Tel Aviv: Attempted rape of a child by African migrant stirs controversy again

I wonder if Obama heard about Israel’s illegal alien problems when he landed there today?

We’ve been reporting the on-going controversy in Israel about African refugees, asylum seekers, illegal aliens (whatever!) coming across Israel’s borders especially now that Egypt has become even more unfriendly to the Jewish state.  See our category Israel and Refugees.

Israeli citizens in South Tel Aviv protest the presence of African illegal migrants in May 2012. photo credit: Tomer Neuberg/Flash90

In the past week, things boiled over again when a Sudanese man broke into a home allegedly intending to attack a child.

From Haaretz on March 13th:

A Sudanese man broke into a home in the south Tel Aviv neighborhood of Yad Eliyahu at 5 A.M on Wednesday morning and apparently tried to sexually assault an 8-year old girl.

According to an initial investigation, the man entered the home and headed straight to the child’s bedroom, at which point the mother, 40, heard her daughter crying and rushed into the room. She tried to stop the man, who stabbed her in the stomach with a knife and left her with moderate wounds.

When the father heard, he rushed to the room and managed to overpower the assailant, injuring him seriously.

Magen David Adom rescue services arrived after the family called the police and evacuated the man to hospital in unconscious and in serious condition, with injuries to his head. The mother and daughter were also taken to hospital and the daughter is now being examined.

The next day, March 14th, 100 people took to the streets to demonstrate against the presence of the Africans in their neighborhood:

From Indepth Africa:

Some 100 people burned a trash bin and blocked a major intersection in south Tel Aviv yesterday to protest the presence there of African migrant workers, following the attempted rape of an 8-year-old girl and stabbing of her mother…

By the way this then sends us back to Haaretz where there was an article about the demonstration the other day, but it appears to have been taken down.  I’m wondering if Haaretz downplayed the demonstration story because it coincided with the release of the Human Rights Report critical of the Netanyahu government which also came out on March 14th?

Just one more incendiary incident in South Tel Aviv

Here is a lengthy article at Al-Monitor critical of Israel for trying to deport illegal aliens/asylum seekers back to Africa.  You can read the whole thing yourself, but here is one segment near the end of the story:

Israeli politicians have been at the forefront of a campaign aiming to expel African asylum seekers from Israel. African refugees have been regularly referred to by politicians, and in media reports, as “infiltrators,” and accused of carrying diseases, stealing and raping Israeli women.

In May 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the presence of African refugees in Israel “is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity.”

Recently, this rhetoric has translated into violence.

Molotov cocktails were thrown at a refugee-run day care center last year, and violent riots broke out during right-wing protests against refugees through South Tel Aviv, an area where many African asylum seekers live. Asylum seekers have also been attacked in streets throughout the country.

On the same day as the alleged attempted rape last week, Human Rights Watch released a critical report on the Israeli government’s attempt to send “asylum seekers” back to Africa.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Human Rights Watch and the Hotline for Migrant Workers released a report on Wednesday stating that Israel is threatening detained Eritrean and Sudanese nationals, including asylum-seekers, with prolonged detention to pressure them to leave Israel.

The report said that since December 11, 2012, “Israel’s pressure has convinced several hundred detained Sudanese and one Eritrean to leave Israel, and in February 2013, some 50 detained Eritreans agreed under similar pressure to leave for Uganda.”

According to the report, all 50 of the detained Eritreans remain in detention.

HRW and the Hotline for Migrant Workers said that Sudanese and Eritreans face a real risk of harm if they return to their home countries.

The report said that under Sudanese law, anyone who has visited Israel faces up to 10 years in prison in Sudan and Sudanese officials have said the courts will apply the law.  

Next, the report stated that because of “credible persecution fears relating to punishment for evading indefinite military service in Eritrea, 80 percent of Eritrean asylum seekers worldwide are granted some form of protection.”

“Israel’s prolonged detention of asylum-seekers apparently aims to shatter all hope so they feel they have no real choice but to leave the country,” said Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Read it all.

It is happening everywhere in the world—the third world wants in to the first world plain and simple.  The first world has to say NO! at some point or ultimately risk collapse.   I think we have reached that point.

About the photo:  The photo and its accompanying story can be found here at The Times of Israel published in December 2012.

