Employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, participated in the October 7 attack on Israel, raping, torturing and murdering Jews in tandem with Hamas jihadists and taking Israelis and Americans hostage. Such deadly collaboration should come as no surprise. As Paul Johnson showed in his masterful Modern Times, the United Nations has always been hostile to the West in general and the USA and Israel in particular.
“The notion that Israel was created by imperialism is not only wrong but the reverse of the truth,” writes Johnson. “Everywhere in the West, the foreign offices, defense ministries and big business were against the Zionists.” United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, the worst possible choice for the post according to Johnson, “treated Israel not as a small and vulnerable nation but as an outpost of imperialism.”
The UN boss demonstrated “the way in which the UN could be used to marshal and express hatred of the West.” That emerged in the Algerian conflict of the late 1950s, with a dynamic that went back to Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem. He “outrivaled Hitler in his hatred for Jews” and “organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates.”
In March of 1962, Johnson recalls, “a Muslim mob sacked the Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah, gutting it, ripping the Torah scrolls, killing the Jewish officials and chalking on the wall ‘Death to the Jews’ and other Nazi slogans.” Muslims who had sided with French were “made to dig their own tombs and swallow their military decorations before being killed; some were burned alive, castrated, dragged behind trucks, fed to the dogs; there were cases where entire families, including tiny children, were murdered together.” Decolonization of Africa brought similar horrors.
Johnson charts the atrocities of Bokassa, Mobutu, Sekou Toure et al, but “the most instructive case” was Uganda’s Idi Amin, who became a Muslim at age 16. In 1970, Libya’s Col. Gaddafi and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat pressured Amin to mount a coup against Milton Obote. Amin toppled Obote in early 1971 and quickly showed his true colors.
“Amin’s was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim-Arab League from the start,” Johnson notes, “since he began the massacres of the Langi and Achili tribes within weeks of taking over.” The dead soon included “any public figure who in any way criticized or obstructed Amin.” The victims included two cabinet ministers beaten to death by Amin himself. The Ugandan Muslim was a “ritual cannibal” who kept selected organs in his refrigerator.
Amin deployed the deadly State Research Center (SRC), operated “on the advice of Palestinians and Libyans.” Amin’s terror, “was a Muslim-Arab phenomenon” and his regime “was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians and Libyans.” The UN did nothing to stop it and “the only government to emerge with credit was Israel’s which acted vigorously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an airliner at Entebbe in 1976.”
As Johnson sees it, “Hammarskjold and his school were responsible for prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years.” This was “the consequence of the morally relativistic principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans was not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking the UN had given him a license for mass-murder, even genocide.”
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) elected Amin as its chairman but the worst was yet to come. On October 1, 1975, Amin addressed UN General Assembly and called for “the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations and the extinction of Israel as a state, so that the territorial integrity of Palestine may be ensured and upheld.”
As Johnson notes, such extinction amounts to “genocide,” but the Assembly gave the Muslim cannibal a standing ovation. The UN Secretary General at the time was Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim, who remained in the office until 1981. Waldheimer’s Disease makes people forget the UN boss was a Nazi.
Amin found sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003 many decades too late. The UN continued to ignore Communist dictatorships and jihadist states such as Iran. That made the events of October 2023 entirely predictable.
The small, vulnerable nation of Israel is again targeted as an imperialist “settler state,” as Johnson noted, a reversal of the truth. Like Idi Amin’s Uganda, Gaza is basically run by Iran through Hamas. Calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea” echo Amin’s demands for Israel’s extinction, which amounts to genocide. The UN does nothing to prevent the 10/7 attack, and UNRWA employees take part in the slaughter, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with Israelis and Americans alike taken hostage.
The revelations prompted some countries to withhold aid for UNRWA. That move, though fully justified, falls short. The United Nations is an enemy of peace and freedom around the world. The time has come for mass withdrawal, with the United States of America leading the way.
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