When the Elsas and Supermen trick-or-treat their way to our doorsteps next week, some will be toting an orange box with the word UNICEF on it. Since 1950, four years after the organization was founded, children have been collecting these donations for the United Nations Children’s Fund in a box given to them by their local public school.
The question is: Why are our public schools involved in pushing any charity, much less one that is associated with a mismanaged and corrupt organization like the United Nations? Especially considering the objectionable turn UNICEF has taken.
President Lyndon Johnson liked the UNICEF Halloween program so much he declared Oct. 31 to be “UNICEF Day” and said the organization had turned Halloween into “a program of basic training in world citizenship.”
World citizenship is all fine and good, of course, but our schools haven’t been able to master even American citizenship, nor are they trying.
For example, when I learned my daughter’s Brooklyn public school wasn’t reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — even though New York state law requires it to be said daily — I asked school officials to start. In response, I was told it could be offensive or uncomfortable for immigrants to have their children say it.
When I said my children have two immigrant parents from different countries and we suffer no discomfort when this country is honored, they relented and implemented it — once a week.
But we should be uncomfortable with turning our kids into UNICEF fund-raisers. Two weeks ago, a different UN arm, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, adopted an anti-Israel resolution that, among other things, denies a Jewish connection to the sacred Temple Mount site.
And UNICEF isn’t exactly free of anti-Israel activity, either. It funds summer camps in Gaza, which, as National Review’s Dave Kopel explained in 2007, partners with the “Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation” to produce glowing biographies of terrorists. One of the UNICEF-funded camps was even named after a female terrorist.
And it’s not just about Israel — though school administrators worried about offending kids of immigrants with the Pledge of Allegiance might consider the hypocrisy in having Jewish kids raise money for a group that might send that money to genocidal Jew-haters. UNICEF also fights against international adoptions. It pressures developing countries like Guatemala to stop allowing foreigners to adopt thousands (5,800 in 2013 by UNICEF’s own count) of Guatemalan kids.
It would rather children grow up without parents than find a loving home outside their country of birth. This should be unacceptable to enough people to end the practice of American children raising money for an organization like this.
Additionally, UNICEF has seen, for decades, the kind of mismanagement typical of the overall United Nations. UNICEF’s internal audits found it lost tens of millions of dollars in the 1990s. It has had bribery scandals at its African outposts. Its chapter in Germany had thousands of regular donors cut off funding a few years ago after it was discovered that some UNICEF employees received exorbitant salaries.
The truly offensive works of the United Nations go unremarked upon in our schools. But plenty of parents in New York already associate the United Nations with corruption.
Anna, a Midtown East mom, was appalled when her child brought home the UNICEF box last year. “It’s completely improper for a public school to direct my kid’s charitable contributions to any organization,” she said. “Much less one with which I greatly disagree.”
Anzhelika, a parent in Staten Island, felt like an exception was being made for UNICEF that wasn’t being made for other charities and groups. “As far as I know, all ‘fund-raising’ has to go through the PTA for school-related activities, clubs, needs,” she told me. “Why is this fund-raising for an outside cause OK? The school doesn’t benefit from these boxes but ends up associating itself with a particular organization which can be alienating to certain people.”
Sorry if it sounds Grinch-like to want to impede donations meant for the children of the world, but the inappropriateness of pushing this at public schools, coupled with the United Nations’ neverending corruption problems (or worse, as in Gaza) makes ending the boxes a no-brainer.
Let the kids collect their candy free of political action dressed up as do-gooderism, and let their parents donate their pennies to a charity that makes sense.