Category: Israel and refugees

Obama sending almost a billion dollars to Hamas via the UN

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not content with the $20 million he ordered sent to Gaza, President Obama is now going for aid in a big way. The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration intends to provide some $900 million to help rebuild Gaza after the Israeli incursion that ended last month, administration officials said Monday.

In an early sign of how the administration plans to deal with Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, an official said that the aid would not go to Hamas but that it would be funneled through nongovernmental organizations.

Andy McCarthy at National Review has a comprehensive smackdown of the idea the money won’t go to Hamas, beginning with this excellent paragraph:

Various la-la land conservatives and moderates assured us that Obama, despite a career spent in the Left’s fever swamps, is really a “pragmatist” who would govern from the center.  They pooh-poohed us knuckle-draggers who doggedly pointed to his radical intimates, like Hamas-apologist Rashid Khalidi.  I wonder what they’re thinking today as Obama takes time out from destroying the economy to send $900M from the mint’s busy printing press to Hamas.

Despite disclaimers in the New York Times, yes, the money is going to Hamas, via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA.

The UNRWA is effectively an arm of Hamas in Gaza (and elsewhere).  In its second term, the Bush State Department was reckless in enabling Palestinian terrorists on its utopian quest for Middle East peace.  As in so much else, Obama is taking that parlous policy and multiplying it by a hundred.

After going through the many ways UNRWA aids Hamas, McCarthy concludes:

The game here is obvious.  UNRWA takes in hundreds of millions (indeed, billions) in aid.  Some is directly funnelled to Hamas in cash or in kind.  But for the most part, UNRWA performs social welfare services quite consciously to free Hamas — the Palestinians’ chosen government — to divert its limited resources to wage a terrorist war (“the resistance”) against Israel.

And here’s the nub of it:

If an organization comprised of American citizens attempted to do this, they could be prosecuted and imprisoned for decades on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization.  (I would say “would be prosecuted,” but with this administration, who knows?)  Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (an old hand at empowering Palestinian terrorists) are now proposing to give nearly a billion dollars to a Hamas subsidiary — knowing full well that this funding must inevitably result in the murder of innocent people.

McCarthy points out that Congress could stop this expenditure. Fat chance. All we can hope for is that a few principled Republicans will raise the alarm, so at least some citizens will realize how closely the Obama administration is aligning itself with terrorists.

I highly recommend you read McCarthy’s whole post.

 

 

 

Palestinians as refugees to the US?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Oh gosh!    This issue doesn’t seem to go away.   Regular readers know that a rumor got started some weeks back about Obama’s use of ERMA funds ($20 million) for Gaza relief.   The rumor, in a nutshell, is that the money was for transporting a 100,000 Palestinians to the US.   I first reported on the ERMA funds here, and Judy did an excellent job of tracking the full story down here.   For more on ERMA generally, go here and scroll down the table of contents.

There are no plans at this time to bring thousands of Palestinian “refugees” to the US.  As a matter of fact, as Judy has pointed out here and here, the reason that 50 years later the Palestinians are kept as refugees is to fuel the never-ending Arab hatred toward Israel.  The Arab countries could have long ago brought peace to the Middle East by absorbing their fellow Arabs, the Palestinians.   They don’t want to, and if we started moving Palestinians in large numbers to the West, they would scream bloody murder.

However, I wouldn’t stake my reputation on what the Obama Administration might try to do.  We could read tomorrow that they are going to do that and I would have to eat my words!

That said, there are a few Palestinians getting into the US.   We have not taken Palestinians in the refugee program prior to 2008.  However, 9 Palestinians are in the database (unpublished) for Refugee Admissions for 2008.   That is out of over 60,000 refugees resettled from around the world.

Also, in a very curious situation that I reported on January 15th of this year, we were bringing Palestinians to the US presumably for a short period of time during the latest war there.  These Palestinians are babies and children who are US citizens!  Their parents are not, and CAIR is helping them.   I speculated that these children may have somehow been born in the US and are thus so-called ‘anchor babies’   So this is something to keep a close eye on.

In a case where we could potentially bring Palestinians to the US, the Palestinians have been living in Iraq and are now in camps along the Iraq/Syria border.   There is quite a lobbying campaign going on to resettle them in the West.  A recent report on this group is here.   Notice that they are speaking the truth and condemning Arab countries for not helping them and keeping them and all Palestinians in limbo.

That’s all I know of, so far.  But, I wanted to be sure our readers knew there are some  Palestinians (a small number) coming as refugees and there is a potential for those Iraqi Palestinians I mentioned to be resettled here, they number in the hundreds, at most a thousand or two.

