Americans mostly know UNICEF through the “trick or treat for UNICEF” campaigns. The “trick” is on the donors who think that UNICEF is all about helping poor children.

UNICEF has been a major financier of Palestinian “summer camps” which encourage children to become suicide bombers. One such camp is named for Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber.

During the late 1990s, UNICEF served as a propaganda organ of the Saddam Hussein regime. Relying solely on Iraqi government statistics, UNICEF and the Saddam government co-authored a report asserting that over a million children in Iraq died because of U.N. sanctions. A map on the first page of the report depicted Kuwait as a province of Iraq.

UNICEF is the primary funder for the “Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation” (PYALARA), which UNICEF calls “a major strategic partner in Palestine.” Materials produced by the group are frequently used in schools operated by UNICEF.

PYALARA publishes a 16-page newspaper for young people, The Youth Times (TYT). It is distributed at Palestinian universities, colleges, community centers, and in the many U.N.-operated schools in Palestinian areas.

The organization claims that its mission is “expanding awareness of one’s roots and identity, environment and culture, as well as of other countries and the world at large.” Yet PYALARA’s products follow the typical line of terrorist propaganda, in which nothing is the fault of the Palestinians, everything is the fault of the Jews, and there is never any effort to consider the merits of Israel’s position on anything.

For example, one PYALARA article was admiring a biography of the recently-deceased terrorist Abu Ali Mustafa.

Mustafa was the head of the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a branch of Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Mustafa met his demise at the hands of Israeli forces in 2001. In the months before Mustafa’s death, his terrorist group had assassinated an Israeli Cabinet Minister, set off three car bombs in Jerusalem, and carried out many other terrorist attacks.

Earlier, Mustafa and the PLFP had worked with the Japanese Red Army (a Communist terrorist group) and slaughtered 24 people at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. In 1976, the PFLP hijacked an Air France flight. After refueling in Libya, they flew to Entebbe, Uganda, which was, at the time, ruled by the insane, genocidal tyrant Idi Amin.

The PFLP hijackers, assisted by Amin’s army, demanded that five nations release 53 named, convicted terrorists, or else the plane and its passengers would be blown up.

The Israeli Defense Forces carried out a daring raid on the Entebbe airport, killing the hijackers and their Ugandan accomplices, and rescuing all the hostages. The IDF rescue planes touched down at Ben Gurion Airport on July 4, 1976.

One of the few Israeli casualties in the rescue was Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, whose brother Benjamin would later become Prime Minister of Israel.

So what did the UNICEF-funded PYALARA have to tell young people about the terrorist mastermind Abu Ali Mustafa? That he was “a political leader...whose history prides his nationalistic activism.” Mourning the death of the terrorist, the magazine whined “this is a human being who has a family that awaits his arrival every day.” Sympathy would have been better directed to the many innocents who were murdered at Mustafa’s direction. 

Then, in a lie typical of the Palestinian propaganda press, the PYALARA claimed “the Israelis could have turned to Abu Ali Mustafa to talk peace if peace were what they truly wanted.” In truth, Mustafa was always an adamant foe of negotiations, opposed even to Arafat’s strategy of going through the motions of peace negotiations in order to distract attention from his devotion for war.

Shortly before becoming head of the PFLP, Mustafa was interviewed by Al-Jazeera. He stated: “We believe the conflict and the struggle against Israel is a strategic [principle] that is not subordinated to any consideration.” Thus, “We believe the Palestinian people, both in the Diaspora and under occupation, have the right to struggle using all means, including the armed struggle, because we think the conflict is the constant, while the means and tactics are the variables.”

Not that UNICEF blames Israel for everything. Bianca Jagger, in her official capacity as “UNICEF ambassador,” has toured the Middle East telling audiences that the United States is the source of evil in the modern world.

As for the actual needs of children, UNICEF is sometimes an obstacle to progress. For example, UNICEF has been pressuring Guatemala to stop allowing inter-country adoptions. That is, UNICEF would prefer a child to languish in a Guatemalan orphanage rather than be adopted by a loving family in the United States.

UNICEF’s focus on politics and political correctness has come at the expense of saving the lives of the approximately ten million children under the age of five who die each year from preventable causes.

According to UNICEF, the major cause of child poverty in the world is the free market—even though countries with free markets have vastly lower levels of child poverty than do the kleptocratic, statist economies extolled by UNICEF.

A 2003 report praised the North Korean dictatorship:

the particular strength of the DPRK’s policy framework lies in its comprehensiveness, integration and consistency in addressing the interests of children and women. It has been aligned with the collective production system. The Government has proactively broadened and updated its laws and policies on an ongoing basis, also making an effort to harmonize with international innovations and standards.

Given UNICEF’s affinity for the extreme left, it should be no surprise that UNICEF helps fund the gun- prohibition lobby in Brazil.

