Teaching Bias and Hate

"[UNRWA teachers and staff produce their personal supplementary teaching and study materials rife with antisemitism and] calls for martyrdom, violence and jihad."

"Thirteen UNRWA staff members have publicly praised, celebrated or expressed their support for the unprecedented deadly assaults on civilians on 7 October."

"By Hamas' own admission, more than 100 UNRWA graduates have become active Hamas terrorists."

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se)

An Unrwa school converted to a camp for Palestinians fleeing Israel Defense Forces’ bombardments in Gaza, since Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred an estimated 1,200 people in Israel.

 

As examples of what IMPACT-se found was an Arabic reading assignment for Grade 9 students referencing a bus bombing, naming it a "barbecue party ... with firebombs on one of the buses of the colonial settlement", as well as a Grade 5 Arabic language summary venerating terrorists as 'heroes'. A March 2023 report by IMPACT-se documented 133 UNRWA staff posting antisemitic statements and incitements to violence on social media.

Yet this and other documentation readily available to alert donors to the United Nations special refugee for Palestine administrative organization's institutionalized bias against Israel, failed to make an impression on any of the liberal democracies that routinely donated huge yearly financial supports to UNRWA in support of its activities operating schools in the Palestinian Territories. 

 

Now that solid evidence has been produced of UNRWA employees' complicity in the Hamas/Palestinian Islamic Jihad violent assault in southern Israel's towns and kibbutzim located near the Gaza border, those same oblivious donors -- seventeen in all, to date -- have announced their intention to suspend further funding, awaiting an official investigation to corroborate the evidence provided by Israel to a purportedly shocked United Nations.

Skeptics among international observers believe the funding will be quietly restored after a period of time when the scandal's effects have been muted in the public mind. Unless the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees is totally disbanded and other arms of the United Nations' charity groups continue its work at a remove. UNRWA has basically served over the years as a permanent employment vehicle for Palestinians in Gaza.

And while a United Nations umbrella refugee organization, the UN Refugee Agency, serves global refugee populations with an eye to settling them in accepting countries, nowhere else but in 'Palestine' are the 'refugees' considered permanent. With the exception of Jordan, the surrounding Arab nations preferred to have them maintained as refugees in perpetuity, supporting 'right of return', and UNRWA was obliging. However, since Israel isn't going anywhere and the 20% population of Palestinian-Israelis fulfill the Jewish state's obligations to democracy and inclusion, 'right of return' is off the books.

Which hasn't stopped either the Palestinian Authority, Hamas or UNRWA from nursing the intention of 'return' not only of the estimated 700,000 Palestinians that fled the fledgling Israeli state when Arab armies converged on it to destroy its nascent promise, but the generations that followed, permitted to take on the mantle of 'refugees' and now amounting to over five million. The 850,000 Arabized Jews who had lived in Arab ME countries for millennia -- exiled when Israel was reborn -- streamed into Israel.

Yet over 50 Palestinian 'refugee camps' exist, in the territories and in Arab states. The Arab states refuse to give them the rights of citizenship and have never integrated the Palestinian refugees into their populations. Initially the rationale was for them to remain refugees, a festering sore as a bulwark in their plans to destroy Israel, and later in acknowledging that Israel was there to stay, disinterested in giving the Palestinians citizenship because of their proclivity to produce unsettling destabilization and violence.

Palestinians in their numbers began emigrating, and with their UN-mandated refugee status, took up residence in welcoming countries of the West. And there their agitation, destabilization and resentment against the 'occupation' forces of the Jewish State and the Israel Defense Forces turned into propaganda that lent them sympathy from the host countries. Unions and academia in particular empathized with their victimhood status and latent antisemitism was awakened.

Throughout the West, the infiltration of Islam has been steady over the years, with millions of Muslims establishing themselves to the point where government agencies, academia, unions, and elections served the purpose of enabling a spread of faulting Jews for the plight of Palestinians whose leadership time and again spurned all offers of a peaceful settlement and a state of their own, in favour of mounting ongoing violence against Israel and Jews everywhere.

In Canada, a Mainstreet Research poll found that 10.6 percent of Canadians over age 65 disapprove of Canada's support for Israel, while 26.4 percent among those aged 18 to 34 disapprove. While nine percent of Canadian women over 55 say their "sympathies rest more with" the Palestinians according to an Angus Reid poll, the number increases to 35 percent among women 18 to 34. Students at university are ingesting the bias of their professors.

But it even starts in grade school where a Brampton high school principal spoke of rising antisemitism as 'anti-Zionism' having "skyrocketed in the wake of the Israel-led genocide in Palestine". In Ontario a principal tweeted anti-Israel messages displayed in the school foyer. A professor at University of Toronto,  hearing of violent rapes at the Israeli Nova music festival led Safia Aidid to tweet her "solidarity with the Palestinian people, today and every day".

Professor Uahikea Maile called for people to 'stand behind' Hamas's act of 'anticolonial resistance'. The following day, another U of T professor, Girish Daswani, spoke of "what is happening to Palestine" as a result of "settler colonialism, genocide and fascism". At the University of British Columbia a professor encouraged his students to leave their class to "participate in the global protest against the Palestinian genocide". A union representing contract and part-time faculty at York University issued a 'toolkit' to teaching assistants, calling on them to skip their regular curricula and substitute accounts of Israeli 'genocide' in Palestine.

A tide of anti-Israel, antisemitic bile has been sweeping the West, through a hugely successful public relations/propaganda vehicle spurred by Palestinian students in schools and universities throughout the West. Ghada Sasa, a TA and PhD candidate at McMaster University suggested that countries were halting funding to UNRWA because "Zionists vaguely linked it to October 7", an event to be celebrated as the "day that Palestinians broke through their open-air prison".

Students across campus protest in support of Palestine and Israel. JESSIE SCHWALB and CAROLINE BELLAMY/THE VARSTIY