Tel Aviv rocked by demonstrations in wake of arrest of African in rape of elderly woman

Residents of the neighborhood in south Tel Aviv say their community has been taken over by “refugees” and they want them deported.

Here is one of several stories on the latest crime, from YNet news:

“Today was a really hard day since aside from going to work, we didn’t leave our homes. We are afraid of the police and afraid of the Israelis, hatred is felt on the streets.” This is how Salman, 32, a Sudanese asylum-seeker has described the situation in south Tel Aviv.

Salman, like many of his friends and acquaintances who live in the vicinity of Tel Aviv’s central bus station, fears the vengeance likely to take a toll following the arrest of the Eritrean man suspected of raping an 83-year-old woman.

Go to the YNet story from the day before about how the “horrendous rape” of an old woman rattled the neighborhood, here, leading to the demonstrations.

“Refugees” say they aren’t all criminals and say the Israelis just don’t like blacks.  The migrants to Israel have had it good so far, they aren’t placed in detention as they are in Australia.  (Australia faces criticism daily for that detention policy).

A refugee from Darfur, who infiltrated Israel two years ago said that “the situation is really difficult here, we hear people calling out ‘we don’t want the Sudanese’ and we stay in our homes. The Israelis don’t differentiate between us – to them, we are all black.

“I want to tell them that we are not criminals we are refugees who fled war. Just like in every place, there are people who commit crimes but most of my friends and I just want some peace and quiet.”

Residents:  deport them all.

As a result of the horrifying rape of the elderly woman, an uproarious demonstration was held on Monday night in which dozens of south Tel Aviv’s residents and right-wing activists demanded the deportation of the African migrants.

Maybe the Israelis should go study that Greek border security success story.

Huge Christian refugee problem is coming

I’m watching C-SPAN’s Book TV this Sunday morning. An author, Lela Gilbert, is discussing her book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. She was talking about the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Arab lands who had to flee after the founding of Israel. That went on from 1948 until the 1970s, but it’s only now being taken note of. Then she talked about what is going on with Christians in the Middle East. The Iraqi Christians didn’t see it coming, she said. They are still being attacked, and their numbers are a fraction of what they were. (We’ve written about this.) But Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, and now they are in danger there. Egypt has millions of Christians, and the ones who have enough money to get out are getting out. The others will leave any way they can, lots of them.

There will be no Christians in the Middle East in a few years, except, ironically, in Israel. Lela Gilbert said the Christians’ plight is desperate. “Christians have no Israel,” nowhere to go where they will be automatically accepted. And Christians in the west do not take much interest in these beleaguered people. Their ancient liturgies and ways of worship are strange to most American Christians. Evangelicals consider them Catholic (which they are) and want to “convert” them. Christians usually don’t think of themselves as one people, the way Jews do, and that’s a sad thing. It wasn’t always that way.

I don’t see any solution. We unleashed “change” in the Middle East, and the change turned out to be all in the direction of Islamists taking power. The Jews found there was no room for them decades ago, and now the Christians are finding the same thing.

Iraqi Palestinians suffer in Chicago; mental illness is one major problem

This is a very interesting article about a Palestinian family (from a camp on the border of Iraq and Syria).  I am posting a lot of it because it in so many ways summarizes many different topics we discuss here daily.

A little background:  We don’t normally take Palestinian refugees (or at least we haven’t) because they are needed to keep the pressure on that evil Israel.  If they are resettled and scattered around the world, Arabs wouldn’t have anything to complain about and no reason to continually send rockets into the state of Israel (just call me cynical!).

However, Palestinians were welcomed into Iraq by Saddam Hussein, one of the few Arab countries that wanted them.  When the war came in 2003, ol’ Saddam went into his ‘spider’ hole, and the new Shiite government didn’t like those Sunni Palestinians and so many Palestinians (34,000 we are told in today’s article) tried to get into Syria, another Muslim country that didn’t want them.  They ended up in a refugee camp on the border and we decided to take a thousand or two of them (numbers vary).  That is where we pick up our story from Chicago.

From New America Media:

CHICAGO — A fragile sense of security often robs Zuhair Sulaiman of the luxury of a good night’s sleep. “The fear is embedded inside,” he said in Arabic at a meeting at Arab American Family Services in Bridgeview, Ill., just outside Chicago.