The Executive Director of UNICEF is traditionally chosen by the United States (although nominally appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General). All of the abuses described above took place during the tenure of Executive Director Carol Bellamy, who was selected by President Clinton in 1995. In May 2005, President Bush chose former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman as executive director.

While there is no reason to believe that Veneman shares Bellamy’s extreme Left agenda, it would be fair to say that she has a long way to go to fix UNICEF. The organization today stills promotes the Brazilian gun prohibition lobby Viva Rio, and funds the pro-terrorist Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation as one of its “partners” in what it calls “occupied Palestinian territory.” UNICEF also “partners” with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which uses ambulances to transport terrorists and their weapons, and whose personnel have participated in suicide bombings.

UNICEF’s executive board includes China (whose forced abortion policy is neither pro-life, nor pro-choice, nor pro-child) and Bhutan (where children are among the many victims of the regime’s human rights abuses). UNICEF has doled out unaccountable money to the North Korean regime.

Under Veneman, UNICEF is not as bad as it was under Bellamy, and even under Bellamy, the organization performed some good works. However, most people who give money to groups which help children would prefer that none of their donations be used to finance terrorism, the destruction of civil liberties, or tyranny.

The good-hearted children who “trick or treat for UNICEF” don’t know about UNICEF’s sordid allies, of course. So instead of simply rejecting the requests of the children, gently explain that you don’t want to give money to UNICEF because dictatorships like China help run the organization, and some of UNICEF’s money helps pro-terrorism groups. Then, put a dollar (or five, or ten) in a bag of your own, and tell the children that because of their trick-or-treating, you will be giving more money to a different charity (which you can name for them) which uses all of it money to help children. And if your child’s school is contemplating a UNICEF fundraiser, politely encourage the administration to pick a better charity.

— Dave Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute, in Golden, Colorado.

National Review Online 

SWAT, Oct 26: Militants on Friday publicly executed four law-enforcement personnel in a village, 16km west of Mingora, the district headquarters, and exchanged heavy gunfire with security forces in a nearby sub-district.

“It was gruesome,” was how a resident of Shakkardarra described the scene of beheading of the law-enforcement personnel.Requesting anonymity, he told Dawn on phone that masked militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles brought the four men to the village at around 5pm, fires a few shots in the air and then beheaded them.

The men, said to be in their mid-20s, had their hands tied together. They were pushed to the ground on the main Matta-Mingora road and had their heads chopped off.

“Let this serves as a warning to all those who spy for the government or help the government. All sons of Bush will meet similar fate,” the resident quoted one of the militants announcing shortly before the execution.

“We watched the gory scene in shock and horror. We felt so helpless. There was fear and gloom in the village,” he said.

There was no information about the identity of the beheaded men. Locals said that two of them were from police and from the haircut and the sandals of the other two it appeared that they belonged to a paramilitary force.

“The bodies are still lying on the road and militants are standing nearby,” he said.

Military Spokesman Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad denied that any paramilitary personnel was missing or had been killed.

However, NWFP Home Secretary Badshah Gul Wazir said at a news briefing in the evening that three Frontier Constabulary personnel and one policeman, who had been kidnapped by militants from Sambat and Baryan in Matta sub-district earlier in the day, were ‘reported’ to have been executed.He said two civilians had been killed and another wounded in a crossfire between militants and security forces in Imam Dheri, the village of Maulana Fazlullah.

He denied reports that the government had launched any operation and said that militants in the village had fired on troops who were patrolling the area.

People in Shakkardarra said that militants of Jaish-i-Muhammad, who had set up checkposts on the main road and took positions on hills, seized the four men during the checking of vehicles.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the execution, but Maulana Naddar, a lieutenant of Maulana Fazlullah, said in a broadcast on an FM radio that the men had been executed to avenge the death of three militants killed early in the day.

Earlier, security forces and militants holding positions on the two sides of the Swat river exchanged heavy gunfire.

The military spokesman said that army troops deployed in the troubled region were not being used in the area. However, local people claimed that mortar shells were fired as gunship helicopters hovered over the area.

Maulana Fazlullah, son-in-law of incarcerated leader of Maulana Sufi Mohammad, is reported to have gone underground. It is said that he is trying to garner support from the nearby district of Kohistan.

Local people said that paramilitary forces had occupied a militant training camp located in the mountains of Shah Dagai in the Khwazakhela sub-district.

Meanwhile, the NWFP cabinet met in Peshawar to discuss the situation.

Agencies add: The home secretary said that militants fired rockets at a chopper carrying IGFC Maj-Gen Mohammad Alam Khattak who had come to inspect troops deployed in the Fizza Ghat area.Military spokesman Waheed Arshad said: “The clash erupted after militants fired at paramilitary forces setting up checkposts; the forces retaliated and asked for helicopter cover. “We provided them with surveillance and gunship helicopters to give cover to fighting troops.”

