months of relentless conflict.

 

Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered his military and security officials to arrive at a 'combined plan' to include both a mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of Hamas forces. The people of Gaza, the Palestinians who 'voted' overwhelmingly for the terrorist group to lead them are now victims of war. Their plight has moved the international community in a way that the victims of the Hamas slaughter of 1,200 Jewish lives failed to, and the pressure applied to the Israeli government's offensive is enormous.

 

The United Nations claims that millions have been displaced in Gaza, resulting in a humanitarian crisis of food shortages along with a lack of medical services.  This is the same United Nations whose arm of support for Palestinian 'refugees' -- UNRWA -- has been accused of complicity with Hamas. A charge with ample evidence to support it. Not only have hospitals and schools in Gaza been co-opted by Hamas for weapons storage and command posts, but UNRWA's Gaza headquarters has been revealed to house a sophisticated underground executive command headquarters for Hamas.

While pressure has been placed by the United Nations and Israel's Western allies to ensure humanitarian aid enters Gaza, Hamas operatives have taken possession of that humanitarian aid rather than see it distributed among the population. Looted aid is now available -- for sale to Palestinians in markets supplying ample food to those who will pay inflated prices -- the proceeds benefiting Hamas. This is the Hamas that uses its people as security shields, endangering them by operating and securing themselves in dense residential areas.

Israeli air strikes have begun. Egypt warns Palestinians it will not accept their entry, even while it warns Israel that complete destabilization will challenge its peace treaty with Israel. Friction, always tense between the U.S. officials who are negotiating between Qatar, Egypt, Hamas and Israel, is at its height. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attempting to mediate a ceasefire has once again failed to secure his goal.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he intends to settle for nothing outside of "total victory" in destroying the Hamas military machinery and governing capabilities. The issue of Israeli hostages remaining in Hamas captivity is one of burning rage among Israelis in the knowledge of the hostages' plight of ongoing torment and abuse.

Smoke billows during Israeli bombardment of Khan Yunis, not far from Rafah  SAID KHATIB / AFP

The Privacy Rights of Mass Murderers

"The report provides insight into Canada's shameful history of admitting many former Nazis and their collaborators to the country, almost all of whom lived out their lives in Canada undisturbed, without ever having to face justice."

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center

 

"The applicant's obligation is to satisfy the court that he is of good character. He is not required to satisfy the court that he, at no time in his past, committed an opprobrious act."

"[While I can appreciate the concern of Jewish Canadians relating to inaction on the presence of war criminals in Canada] it appears to me, on the other hand that it would be most ill-advised for the government to undertake this venture [removal of citizenship from war criminals]."

(Former) Justice Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1967)

The Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Canada distinguished itself for posterity during the years of the Second World War when it, along with the United States and most other Western nations declined an opportunity to save European Jews from extermination. It became well known that the Third Reich had established a priority program to rid the world of Jews, and it began the industrialized process of that institutional extermination with the Jews who had lived for centuries in WWII German-occupied Europe. When Germany in its early stages invited Jews to leave, there was no welcome extended to them elsewhere.

“Canada is where the Nazis are. Canada is the unknown haven for Nazis. Everybody knows about Argentina, but nobody knows about Canada.” 

War crimes investigator and private detective Steven Rambam. 1977

Canada's attitude at the time under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was influenced by his immigration minister, a staunch antisemite, Frederick Blair, who opposed and strictly limited Jewish immigration to Canada was clear. Mackenzie King was pleased to agree. And so was born the legend: 'One is too many'. Post-war, German Nazis fled the record of their past performance under Hitler's rule, hastily leaving for South America in preference to standing trial for their crimes. Canada's quiet motto then might have been 'More would be fine'.

Canada became notorious for its laissez-faire attitude on admitting Nazi war criminals. Recently, a 40-year-old report was newly declassified -- revealing the manner in which Canada handled Nazi war criminals. Canadian bureaucrats, it seemed, understood at the time that politics, not legal positions drove decisions on the harbouring of war criminals. The case of one such criminal stood out as an example, one that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was engaged with.

A decision was made in 1967 not to extradite a man who had been convicted in the Soviet Union of Nazi war crimes. The revocation of his citizenship and expelling him to the country which found him guilty in absentia failed to materialize, based on advice from Pierre Trudeau, then-minister justice, when the minister of external affairs asked for his advice relating to a man identified only as 'Subject F' in the documents.

