As a guy who keeps promoting dialogue amongst Palestinians and Israeli Jews (and their very vocal supporters in this country), I’m baffled by how the United Nations keeps allowing the Palestinians to make so many pro-Israel advocates despise them. Consider the latest:

The U.N. Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA) – the world’s only permanent refugee agency (meaning they are not trying to resettle people under their care) is hosting a youth soccer tournament. The Shahid (Martyr) Abu Jihad tournament is being held in Ramallah. For those keeping score, that’s the seat of the “moderate Palestinians,” the ones who are not Hamas and say that they want to negotiate a two-state solution with Israel.

Let’s get real: If a German right-wing nationalist group named its U.N.-sponsored swimming tournament for Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, how would the world respond? What if a Cambodian political party named its U.N.-funded baseball tournament for Pol Pot, the country’s genocidal dictator of the late 1970s? How about if Israel named a film festival backed with U.N. money after Baruch Goldstein, perpetuator of the 1994 massacre of Muslims worshipping in Hebron?

No doubt the outrage would be loud, sustained and legitimate. Am I being hypersensitive – even paranoid—in wondering where the outrage is on this soccer tournament? 

Who was Abu Jihad? He’s the once feared Palestinian terrorist assassinated, likely by Israeli commandoes, in Tunis in 1988. Prior to that, this founder of the Fatah group of the Palestine Liberation Organization had planned numerous attacks inside Israel. They were indiscriminant in their aim at both civilian and military targets. When the first intifadah was raging in 1988, he was busy organizing the youth committees that in addition to attacking Israeli soldiers, targeted “collaborators,” or Palestinians cooperating with the Israelis.

No one is claiming that the Palestinians need to become Zionists. And we can never forget that there is real misery in the lives of many, many Palestinians. Yet one wonders how basic distancing from a terrorist past can be ignored, and how a world body supposedly devoted to advancing peace allows itself to be hijacked by extremists.

Some lessons, it seems, need to be learned over and over again – particularly by UNWRA administrators.