UN's Terror Teacher

The gullibility and duplicity of the UN never ceases to amaze. They have an outright hostility toward Israel while consistently downplaying the terrorist activities and connections of Palestinians, whom they portray and noble freedom-fighters just struggling to survive hostile Zionists oppression.

Well, what do you know, here we have yet another case where their actions have literally blown up in their faces.

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli airstrike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a UN agency that has long rebuffed Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

Game. Set. Match.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as UN officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq's work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave's ruling Hamas group hailed Qiq as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad's "engineering unit" - its bombmakers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq's body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, posters in his honor still bedeck his family's home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit," would now find "paradise."

Seems like pretty strong evidence to me.

Still, the dupes are bewildered at any accusation they're soft on terrorists.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA was looking into the matter.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy toward politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people's minds," he said.

Sure. They immediately point fingers every time there's a Palestinian "work accident," but now claim they're not mindreaders.

Sure.

The Post editorial also weighs in with a devastating editorial, appropriately entitled Teaching Rocket Science. Read the whole thing, bust just wash this part around a bit.

Indeed, Islamic Jihad gave him the ultimate sendoff tribute: firing a barrage of his rockets into Israel in mourning.

So much for UNRWA's self-proclaimed "zero-tolerance policy toward politics and militant activities."

Of course, that policy was pretty well shown up as a joke when a UNRWA teacher named Saeed Seyam was named interior minister of the Hamas-led government in Gaza and immediately vowed never to arrest any Palestinian for "resisting the occupation."

According to Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), UNRWA confirmed last December that families of suicide bombers have received money from the agency.

The United States, incidentally, pays 30 percent to 40 percent of UNRWA's budget - $505 million last year alone.

For years, Congress has tried to ax US funding for UNRWA, with little success.

It's time to try again.

For some reason, no reporters ever bother to ask our erstwhile presidential candidates about this.