The 1985 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada in a version of historian Alti Rodal's report had deleted mention of Mr. Trudeau's involvement in the case until 15 additional pages from the report were released by the present Liberal government, pressed to do so by B'nai Brith Canada and other Jewish groups which had been requesting that be done for decades. B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center renewed the request following an incident in the House of Commons.

On that occasion, when  Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelenskyy was to address Parliament, a Ukrainian war veteran had been invited as a special guest to meet Zelenskyy. Parliamentarians recognized the man's presence with enthusiastic applause. Only later was it discovered to their shame and embarrassment, that the elderly Ukrainian had been one of many volunteers who fought for a Nazi Waffen SS unit in Ukraine. At a time when Ukraine viewed Russia, then an ally of the West, as the enemy and Germany as their saviour.

 

Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the Waffen-SS, seen sitting in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Photo by The Canadian Press/Patrick Doyle

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated the release of additional documents was made on the decision to balance public interest with privacy. "I think people understand that this is both an important part of the historical record, but also one that has implications around privacy, around community". Unsaid is the reality that within the Canadian-Ukrainian community there are those who venerate the memory of Ukrainians who fought against the Soviets, preferring to cast their lot with Nazi Germany. That is seen in the controversy over the newly-completed, not-yet opened memorial to 'victims of Communism'.

Where names and groups are memorialized, some honoured within the Ukrainian community, but known to be Nazi collaborators; those whose voluntary inclusion in SS units, did not preclude them from murdering Jews and others whom the Third Reich targeted for extermination. The newly-released pages of the report show that the current prime minister's father Pierre Trudeau said Canada should not revoke Subject F's citizenship, when he was asked for his opinion in 1967.

 

This is a cenotaph at Oakville, Ont.’s St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery honouring the Galician Division, which it refers to as the First Ukrainian Division, Ukrainian National Army. It’s one of two monuments in Canada (the other one is in Edmonton) paying homage to a division of the Waffen-SS. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

 

There was no evidence, said Pierre Trudeau, that the citizenship court that handled Subject F's application ever asked about the crimes, nor was there evidence that he knowingly concealed that information. Both can certainly be inferred, however, since to reveal such information would have disqualified the subject's application. Nothing in the Citizenship Act required Subject F  to confess the evil deeds he was involved in, reiterated the elder Trudeau.

There are times when political devices are downright immoral, and this was one of those times. Historian Rodal characterized Trudeau's logic as "highly abstract and contrived", since Subject F had been accused of direct participation in the deaths of thousands of people. A naturalized Canadian, Subject F immigrated from Latvia, convicted in absentia by the Soviet Union in 1965, the case identifying him as the "captain of a firing squad which murdered, 5,128 Jews" in Latvia during the Second World War.

Publicly accusing a Canadian citizen, said Trudeau Sr., convicted in absentia in Russia would strike fear into the heart of any naturalized Canadian, that something they were involved with in their past could become a reason for the government to revoke their citizenship. In actual fact, falsely attesting on a citizenship application or failing to include evidence that can be incriminating is in and of itself grounds for revocation. With Pierre Trudeau's intervention, the government reached the conclusion it could do nothing respecting the allegations against Subject F.

However, soon afterward, lawyers at the Department of External Affairs expressed their displeasure with the decision in a memorandum, wanting to have it reviewed on the basis it was not made for legal reasons, but for political ones. The unredacted pages show that External Affairs believed that requests from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union to extradite four accused or convicted war criminals had been political, designed to embarrass Canada. Even so, they believed the four named were very likely "guilty of having committed atrocities".

Volunteers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS are sworn in, 1943. As many as 2,000 members of the unit arrived in Canada in the 1950s. Photo courtesy the National Digital Archives of Poland

"In purely legal terms, it is arguable that the government is free to commence revocation proceedings under the Citizenship Act, notwithstanding the Attorney General's opinion."

"It appears to us that the government's decision not to do so is a matter of policy rather than law."

"[Subject F stood out for having been] an ardent Nazi lackey, not only co-operating actively with the occupying German forces but actually serving their Jewish and Gypsy extermination squads." 

Canada's (then) External Affairs Department

On The Wrong Side Of Woke

"In a social media post he admits may have been a little too blistering, he said that an academic in Pakistan calling for Palestine to be free 'from the river to the sea' was a 'pro-Nazi zealot'."

