If you have any interest in UNRWA, several people, including Hillel Neuer, the head of the NGO UN Watch, will testify before a House subcommittee starting NOW. I expect there will be lot of testimony, supported by evidence, about how this UN agency was in effect an arm of Hamas.
It’s a bit late, as it was supposed to start at 2 p.m. Eastern time, but should start shortly.
Here are the witnesses. It should be enlightening:
Richard Goldberg
Senior Advisor
Foundation for Defense of DemocraciesMarcus Sheff
Chief Executive Officer
IMPACT-seHillel Neuer
Executive Director
UN WatchMara Rudman
Schlesinger Professor
University of Virginia Miller Center
And here’s the link. It sounds as if there are hecklers in the audience.
Thanks for covering this.
+1
Why aren’t the hecklers removed?
Just got to the end. The witnesses were mostly impressive, particularly Sheff, and it was mostly a good discussion apart from a juvenile attempt at gotcha baiting from the chair about “bad behaviour thresholds”. The elephant in the room, only obliquely addressed near the end, was whether it would be possible for some successor organization to avoid the same traps if it’s going to be staffed by Palestinians themselves, since the population as a whole is obviously deeply compromised, not least by the education that UNRWA has been serving up for several decades. If all their teachers were Japanese, or Sri Lankan, or Mongolian, for instance, that’s a problem that would be solved instantly.
Could we expedite the hostage negotiation process and just negotiate with the UN for their release? We would not need to go through Qatar, as the UN has their headquarters in NY.