Along with more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, who abandoned their homes, his family fled to Iraq when Israel was born in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He lived in Iraq as a Palestinian refugee with no citizenship papers for 54 years before applying to come to the United States as a refugee.

Now, living in Chicago as an Iraqi refugee, Sulaiman, 58, is grateful to be in a safe and secure country, but nightly dreams of death, and fears for his children when they leave the house. “I saw too many things in Iraq; too many dead bodies, too many dead children, too many heads cut off in the street and too much blood.”

But here he faces new struggles—many of them not unlike those faced by others seeking sanctuary in America. He struggles with poverty because of the limited help offered by the U.S. government. He struggles to pay the government back for his family’s flight to America. And he struggles to find his feet in a place that’s so different from what he’s always known.

Living in the Al-Waleed refugee camp in Iraq, near the border with Syria and the Al-Tanf crossing, Sulaiman applied to come to the United States through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). With the help of World Relief-Chicago, Sulaiman, his wife Allaay, and their five children, who were born into refugee status in Iraq, were relocated to various areas of Chicago in 2010. Sulaiman now lives with his wife and three of his children in the North Side Chicago neighborhood of Albany Park.

US government not doing enough for refugees!

As refugees, he and his family received assistance from the U.S. government when they arrived, but were eventually forced to seek aid on their own. Sulaiman found help at the non-profit organization Arab American Family Services, but he says more could be done to assist the refugees.

Resettled by World Relief,* one of nine primary federal contractors (they have spun off hundreds of subcontractors) which is almost completely funded with your tax dollars.  Here is a succinct little summary of what refugees get from you managed by World Relief:

For the fiscal year 2012, the State Department provided a one-time payment of $1,100 per refugee upon arrival in Illinois. Refugees arriving in the U.S. are placed with a resettlement agency, such as World Relief-Chicago, that has signed a cooperative agreement with the State Department. The affiliates are responsible for assuring that the refugees receive aid for the first 30 to 90 days after arrival, arranging for services such as food, housing, clothing, employment services and follow-up medical care.

Income eligible single adult refugees, and married couples without children, are eligible for Refugee Cash and Medical Assistance, from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Department of Health and Human Services (ORR), for eight months from the date of arrival. Families with children are eligible for Transitional Aid for Needy Families (TANF) for up to five years. Eligibility criteria for these services often parallel the state’s Medicaid programs.

Refugees must pay for the cost of their plane ticket, though. The U.S. government is reimbursed for the costs expended of the refugees’ flights by the refugees’ sponsor agencies. These agencies then set up payment plans for the refugees. Sulaiman said when he resettled in Illinois in 2010 the U.S. provided every member of his family $900.

On this plane ticket repayment business, keep in mind that World Relief, in this case, gets a cut of whatever money they collect from the refugees for the plane ticket loan.  The full repayment, if it ever happens, does not go back into the US Treasury (which originally supplied the plane ticket funds).

World Relief   “took their hand away,” said Sulaiman:

He received two months of aid from World Relief-Chicago before they “took their hand away.” Now he pays about $50 a month to cover a $5,000 debt for the plane tickets that brought him and his family to Chicago. Once World Relief-Chicago stopped supporting Sulaiman and his family, he had to seek out aid from a social service agency. One of his married daughters was resettled in Bridgeview, Ill., just outside Chicago, and through word-of-mouth he was able to reach out to Arab American Family Services, for services such as English-language tutoring.

He and his wife are also seeing a therapist through Heartland Alliance.

Although this reporter is trying to make it sound like these good-hearted charitable organizations like Heartland Alliance are picking up the slack where the bad US government has dropped the ball, know that Heartland is largely funded with taxpayer dollars too.  See their recent Form 990 (here) (page 9).  It is a $20 million organization which gets over $13 million from GOVERNMENT GRANTS.

The article continues:

Shalabi said the resources available to refugees are often good in theory, but executed poorly. “Refugees’ expectations are very high based off what the American government promised them, but the response is not always as dignified as it should be; a lot of them are left to fend with inadequate furniture and clothing, mental health issues, children trying to adjust to new schools and parents who don’t know their rights because they come from countries where they had none.”

“Things are given to refugees when they first arrive, but often they are given fish and not taught how to fish,” said Shalabi.

