Biden State Dept Privately Downplayed Use of ‘Jihad’ and Occupation in UNRWA-Made Study Materials, Saying Only ‘Some Other Audiences’ View the Terms as ‘Inappropriate’
- February 6, 2025
Adam Kredo, Free Beacon
When the Biden administration resumed funding to the United Nations relief agency for Gaza, it penned an internal memo aimed at defending UNRWA over its production of childhood “educational materials” that encourage violence and demonize Israel. Some of those materials included references to “jihad” and Israeli “occupation”—terms that the Biden State Department wrote are “in line with U.N. principles” and only “viewed as inappropriate by some other audiences.”
The memo, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a records request from watchdog group Protect the Public Trust, came roughly two weeks after the Biden administration restored tens of millions of dollars in funding to UNRWA in April 2021 following a pause during President Donald Trump’s first stint in the White House. Written by deputy assistant secretary Nancy Izzo Jackson for Secretary of State Antony Blinken, it addressed “examples of criticism” targeting UNRWA and laid out the State Department’s “response.”
Michael Chamberlain, Protect the Public’s Trust’s director, said the newly unearthed State Department documents highlight how the former administration “tried to sell a wholly unrealistic version of UNRWA to Congress.”
“Even with all they knew, they shrugged and wrote the checks anyway,” he told the Free Beacon. “All the post-Oct. 7 reports about UNRWA staff participating in terrorist attacks and terror groups storing war materiel in UNRWA facilities were not surprising to anyone paying attention—not even to the officials in charge of the decision to resume sending money to this organization.”