DEMAND ACTION: Fire UN Officials Refusing to Teach the Holocaust in Gaza | Simon Wiesenthal Center

DEMAND ACTION: Fire UN Officials Refusing to Teach the Holocaust in Gaza | Simon Wiesenthal Center

Text of a petition letter to UN Secretary General.

Dear Secretary General Ban:

When senior UN officials in Gaza sound like spokesmen for Hamas … when they deny that the Nazi Holocaust "is a human rights issue"… when they empower those who call the Shoah "a lie"… it's time for action.

As you have noted, the Holocaust - the most profound example of man’s inhumanity to man in history - is universally accepted as the heart and soul of any human rights agenda. But even as the world gathered in Poland to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, in which fifty million human beings lost their lives, officials of the UN’s Relief Works Agency in Gaza were unilaterally deciding to eradicate any references to WWII’s Nazi Holocaust. Karen Abu Zayd, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, sounded very much like a Hamas official when she said at a press conference, “I can refute allegations that the UN school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust … we focus on human rights in curriculum … and the murder of six million Jews and five million other undesirables…is not a human rights issue.” And John Ging, UNRWA’s Gaza Director of Operations, mocked UN policy when he declared, “There is no intention to integrate materials and topics [on the Holocaust] that are inconsistent with the desire of Palestinian society.”

I join the Simon Wiesenthal Center in urging you to fire Abu Zayd and Ging and move to implement the UN's Holocaust curriculum in all UNRWA schools. The role of UNRWA must be to help set the stage for peace and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis, not as agents for the agenda of terrorist groups. I am also urging my government to suspend funding for UNRWA in Gaza untill this situation is rectified.