The US government made no such promises!   And, frankly the federal contractors, World Relief is one!, were supposed to be in a PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership to care for the refugees.  However, when the government money runs out it’s bye-bye to the refugees, you are on your own now while we (World Relief) “welcome” our next batch of new refugee clients who still have government ‘resources’ attached to them.

* World Relief  (Corporation of National Association of Evangelicals) also headquartered in Baltimore is not as rich as the IRC I reported on yesterday.  According to its most recent Form 990 (here), it is a $53 million a year federal contractor receiving $31 million from YOU, the taxpayer.  World Relief Chicago is a subcontractor of contractor World Relief.  No separation of church and state when it comes to your tax dollars flowing to “non-profit” “charitable” religious organizations!

Recognizing Jewish refugees from Arab countries

As the United Nations continues to bemoan the fate of so-called “Palestinian refugees,” the history of Jewish refugees from the time before and shortly after the creation of the State of Israel has been long forgotten—until now.   Regular readers know this is a topic we’ve discussed on several occasions recently and previous posts can be found in our Israel and Refugees category.

Here is another good article on the issue and it’s worth repeating because any future discussion about the Palestinians and “peace” attempts will necessarily include consideration of fairness to former Jewish refugees.

Here is Michael Curtis writing at the Gatestone Institute (Hat tip:  Richard Falknor at Blue Ridge Forum):

The status of those Jews as refugees has been found to be in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees. The UNHCR announced on two occasions, in February 1957 and in July 1967, that Jews who fled from Arab countries “may be considered prima facie within the mandate of this office,” thus regarding them, according to international law, as bona fide refugees.

The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, emphasizing the pitiful condition of Palestinian refugees, and portraying them as the world’s major refugee problem, has convinced many in the international community to accept this version of their unfortunate plight and the injustices done to them.

That narrative, however, essentially one of historical revisionism, denies the truth that the Jews who left, fled, or were expelled from Arab countries can really be regarded as refugees, as well.

The story of these Jewish refugees has been much less well known than that of the Palestinian refugees, about whose fate international resolutions have been passed, and on whose behalf thirteen UN agencies and organizations have provided aid. The issue of the legitimate rights of the Jewish refugees, and the individual and collective loss of their assets, have not yet been seriously addressed; nor have there been any real attempts in international forums at the restitution of their rights and assets.

The contrast is startling. Between 1949 and 2009 there were 163 resolutions passed in the UN General Assembly dealing with Palestinian refugees; there was not one on Jewish refugees. Similarly, since 1968, the UN Human Rights Council (formerly Commission) has adopted 132 resolutions dealing with the plight of the Palestinian refugees, but not one directed to the Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Other specialized agencies of the UN have been specifically established, or charged, to pay attention to the Palestinian refugees. These refugees have benefited from international financial assistance; the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), since 1950, has provided over $13 billion (in 2007 prices). Jewish refugees have received nothing from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international organization dealing with refugees all over the world except Palestinians, who have the UNRWA solely devoted to them.

There is more, read it all here.

Forever a thorn in the side of Israel

It should be stunning to those who don’t know already—Palestinian “refugees” are the only people the UNHCR never tries to resettle in other countries.  Indeed they have their own UN agency—UNRWA—to which we in the US send billions of dollars to help maintain them as permanent refugees generation after generation (60 plus years!) while demanding their “right to return” to the land that is now Israel, whereupon Israel would promptly become a Muslim country.

Contrast that to how we quickly did the UN’s bidding and scooped up tens of thousands of Bhutanese/Nepali people expelled from Bhutan (as one reader said because Bhutan feared the ethnic Nepalis would end up out-populating them in their own country—sound familiar!).   The UN and the US did not demand a “right of return” for the Bhutanese/Nepali people to either of those countries which we very easily could have done through financial aid sweeteners (if we needed to get involved at all!).   Instead we simply moved them out to your cities.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am not promoting the mass resettlement of Palestinians (to western countries, let the Arabs take them in) now that Hamas is running the place, but just pointing out the hypocrisy of the United Nations (and fascist one-worlders) when it comes to Israel and refugees generally.

Did we really help the Bhutanese/Nepali “refugees” by bringing them to America, ripping them out of their Buddhist culture, subjecting them to crime and murders in rotten US slum neighborhoods, and jobs in chicken factories?  Really?

LOL!  There is a lot of hypocrisy in the refugee industry and pointing it out keeps me going every day!