By Michelle Malkin, author of “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes
Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.”
June 2, 2004.
The United Nations and Red Cross have been providing cover for
terrorists-literally. And American taxpayers are footing some of the bill.
Last week, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in
southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Palestinian gunmen used the UNRWA emergency vehicle as getaway
transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11.
The footage shows two ambulances with flashing lights pull onto a street.
Shots and shouts ring out during the nighttime raid. A gang of militants piles
into one of the supposedly neutral ambulances, clearly marked “U.N.” with the
agency’s blue flag flying from the roof, which then speeds away from the
scene.
AccessMiddleEast.org, a nonprofit global news monitoring service, posted the
video (shot by a Reuters TV cameraman) on its Web site last week.
To date, Access Middle East managing director Richard Bardenstein in
Israel informs me, not a single U.S. television news station has expressed
interest in showing the footage to American viewers.
Why should we care? Because since 1950, the U.S. has provided UNRWA with
$2.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies-about one-third of the relief agency’s total
budget.
And because instead of investigating this latest black eye-inducing
scandal, the U.N. is blasting American troops for defending themselves against
such outrageous tactics-now being emulated by Iraqi guerrilla warriors sniping
at our men and women from ambulances in Fallujah.
International relief officials are in stubborn denial about the abuse of their
emergency vehicles and hospital credentials by terrorists. They claim the
videotaped May 11 ambulance-assisted attack was an isolated incident and that
the driver was forced to transport the gunmen.
But this ambulances-for-terrorists program has been going on for years. And
“humanitarian” workers have been willing collaborators.
According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for
Special Studies (CSS), senior UNRWA employee Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah
confessed to using his official U.N. vehicle to bypass security and smuggle
arms, explosives, and terrorists to and from attacks.
He was in charge of distributing food supplies to Palestinian refugees. Nidal
‘Abd al-Fataah ‘Abdallah Nizal, a Hamas activist, worked as an UNRWA
ambulance driver and admitted he had used an emergency vehicle to transport
munitions to terrorists.
U.N. vehicles aren’t the only ones being used by terrorists. An intensive care
ambulance carrying the acronym of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
was used to deliver an explosive belt found underneath a stretcher on which a
sick child was lying in spring 2002.
Female suicide bomber Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in a January 2002
attack in Jerusalem, was a medical secretary for the PRCS. Her recruiter was
an ambulance driver for the same organization. PRCS receives financial support
from governments and organizations around the world, including the American
Red Cross and International Committee of the Red Cross.
The UNRWA has long been suspected of providing aid and comfort to terrorists.
Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism
and Unconventional Warfare, recently documented how “buildings and
warehouses under UNRWA supervision are allegedly being used as storage
areas for Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories.”
Cantor’s 2002 report also noted that UNRWA hosts summer camps in
martyrdom for young terrorists-in-training. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has also
lobbied for increased scrutiny of UNRWA funding, which has been used to
publish anti-Semitic textbooks and posters in schools that “glorify homicide
bombers and the slaughter of innocents.”
Moreover, according to Rep. Smith, an UNRWA school hosted a Hamas rally by
a key Hamas leader in July 2001 and another UNRWA employee praised
homicide bombers, proclaiming: “The road to Palestine passes through the
blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh
and their bodies.”
While jihadists gain shelter in its emergency vehicles, the U.N. continues to
lambaste the U.S. for assorted wartime “atrocities.”
Not one more American dime should go to fund the bloody self-righteousness of
the world’s most generous terrorist relief organization.