In the month since HonestReporting delivered its 15,000 signatures demanding the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) fire “false photo tweeter” Khulood Badawi, there has been a deafening silence on progress in the UN’s investigation into the case.
HonestReporting broke the news that Badawi was an employee at the UNOCHA office in Jerusalem. The information prompted Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, to formally demand her dismissal.
UN officials had promised to investigate Badawi’s use of Twitter to spread propaganda about Israel. In the meantime, UN officials said, Badawi would remain in her post at UNOCHA until a decision on her fate would be reached.
But according to a report by the pro-Palestinian Alternative Information Center (AIC), Badawi has essentially, if not officially, been suspended from her work at UNOCHA. “The telephone is not answered, there is no reply to emails and at her office, I receive the laconic reply that Khulood Badawi is on vacation,” writes AIC activist Michael Warschawski, who went looking for Badawi in the absence of news about her.
“Since the beginning of this “affair”, Khulood has been sitting at home, in a sort of administrative detention, and from time to time is required to turn up for an “investigation” by her supervisors in New York,” the article states.
The AIC has been trying to influence the “affair” since the very beginning, issuing a string of articles defending Badawi and dismissing her blatant falsehoods as an expression of her “personal opinion.” Following HR’s petition demanding that the UN remove her from her post at the UN, the AIC launched a counter-petition demanding that the UN keep her.
