By Debbie Schlussel

Leave it to the United Nations to blame some cockamamie, imagined spread of polio on the United States and our assassination of Osama Bin Laden.  Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to give it credence and report on it. Because, ya know, the imagined danger to the lives and health of a few terrorist-supporting Pakistanis is far more important than the lives of thousands of Americans that Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda mass murdered.  It’s quite ridiculous, but as one might expect, the United Nations certainly has the market cornered on the absurd. Uh, there’s a reason–many of them–why Pakistan is one of the last bastions where polio hasn’t been mostly eradicated.

And it has nothing to do with the U.S. or with the allegation that a local doctor got DNA confirmation from the Bin Ladens by allegedly using hepatitis B vaccines as a cover story. It has everything to do with the fact that Pakistan is far too busy looking for ways to hate America and aid its enemies than care for its own people and finally emerge from the 7th Century. Oh, and by the way, UNICEF–an openly anti-Western, pro-Muslim waste of American tax contributions to the UN–can go to hell along with Bin Laden. You’ll note from the excerpt, below, that the UNICEF creep is whining about a drop in vaccinations for one month. That’s it.

Note the real cause here–Islamic clerics who constantly rehearse conspiracy theory canards to their Muslim followers: that the Westerners “want to sterilize us” and other similar BS. That’s not the fault of America. That’s Islam. And, don’t forget, that the GOP–when Newt Gingrich controlled the U.S. House–could have defunded the U.N., but Newt chose to ignore that promise like so many others, once he was elected speaker.

The United Nations says a reportedly fake vaccination campaign conducted to help hunt down Osama bin Laden has caused a backlash against international health workers in some parts of Pakistan and has impeded efforts to wipe out polio in the country.

A number of families across Pakistan refused vaccinations from July, when news of the reportedly fake campaign broke, to September, said Dennis King, chief of polio vaccinations in Pakistan for Unicef. “Following the early reports, some families in the provinces did refuse to have their children vaccinated citing the fake campaign as the cause,” Mr. King said.

The refusals, he added, have declined since September due to vigorous campaigning by international and local health workers to ensure families they are working only to vaccinate against polio, a disease eradicated in most of the world but still prevalent in Pakistan.

Pakistan military intelligence in July detained a local doctor, Shakeel Afridi, on charges of involvement with the reportedly fake vaccination campaign, supposedly involving vaccine against hepatitis B. Pakistan officials believe the campaign was an attempt to get DNA samples from bin Laden’s family to confirm his location in a house in Abbottabad. . . .

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which Pakistani officials say carried out the purportedly fake program, hasn’t publicly commented. Officials familiar with the bin Laden operation say the CIA did indeed institute a mock vaccine program with a local doctor who had previously been an informant in the tribal areas. The plan was to obtain DNA from residents of the Abbottabad compound as they got a vaccine injection, helping confirm bin Laden’s presence there. . . .

The issue has given fresh ammunition to Islamist preachers who for years have claimed foreign health workers are spies and urged people to shun vaccination campaigns.

Some 1,700 families living in Mohabatabad, a poor area of 20,000 people on the outskirts of Mardan, a town in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, have refused vaccinations after local Islamic seminaries launched a countercampaign to discourage vaccinations, health workers say. They say the main obstacle in the neighborhood is an influential cleric, Maulana Siddique Ahmed.The preacher runs the Marifu Shria-o-Khanqah seminary, one of 10 hard-line religious schools in the area, and uses sermons to scare locals from getting their children vaccinated.

Mr. Ahmed said during a recent sermon to poor ethnic Pashtun villagers that the U.S. isn’t to be trusted because of its campaign to eliminate Taliban fighters through unmanned drone attacks.

“Enemies of Islam, especially America, are using polio drops to make future generations of Muslims sterile,” he said. “Why else are they emphasizing on saving us from polio when they are killing us through drone attacks? It cannot be on humanitarian grounds only. Why would you drink water from a well belonging to anti-Islamic forces, which is already poisonous?”

These kinds of vehement views existed before allegations of the fake campaign came to light. . . . Usman Khan, an official at the National Research Development Foundation, a Pakistani nongovernment organization, says he tried to draw up a list of prominent clerics in Mardan to get them to issue a decree that vaccinations are allowed under Islam. Instead, the clerics accused him of spying for the U.S. . . .

Pakistan is one of the last significant polio reservoirs in the world, imperiling global eradication efforts, Unicef warns.

And that last sentence has everything to do with backward Islam, not forward Western forces. Still, the ghost of Bin Laden is having the last laugh that the Wall Street Journal reprinted this “blame America” bulldung.