The Religion  of Peace™

DAWN 

In 1942, Hollywood went to war. It began pumping out countless movies designed both to entertain the public and bolster its will to fight. A lot of them were cheap, hokey, or both. But even in a nation that seemingly needed little reminder of the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor or the evils of the Nazis, they kept drilling home the message that we must persevere no matter the costs or the duration.

Well that they did. President Franklin Roosevelt lived in constant fear that the public would turn against the war. Indeed a Gallup Poll taken just five months before Germany’s collapse and long after the American public began learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, showed about one-fourth did not want to drive on to unconditional surrender.

Fast forward that reel to the post-9/11 era. Just how many Hollywood movies (not documentaries) have been made in which the bad guys are Islamist terrorists that do not specifically concern the Sept. 11 attacks? If you have to guess, guess “none.”

Consider the film that came out this June, “Live Free or Die Hard.” Early on in the story the FBI believes a massive cyber-attack is the work of Islamists. But it’s the Department of Homeland Security that proves to be more or less responsible. Turns out, the agency had rejected an excellent idea from an employee who, in comic book style, becomes an insane evil genius complete with a beautiful kung-fu-expert sidekick.

In one of last year's most critically acclaimed films, the severely disjointed “Babel,” what is treated as a terrorist shooting of an American tourist woman in Morocco proves to have been accidental. But the Moroccan police, fearful of losing tourist dollars, stage a desperate manhunt that ultimately leads only to the shooting of a cute little boy.

Consider, too, the odyssey of the conversion of Tom Clancy’s massive best-selling 1991 book, “The Sum of All Fears,” in which a nuclear bomb destroys an American city, into the 2002 film of the same name. In the book and the original script, the bad guys were Islamist terrorists. Little did Mr. Clancy know how realistic his choices of villains were: Federal court hearings in February 2001 revealed that as early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear weapon.

But ultimately the Paramount movie depicted the bomber as yet another comic book character villain, an Austrian neo-Nazi. (Though at least he never says, “Vee haff vays uf making you talk!”) [ Heh! -ed.]

Mr. Clancy, who unfortunately had no control over the process, took a swipe at director Phil Alden Robinson on the special features section of the DVD. Mr. Robinson, for his part, made the incredible claim on the DVD extra that the change was in the name of realism.

In reality, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had lobbied to change the villains and won. “I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs,” Mr. Robinson wrote to them, “and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination." Paramount’s CEO at the time, Sherry Lansing, also suggested that she would steer clear of movies with Muslim villains.

Indeed, one of the few competent characters in “Live Free or Die Hard,” the Deputy FBI Director, looks Arab. In reality, he’s a New Zealander of Maori descent but indeed played an Arab in the film “Three Kings.”

As for CAIR, former FBI assistant director and chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section, Steven Pomerantz, has chargednamed CAIR an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a plot to fund the designated terrorist organization Hamas. CAIR’s 1996 publication, “The Price of Ignorance,” listed “incidents of anti-Muslim bias and violence” that included the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman was convicted of conspiring to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and other New York City landmarks.

By cooperating with organizations like CAIR, Hollywood kowtows to groups that aid and abet terrorists.

The most one-sided of these films, however, are “The Kingdom” and “Rendition.”

In “The Kingdom,” Islamist terrorists blow up 200 American men, women, and children. They are not even affiliated with the military, but rather with Saudi oil production. A small team of FBI agents are allowed into the country to catch the killers. The Saudi police torture an innocent man and both Saudis and Americans turn bad guys into sieves rather than trying to capture one to interrogate him. Still, these don’t particularly slam the viewer over the head and the film is a fairly straight-forward action film with a bit of forensics tossed in.

Until the last few seconds, that is. That’s when we discover that the FBI agents, and America as a whole, are really no better than the terrorists. Both sides profess as their ultimate aim simply killing everybody on the other side.

Meanwhile, “Rendition” stars top box-office draw Reese Witherspoon, with the reference in the title being to “irregular” or “extraordinary rendition.”

Witherspoon’s husband in the film is an Egyptian-born American and “dedicated family man” who is clearly innocent of any wrongdoing. U.S. authorities nonetheless snatch him from American soil and deliver him to a country where he’s horrifically interrogated. The authorities deny any knowledge of the incident. They are liars and they are torturers-by-proxy.

In reality, “rendition” merely means moving someone from one country to another outside formal extradition laws. The process could be abused, but you’ll find it defended in the pages of the Washington Post by a senior fellow from the liberal Brookings Institution.

You can’t argue that Hollywood’s only motivation in bashing anti-terrorist efforts is money. "Babel" lost money and it's clear "The Kingdom" will as well, while "Rendition" came out of the starting gate a full-fledged flop.

Moreover, it’s hardly the case that Islamists don’t make believable villains, much less more believable and captivating than evil cyber-geniuses and neo-Nazis. Islamists have killed about three thousand American civilians on 9/11, killed almost 200 people in the Madrid Train Bombings, and 52 more in the London subway bombings.

Islamic terrorists routinely explode bombs in markets and launch chlorine gas attacks. They build torture chambers and make and display videos of beheadings in which the victim screams in agony as his head is sawed off with a dull knife.

Even their foiled plots are often bizarre, such as Richard Reid’s “shoe bomber” attempt. These guys are a scriptwriter's dream. Quentin Tarantino couldn't think this stuff up.

As to not wanting to stereotype either Arabs or Muslims, the vast majority of whom want nothing to do with violence done in Mohammed’s name, has it occurred to the Tinseltown terror apologists that nobody suffers more from Islamic terror than Muslims themselves?

Islamist terrorists everyday kill and maim Iraqis and Afghans. Afghans were forced to suffer for years under the Taliban terror regime. Now the terrorists have blown up at least 136 Pakistanis and injured 400 more for the “sin” of greeting former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Was there what the Islamists call an “infidel,” such as a Christian or Jew, among them?

Whether CAIR cares about them, we should. So should the moguls in La La Land. Instead, they’re giving us the equivalent of 1943 movies equating FDR with Hitler.

Hollywood truly has declared war on the global war on terror.

Outstanding

Michael Fumento

WASHINGTON — A letter sent to Rush Limbaugh's boss demanding he be chastised for comments he made on the air about "phony soldiers" is now on the auction block, and the latest bid is a cool $41,400.

One hundred percent of the money raised from the eBay auction will go to educate the children of Marines and law enforcement officers who died while on duty, the auction says.

Bids will continue until Friday for the letter signed by 41 Democratic senators and sent on Oct. 2 to Mark P. Mays, president of Clear Channel, the parent company of the conservative talk show host's radio broadcast. The winning bidder will get the letter, the "Halliburton briefcase in which this letter is secured 24 hours a day;" a letter of thanks from Limbaugh and a picture of the talkmeister announcing the auction at a speech in Philadelphia delivered last Thursday.

"This historic document may well represent the first time in the history of America that this large a group of U.S. senators attempted to demonize a private citizen by lying about his views. As such, it is a priceless memento of the folly of (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid and his 40 senatorial co-signers," reads the eBay announcement.

As of midday Sunday, 95 bids by 36 bidders had been made on the letter, whose opening bid price was $100.

Al Gore is not the least worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace – that title, perhaps, belongs to Yassir Arafat. Nor is his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, quite as riddled with questionable statements as the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan activist and 1992 peace laureate, which has since been exposed as a work of fiction. But for an independent assessment of the former US Vice-President’s contribution to world peace and understanding, I am inclined to favour Mr Justice Barton over the Nobel committee.

In the High Court on Wednesday, the judge ruled that schools must not show An Inconvenient Truth without using material to balance Mr Gore’s “one-sided views” on the issue. The film is political rather than scientific, he added, because it contains nine statements that are either untrue or are unsubstantiated. It mistakenly attributes the drying-up of Lake Chad to global warming and falsely claims that polar bears have drowned because they can’t find enough ice.

Most brazen of all, Gore claims that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” – vividly illustrated in the film with a simulation of Manhattan disappearing beneath the waves. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yesterday named as co-recipient of the peace prize with Mr Gore, believes that sea levels will rise by less than 18in over the next 100 years, and that it would take several millennia for sea levels to rise by 20ft.

Far from “disseminating greater knowledge about man-made climate change”, as the Nobel committee put it, what Mr Gore has done is tantamount to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. He has taken a serious debate and twisted it to fit a Hollywood-style narrative: that mankind is facing destruction as a result of his own hubris, unless it listens to the environmental prophet warning of imminent doom – Al Gore – and mends its ways.

Times Online 

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this morning, and I'd like to congratulate Irena Sendler. Sendler was a former history teacher who rescued 2,500 children during the Holocaust and was a top contender for the wondrous prize. Back during the early 1940's, Sendler was a Catholic social worker who had gone into the Warsaw ghetto to rescue Jewish kids who were destined either to starve there, or die in death camps. She would sneak the kids past Nazi guards, sometimes hiding them in body bags, or would provide them with false documents - inevitably getting them to Polish families for adoption, or hiding them in convents or orphanages. She also made a list of the children's real names, put them in a jar and buried them, so that some day she could dig them up and find the kids to tell them their true names. The Nazis captured her and beat the crap out of her, but she later escaped, and she went into hiding. She's now in her late 90's , living in a nursing home in Poland.

I want to congratulate her, because she didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead it went to Al Gore, the guy who invented the Internet. Go figure.

Unt dass isst mine, DARM-ge-fuehl.

The Daily Gut