"What if I were to pay $3 million dollars to have your father shot in the head? That's the question I asked Michael Lynk, the United Nations' so-called 'special rapporteur' on Israel, this past week when he presented a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, a hostile anti-Israel and anti-Jewish body. It was an uncomfortable question, but not as uncomfortable as the circumstances that brought me to ask it.
My father, Richard Lakin, was murdered in 2015 by Palestinians at age 76. He was riding a public bus home from a doctor's appointment in Jerusalem when two terrorists boarded and began shooting and stabbing the passengers. They shot my father in the head and butchered him with a knife after he fell to the ground. He succumbed to his wounds two weeks later.
My calculations show that President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) will have rewarded his killers nearly a combined $3 million over their lifetimes, assuming an average life expectancy of 72 for the two terrorists, who were in their early 20s at the time of the attack.
The PA has a 'pay-to-slay' policy and a law under which it systematically pays terrorists who murder Jews. The PA paid out nearly $350 million in 2017 for this, about 10 percent of its annual budget.
The PA receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year, channeled through the United Nations, from the European Union and individual countries such as the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Ireland. It uses this money to reward murderers. In fact, the amount of money paid out by Palestinians to terrorists or their families amounts to more than 25 percent of the total foreign aid that Palestinians receive - a staggering amount...
Lynk's report to the Human Rights Council fits an established U.N. pattern: there are more reports condemning Israel before the council than any of the United Nations' other 193 states.
The Lynk report, like other Human Rights Council reports and resolutions, fails to mention the Palestinian 'pay-to-slay' law. It somehow omits Palestinian use of U.N. funds as blood money.
On a moral level, the United Nations' failure to report - or condemn - these crimes of incentivizing and rewarding terror makes it an accessory to the murders of my father and many other Jewish fathers, mothers and children by Palestinians.
Invited by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, a U.N.-accredited NGO, I delivered this message publicly and directly to Mr. Lynk. The Human Rights Council billed the process an 'interactive dialogue,' but he chose to respond with silence - a silence that speaks volumes..."