Category Archives: Personalities

Inhumanitarianism – Hamas honcho bankrolled by Brits?

Many a Jewish educational institution or organization will readily tell you that fundraising is an uphill slog.

But it’s smooth sailing if you’re an anti-Jewish terrorist entity like Hamas, which, without official fundraisers, receives largesse from a number of eager sources. 

There’s Iran, of course. Any cause holding the promise of dead Jews is a shoo-in for the mullahs. And they go the extra mile, offering would-be killers not only cash (according to the State Department, up to $100 million annually to Hamas and other assorted such gangs) but also weapons and training.

Then there is Qatar, which has covered salaries of government (i.e. Hamas) employees in Gaza. And there’s no lack of private groups and individuals in places like Algeria, Sudan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates who are more than happy to aid evildoers. And don’t forget the lucrative smuggling of weapons, chemicals and electronics. And income from sham “humanitarian” charities in Western countries.

Like the U.K., at least according to a recent investigation by Israel’s Channel 12. The Brits? Who knew? Not many, it seems, at least until now.

Hamas is banned in the U.K. as the terrorist organization it is. And no one is accusing the country’s government or official entities of intentionally funding it. The problem is that it may be enabling aid to Hamas, by supporting efforts with nefarious connections. By taking, in other words, the famed road of good intentions to an unexpected but not uncommon terminus.

The U.K. and, to be fair, Canada and the European Union, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and others, have sponsored a project of UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Emergency Fund, whose beneficiaries are designated by a Hamas-run office, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).

The program provides monthly cash payments to 546,000 Gazans the MSD deems needy.

The MSD’s head is Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ politburo. The U.S. Treasury Department identifies him as a “senior Hamas official.”

NGO Monitor, a group that investigates non-governmental organizations, found a document from back in 2022 that shows how the U.K. Foreign Office was aware even then of the involvement of Hamas, “a proscribed group,” with the program. The office was concerned about “severe reputational damage” that revelation of the connection might cause Britain.

All respect is due to traditional British fussiness about appearances, but blimey, there’s a rather larger issue here, namely handing funds over to a member of a terrorist movement and allowing him to disburse them as he sees fit. 

And the U.N. agency “is just the tip of the iceberg,” according to NGO Monitor’s legal advisor, Anne Herzberg, “because 13 U.N. agencies are operating in Gaza. There is very little information into how these other U.N. agencies are operating.” 

What’s more, there are also Hamas operatives active in the U.K., including Zaker Birawi, a head of the Palestinian Return Center, who has helped organize weekly anti-Israel protests in London. A former member of the Hamas politburo, Issam Yusef Mustafa, a U.K. citizen, is the biggest fundraiser for Hamas in Europe.

In response to a query from Jewish Insider, the British Embassy in Israel insisted that “Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.K., and funding or supporting it is a crime.” The embassy, moreover, “categorically reject[s] the false and irresponsible allegations in the Channel 12 investigation,” and maintains that “No U.K. funding was provided to the Ministry of Social Development in Gaza.”

That, though, wasn’t the investigators’ allegation. It was that UNICEF funds the MSD, with cash provided by the U.K. It’s the old “I didn’t give the killer a gun, I just left it on his nighttable” excuse.

The U.K. claims that its Foreign Office monitors where funds provided to UNICEF  end up. But allowing a Hamas honcho to be a conduit doesn’t inspire confidence in the effectiveness of that supposed oversight.

Recently, the U.K., along with France and Canada, threatened Israel with “concrete actions” if it does not lift restrictions on humanitarian aid and work with United Nations agencies. 

Humanitarians, heal thyselves.

(c) 2025 Ami Magazine

A Life Lesson

Mishpacha Magazine asked me to contribute, as part of a symposium, a short essay on the topic of a lesson I would want my children to internalize. The symposium was recently published, and my contribution is below.

(As it happens, although the below was written months before then end of my 31-year tenure as Agudath Israel’s director of public affairs, it turns out to be a most timely idea for me.)

