Live a lie, die by it 85

 Reuters reports:

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 air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. 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 him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s "engineering unit" – its bomb makers. 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, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family 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".

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq’s activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq’s widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher’s surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.

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

To my certain personal knowledge it is a blatant lie that UNWRA does not ‘tolerate’ political activity in its schools. The last time I entered an UNRWA school evidence of its support for anti-Israel activity could not have been more evident, in text books, exercise books, posters, and other instruction materials. 

The Arabs have deliberately kept generations of their fellow Arabs, the ‘Palestinians’, in a condition of dependency, without ‘human rights’  or civil rights as a reproach to the conscience of Israelis and Westerners – having no conscience whatsoever themselves. And the United Nations has assisted them in this, with the creation and perpetuation of UNRWA, and so have the Western powers. Of course the Gazans  could have done more for themselves. When they were left functioning greenhouses worth billions of dollars by the departing Israelis, they preferred to smash them rather than use them. And it is not to be forgotten that they voted for Hamas to govern them. 

Posted under Commentary by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, January 6, 2009

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