{Written by Hank Berrien and originally posted to the Daily Wire website}
According to a watchdog group that examines non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to advance humanitarian agendas, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has allegedly been fed biased information by radical anti-Israeli groups in order to catalyze Security Council sanctions targeting Israel’s military.
The U.N. secretary-general is soon expected to release a report on children and armed conflict; one consequence of the biased information could be to put the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on a blacklist of “grave violators of children’s rights.”
The watchdog group, NGO Monitor, issued a report titled “UNICEF and its NGO Working Group: The Campaign to Blacklist the IDF. ” The report delineates how UNICEF monitors the “Working Group on Grave Violations against Children” that reports violations against children in Israel and areas where the Palestinians exert control.
The UNICEF working group will likely pass its findings along to the U.N.’s special representative for children and armed conflict, the information will then be supplied to the U.N. Secretary-General.
NGO Monitor states, “UNICEF’s role in this process includes giving legitimacy to false and distorted claims made by the NGOs, which are fed through a UNICEF database to a variety of U.N. publications.” NGO Monitor notes that three groups passing information to the working group are linked to The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Those groups allegedly include Addameer, which NGO Monitor states is an affiliate of the PFLP; the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), which had a board member who helped launch grenade attacks against Israeli civilians in 1968, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose founder was imprisoned by Israel for membership in the PFLP.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, (R-FL), stated that Israel is a “staunch defender of human rights,” and warned the U.N. there might be financial consequences if the IDF was blacklisted. He added, “For the United Nations to even consider such action following their condemnation of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is further proof of the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias. … The United States should take any punitive action against Israel into consideration when determining who is deserving of foreign assistance.”
Groups already on the blacklist include ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Interestingly, one of the violations listed by the U.N. is “recruitment or use of children as soldiers.” One wonders why the U.N. has not seen fit to list the Palestinians and Hamas, who have used children as human shields and suicide bombers.