"Finlayson said he stands with Israel, against antisemitism and against Hamas, which he said takes millions meant for  health and education and uses the money to make war. "You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler".

John Ivison, Journalist, National Post

"[He is ] stressed and uncertain about his future ... stuck in procedural purgatory."

"The suspension has caused my client significant reputational and financial harm, as well as immense personal distress."

"[The university claims the suspension is 'non-disciplinary']. It is clearly anything but."

"[The university appears to have concluded Paul Finlayson engaged in misconduct even before holding an investigation], in flagrant violation of its own policies, its own collective agreement and my client's right to procedural fairness."

Kathryn Marshall, Levitt Sheikh Law

University of Guelph-Humber marketing instructor Paul Finlayson has been suspended pending an investigation into a social media post supporting Israel and denouncing Hamas

 

Lawyer Marshall wrote to Guelph-Humber University's manager of human rights, harassment and employment equity in January on behalf of her client in an attempt to resolve a situation that has left the 59-year-old university lecturer suspended with pay from his teaching employment at the university. Her client, she reminded him, awaits information respecting the complaint lodged against him but no one had yet contacted him. She, like her client before her, received no response.

Her letter emphasized that there is no reason that adjunct Professor Finlayson should be suspended while an investigation was ongoing. The conduct for which he gained the suspension took place outside the university, and her client poses no threat to anyone. His sin was his outraged response to another academic living in Pakistan who had expressed  his support for Hamas and Palestinians, which Professor Finlayson strenuously disagreed with, pointing out that Hamas terrorists set out to rape and murder innocent civilians.

He has been left in limbo; several complaints had been made to the university for his having had expressed his empathy with Israel's plight brought on by the Palestinian terrorist group that ruled Gaza. Whose operatives had created a hell on Earth for a civilian population living in towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza border, and who in fact had sympathized with Gaza's Palestinian population, going out of their way to be of assistance to them, and hiring many as farm labourers. Hires many of whom had briefed Hamas on locales and area situations.

His expressions however, earned  him a suspension and it has been two months that he has been awaiting results of an 'investigation'. In the absence of any move to inform him of a decision that might return him to his lecturing position at the university, despite his course lectures for the semester having been cancelled by the university. His lawyers have advised him to appeal to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. 

Several students appear to have taken umbrage over his outburst at the Pakistani academic's sentiments. And there was also a Canadian academic who had complained. That academic has been identified as Dr. Wael Ramadan, professor of project management at the Pilon School of Business at Sheridan College. Professor Ramadan's own sentiments are in stark opposition to those of Professor Finlayson, unsurprisingly. He has written of Israel as "an apartheid state committing genocide".

Professor Ramadan has a Twitter account with a small number of followers. He posts savagely slanderous and obviously false allegations about the activities of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces in the Palestinian Territories and more specifically in Gaza where according to his world view Israel has been busy committing genocide. Sheridan College has taken no steps whatever to relieve Professor Ramadan of his professional academic presence nor to penalize him in any way for his egregious statements.

But Professor Ramadan feels himself justified in inciting hatred and violence against Israel and Jews, and feels he is entitled to do so without repercussions. He also appears to be of the opinion that Professor Finlayson's fairly tame expressions have earned him censure and uncertainty of his future that could very well result in the loss of his employment at Guelph-Humber University. 

 

Such are the vagaries of cringing academic institutions under pressure by conveyors of Critical Race Theory, Wokeism and the virtues of DEI theology. 

Fuelling Hamas By Funding UNRWA

"A fourth grade math exercise asks students to calculate the number of martyrs [including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centres] in Palestinian uprisings and it [is] accompanied by a photograph of raised coffins at a mass funeral."

2021 IMPACT-se report

"There is no question in anyone’s mind that, given that the majority of UNRWA’s funding goes to education, given that the education is geared towards inciting whole generations of Palestinians to commit the kind of unspeakable acts of terror that we saw, there needs to be a direct link between international funding of UNRWA and an absolute, iron-flat, not just guarantee, but evidence, that once and for all, UNRWA stops teaching this curriculum."

"We need that to end, and it needs to end right now. The international community has the power to end it because they are financially supporting it. That is the absolute bottom [line]. There cannot be one single day more of hate teaching."

