Stop funding UNRWA....

Dismantle it now....

Last week the United States announced an initial contribution of $40 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency dedicated to providing food, jobs and education in the Palestinian territories. According to a U.S. State Department press release, the money will "provide critical health, education, and humanitarian services to 4.7 million Palestinians across the region."

This United Nations agency, which receives the largest share of its funding from the U.S. taxpayer, has in recent years come under fire due to at least one of its employees' admission that it employs members of Hamas.

Last month, due to concerns Hamas had infiltrated UNRWA, the Canadian government quietly decided to redirect funding away from the agency; instead, the $300 million in aid Canada has pledged to the Palestinians for the next five years will go to food aid and the support of the Palestinian justice system in an effort to help the Palestinians build a civil society.

Perhaps the U.S. should follow Canada's lead.

In recent years, watchdog organizations have shined a light on the content of books in schools in the Palestinian territories - and what they illuminated was a consistent pattern of propaganda denying Israel's right to exist, dehumanizing Israelis and Jews, and lacking any concrete perspective that would point towards a nonviolent resolution of the conflict, such as a two-state solution. UNRWA schools use the same text books as those that are used in Palestinian schools run by the Palestinian Authority - and by Hamas.

In 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton joined Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, an organization that translates and publishes online the contents of Palestinian media, in presenting a report to Congress analyzing eight textbooks used in Palestinian schools.

In a press conference on Capitol Hill, then-Senator Clinton said, "These school books together with the media are profoundly poisoning the minds of these children."

(Clinton also convened a Senate subcommittee hearing on the subject at which Marcus testified in 2003).

In the aftermath of last week's State Department announcement of its plan to give UNRWA $40 million, I spoke with Marcus and asked whether text books in UNRWA schools continue to incite intolerance and hatred.

He said that, the wake of consciousness-raising including Hillary Clinton's stand, the Palestinian Authority had removed overt anti-Semitism from a new crop of text books. But the new books do not acknowledge Israel's right to exist and, perhaps even more chilling, are laden with content that romanticizes suicide martyrdom to children.

He shared with me some examples: In a textbook used in United Nations' UNRWA schools called Our Beautiful Language used for sixth and seventh graders, this verse appears:

"I see my death but I hasten my steps toward it."

In a textbook for eighth grade students called Reading and Text Part II--Grade 8:

"O heroes, Allah has promised you victory... Don't talk yourselves into flight... Your enemies seek life while you seek death ... Death is not bitter in the mouths of the believers."

In addition to glorifying jihad martyrdom, the new textbooks make intolerance politically correct by avoiding direct mention of violence toward Jews--and instead de-legitimize Israel and Zionism, according to Marcus.

"The new approach is to demonize Zionists and Israel,'" he said. "All of Israel is defined as Islamic land, and they say this is part of their historical narrative... the new schoolbooks call the war against Israel a religious war."

(Marcus noted that while the UNRWA schools only go up to grade 8 they use the same elementary- and middle-school texts as schools run by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for students of those ages).

Asked if he feels UNRWA is contributing to this problem of incitement, including incitement of children to suicide martyrdom, Marcus spoke of what he believes is passivity on the part of UNRWA in the face of child exploitation.

"Regarding the incitement of Palestinian children to martyrdom, [UNRWA] does not do anything to put pressure on Palestinian leadership to stop that practice [of encouraging children to become suicide martyrs]--nothing to make it better," Marcus said. "U.N. workers [in the Palestinian territories] for the most part are local Palestinians and for them the issue of hatred is not seen as a problem."