A lesson that has become concretized in my life, and that I have sought to impart to my children (and to anyone else who will listen – the progeny are a captive audience) is what Rabi Akiva famously said when he found himself sleeping in the wild, with the candle he had lit blown out by the wind, his rooster alarm clock devoured by a cat and his donkey killed by a lion (Berachos 60b).

Namely, “All that the Merciful One does is for the good” – an attitude that reflected the motto of his teacher, Nachum Ish Gamzu,  “This, too, is for the good.” 

And when Rabi Akiva repeats that sentiment as well to the people of the nearby town as they, unlike him, were marched into captivity, he is reminding them of the same, even as they are experiencing great adversity. We may not see the good in what happens to us right away – or ever – but it is still for the good.

There’s nothing wrong with wishing for peace and calm and stability. But when adversity arrives, we can either kick and scream (to no avail) or seek to accept and come to terms with the challenge.

What began to teach me that lesson (though it took long to absorb it) was the knowledge that my father, a”h, as a teenager, was banished with other members of his Novardhok yeshiva by the Soviets to Siberia. Those boys could easily have felt hopeless. Yet they grew in unimaginable ways during their Siberian ordeal.  And survived the war to marry and raise families. Families that raised families of their own…

And in my own life, although I never faced anything like Siberian exile, I saw how “bad” things could be good things well-disguised. Our family moved to new cities twice and each exodus was from a wonderful place, leaving me devastated to be leaving. In each case, the new city loomed depressingly.

And yet, each move turned out to be a great brachah. As did an unexpected seeming professional downturn, which I deeply bemoaned at the time but that I have come to see as a true blessing well-camouflaged.

The life lesson of understanding how good can lie beneath what seems its opposite is even reflected in halacha:  “Just as one offers a blessing over good,” Chazal teach and the Shulchan Aruch codifies, “so does one offer a blessing over bad.”

I still need to fully internalize that truth; it’s one that needs constant chazarah. But I have experience born of having seen it realized. And I hope that my and my wife’s children will come to appreciate it as well.

Tzav – The Import of the Ashes

An interesting Midrash is cited by Rav Yosef Nechemia Kornitzer (1880-1933), a great-grandson of the Chasam Sofer who served as the av beis din of  Cracow before World War II. The Midrash is found in the Tanchuma manuscript discovered by Solomon Buber, published in 1885.

The Midrash speaks about the end of history and quotes Ovadiah (1:18): “And the house of Yaakov will be fire and the house of Yosef flame; and the house of Esav, straw. And they will light them aflame and devour them. And there will remain nothing of the  house of Esav…”

Rav Kornitzer quotes its continuation: “And where did Moshe say this? [In the words] ‘it is the olah on its mokeid throughout the night until the morning… And the kohein will lift up the deshen [ashes ]… and place it next to the mizbei’ach’ ” (Vayikra 6, 2-3). A puzzling citation.

To explain it, he quotes his forebear the Chasam Sofer as casting the kohein’s lifting of the terumas hadeshen as the need for the kohein to not avert his eyes from the “lowly of worth.” He has a responsibility to lift them up and bring them to a holier place. 

Rav Kornitzer asserts that the kohein’s responsibility is paralleled in our own vis-à-vis the rest of humanity – that we are in galus (the “night”) to spread knowledge of the Torah and to, by our dedication to Torah, attract those among other peoples, the “deshen”, to join us. That, he contends, is what will bring about the fulfillment of Ovadiah’s prophecy, the destruction of evil.

He then quotes another Midrash: “Rabi Yosi ben Kisma’s students asked him when Moshiach will come. He responded ‘This is the law of the olah’ ” (Vayikra 6:2).

Concludes Rav Kornitzer: “When the Jews fulfill their mission and ‘lift up the deshen’… Ben Dovid will arrive, may it be soon in our days.”

Sadly, the galus didn’t end in Rav Kornitzer’s days. May it end in ours.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran