Accused of intentionally posting false anti-Israel report
by STEWART STOGEL via wnd.com
NEW YORK – The United Nations has decided to dismiss a controversial official who was accused of intentionally posting a false report on Twitter that accused Israel of killing children, WND has learned.
Sources report Kulhood Badaawi, a public affairs officer in the Jerusalem office of the coordinator of humanitarian affairs, had been the target of a year-long internal investigation.
The investigation, according to the source, said Badawi was found to have intentionally posted a false report on Twitter picturing a dead Palestinian girl. The posting portrayed the girl has having been killed during the 2012 Israel shelling of Gaza.
However, the photo was from a Reuters archive, and was traced to a 2006 clash between Palestinian gangs, and the Israeli military had no involvement.
Israeli U.N. Ambassador Ron Prosor publicly had called for Badawi’s dismissal.
Prosor had written to U.N.’s humanitarian affairs coordinator Valerie Amos about the issue, after Badawi was found to be using Twitter to incite local disturbances.
Amos was the highest ranking U.K. national and African female in the U.N. system. She also was the first African woman in a British Cabinet when she was appointed by Tony Blair.
In an incident March 10, 2012, Badawi tweeted what was alleged to be a photo of a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces.
The photo was accompanied by the comment: “Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by Israel. Another father carrying a child into a grave in Gaza.”
The Israeli foreign ministry hotly denied the allegation and claimed the photo posted was from an archived Reuters report in 2006.
Reuters confirmed the Israeli account and also explained that the dead girl was apparently killed by a local gang and not the Israeli military.
In response, OCHA chief Amos admitted that the U.N. did not condone such actions but hastened to add that her office did not consider Twitter posts to be “official.”
Israel’s U.N. mission rejected the U.N. explanation and revealed the same staffer had been involved in several other incidents dating back to 2008.
In one incident, video released by Israel showed Badawi in a Jerusalem demonstration in which she emphatically labeled Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak a “child murderer.”
Israel’s Prosor had insisted that the U.N. “take action to immediately terminate” Badawi due to a history of incidents that he claimed violated U.N. ethics.
Amos, through U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky, said at the time her office would launch an investigation to address the Israeli demands.
Why Amos would be allowed to investigate her own staff, rather than allow the U.N. internal affairs unit, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, to conduct the inquiry was never explained.
As WND reported, Israeli officials say the falsely captioned photo has gone viral and is posing a serious security threat to civilians in the region because it could incite violence. Israeli sources confirmed they believe the goal of the posting was to create a dangerous situation for their citizens.
Anti-Israel sentiment at the U.N., however, is far from startling.
The UN Watch website notes an “alien observing the United Nations’ debates, reading its resolutions, and walking its halls could well conclude that a principal purpose of the world body is to censure a tiny country called Israel.”
“The U.N.’s discrimination against Israel is not a minor infraction, nor a parochial nuisance of interest solely to those concerned with equal rights of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Instead, the world body’s obsession with censuring Israel at every turn directly affects all citizens of the world, for it constitutes (a) a severe violation of the equality principles guaranteed by the U.N. Charter and underlying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and (b) a significant obstacle to the U.N.’s ability to carry out its property mandate.”
The website pointed out that during one year, when Sudan was running a campaign of genocide in Darfur, there was not a single resolution on the subject. At the same time, there were 22 anti-Israel resolutions condemning the leading democracy in the Middle East.
Another site, Honest Reporting, said it had delivered 15,000 signatures on a petition to the U.N. calling for “appropriate action” against “false photo tweeter Khulood Badawi.”
The site has documented numerous incidents of false information being propagated about Israel.
In a high-profile case reported by WND, a widely exploited Palestinian claim that Israeli soldiers killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, was exposed as a fraud.