"We warned that there will be a terrible outcome and that is what you saw. Hamas made its intentions crystal-clear in Arabic. We read it in the textbooks, but the damage is done. It’s unspeakable damage."

"[UNRWA claims it must teach the curriculum of ] the host nation."

“Time and time again, they have been told by the international community that change is necessary, and time and time again, instead of rewriting the curriculum to take out the hate they simply said, ‘We cannot because it is the host nation’s curriculum.’ That’s not good enough. They hid behind bureaucratic gobbledygook instead of taking the duty of care as educators.”

IMPACT-SE CEO Marcus Sheff

 

UNRWA has been heavily criticized frequently by  charges that it has links to Palestinian terrorists, more particularly the governing Gaza terrorist group, Hamas. It would have been difficult to deny those links since many of those UNRWA hires to implement their programs are in fact members of Hamas. In 2010, because of those proven links Canada's previous Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cut Canada's funding to the UN group in 2010.          

 

When Justin Trudeau, the current prime minister of a Liberal government took office, he restored UNRWA funding. Funding that has now been announced by Canada's International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen, to be but a temporary suspension. Reality is, however, that the Liberal government's pious statement of having suspended funding to UNRWA now unequivocally stained with evidence that some of its employees took part in the October 7 pogrom in Israel, is an equivocation too far; the funds were provided prior to the declaration of suspension.

 

Prior to that, it was a known fact that UNRWA facilities had been used to stockpile Hamas rockets, and that launch sites were close to UNRWA facilities. When rockets are launched responses by the targets tend to aim back at the site from which they were launched, creating for Hamas the opportunities it seeks, to cast Israel in the devil's mould for 'targeting' crowded civilian populations. To which UNRWA was an enabler. When Trudeau restored UNRWA funding from Canada, he sneered at the previous government's cutting off the agency, for "political reasons".

 

"Quite frankly", he stated, in his inimical patronizing manner "Canadians expect us to be helpful in the world"; perhaps but not to terrorists. An estimated $110 million was sent from Canada to the UN agency. To an agency which, in Bearing Witness -- the 43-minute video detailing footage in real time of the October 7 atrocities being enacted and the shocking pleasure of Hamas operatives while murdering Israeli children, women and the elderly and desecrating their corpses -- amply demonstrates why not.

 

Images from the January, 2021 IMPACT-se report on UNRWA Palestinian school textbooks. (Screenshot)

 

The Israeli non-profit IMPACT-se conducts analyses on a regular basis of textbooks from UNRWA schools, since the agency's primary role is schooling provision to Palestinians. In them overt antisemitic conspiracy theories and violent Jihad are featured, with Israel referred to as the "Zionist Occupation". And there geography publications feature maps where the State of Israel is absent and reading lessons come complete with "martyr", "attack" and "intifada".

A report in spring of 2023 by the German magazine BILD uncovered examples of  textbooks and course materials with anti-Jewish propaganda. One Grade 9 exercise described an arson attack on an Israeli bus as a "barbecue". The headline of the article in BILD read: "Germany continues to pay for hatred of Jews". When UNRWA officials were charged directly by Avi Benlolo of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, their response to him was: "they admitted this was an ongoing problem but suggested nothing could be done about it".

There have been occasions when UNRWA admitted its facilities were used to house munitions and even rocket launch sites for Hamas and other terrorist groups. The agency wrote that it had "discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip" in July of 2014, A following press release noted that a second discovery had been made and then a third. The munitions in all three instances were "referred to the local authorities"; in other words Hamas removed them for storage elsewhere.

In January, UN Watch issued a report detailing dozens of social media posts where UNRWA employees openly celebrated the October 7 massacres; in some instances even while the attacks were ongoing. A Telegram channel used by 3,000 UNRWA teachers and administrators yielded celebratory posts on the very morning of the attacks. Israa Abdul Kareem Mezher teaching at a UNRWA-funded elementary school asked fellow teachers to pray for Hamas fighters and the destruction of Israel.

A 2015 UN Watch report detailing social media posts by UNRWA teachers glorifying terrorism or antisemitic conspiracies resulted in several UNRWA employees being fired. One post shared publicly to Facebook read "Stab Zionist dogs". The agency's commissioner Pierre Krahenbuhl in 2019 was responsible for a culture of nepotism and financial irregularities, leading him to resign. Just recently he began new employment as director general of the International Red Cross.