Hamas members flooding into U.S.? Maybe even terrorist prisoners! (Or not.)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Since my post of February 11, stating that contrary to some reports, Hamas members are NOT flooding into the U.S. from Gaza, I’ve seen quite a number of articles either repeating the assertion that they are coming here or agreeing with our opinion that this is not what the presidential order is about. Today I came across a long, involved article at the Family Security Matters website:  Determining the Intent of the Presidential Determination, by Frank Salvato. He seems to think there is a good chance the government intends to bring Hamas members here.

I’ll get to the really interesting part of the article in a minute, but I want to set out my criticism first.

Salvato’s argument is too long  and rambling to reproduce here. But one thing he does is reprehensible. He slides from his argument about the president directive into a long discussion about the corruption of UNRWA (the UN agency in charge of the Palestinian “refugees”), and into another discussion about media bias, and back again, implying that anyone who disagrees with him about Hamas operatives coming to the U.S. is ignorant of the corruption in UNRWA and similar to the biased media. The connection is that most of the aid given through the president’s directive goes to UNRWA, and that the media have not done their job reporting accurately on UNRWA and on many other things in the Middle East.

Here is his conclusion. 

Are the ramifications of President Obama’s Presidential Determination 2009-15 clear? No, nothing in the political arena, even in the United States…especially in the United States today, is ever clear. But an honest assessment of all the components related to the Presidential Determination, when considered in unison, present, not only the reality that there exists an opportunity for Hamas operatives to immigrate/re-settle to the West and United States, but the stark reality that the West – and the taxpayers of the United States in particular – are providing financial aid to an organization that supports the efforts of Hamas. To deny these realities and the possibilities that they conjure is to be perilously naïve.

So after all those words, he admits there is no compelling proof that Hamas operatives are settling here, only that it is unclear, but you have to believe they are coming because if you deny it you’re as much of an idiot as those who don’t realize UNRWA is joined at the hip to Hamas.

We’ve written extensively about UNRWA’s connections to Hamas; our search results for “UNRWA” are here. We’re not naive about UNRWA’s support of terrorism. But I’m not convinced the presidential directive was meant to open the floodgates to Hamas. 

But here’s Part Two.

My eye was caught by a name I know being quoted in the article. As Salvat0 describes him:

Howard Linett, a member of the Suicide/Homicide Bomber Tactical Analysis Focus Group of the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute & the Technical Support Working Group of the US Department of Homeland Security, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces and a Sergeant-Major and sniper instructor in the Israeli Police Civil Guard, in writing from his home in Jerusalem, Israel….

Howard is an old friend of our family, and as credible and knowledgeable as can be. His first quote is about Hamas’s stealing humanitarian aid, which we know about.  I like his description: “the anti-Robin Hoods, stealing from the poor to give to political supporters.”

But it’s his next quote that took me aback. He connects the possibility of Hamas supporters coming to the U.S. with the current push by the Israeli government to get Hamas to release Israeli prisoner Gilad Shalit through a prisoner swap. The number of terrorists to be released is said to be between 400 and 1,000.

Those same media sources report that Israel is demanding that the terrorists to be exchanged for Gilad Shalit not be allowed to return to either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. Nor does Israel want to release the terrorists into the custody of some country that will warmly embrace them, anoint them heroes and allow them to return to their terrorist ways.

So what is to be done? Well…

 $20.3 million for ‘Urgent Refugee Relief and Migration Needs related to Gaza’ thrown at the thorny problem might provide for a ‘temporary solution,’ and allow a new American Administration to claim it is administering defibrillation to a moribund peace process.

Not just Hamas operatives, but terrorists from Israeli prisons?  I called up Howard Linett in Jerusalem to ask him if he really thought this is what the presidential directive is about. He told me, “If I didn’t think there was some possibility I wouldn’t have said it.” It would give the Obama administration great credibility to solve the problem of how to get Gilad Shalit released. They could claim credit for re-starting the “peace process.”

But is it likely? “No.”

What’s interesting to me is how easy it is to believe the most far-out things about Obama and his administration. That’s why the story of Obama opening the floodgates to Hamas has circulated so widely. It’s credible. We don’t know his motives at all. His real beliefs have always been hidden, and they remain so. I got an email a couple of weeks ago about Obama’s having changed the oath of the armed services to pledge loyalty to him personally. It was a satire someone had written. But credible to many people, because we have no evidence he wouldn’t do that.

So if you want to say Obama could use the directive to bring in Hamas operatives, well, theoretically he could. Though I don’t know why he’d need to use this particular fund for it; there’s plenty of other government money floating around, and if Obama uses the fund to bring in terrorists, he won’t get credit for sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.  Further, he was apparently taken aback by the strong public reaction to his order to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo; we don’t want released terrorist prisoners wandering around America, whether al-Qaeda or Hamas, so it wouldn’t be easy to sneak them in without an outcry.

Until I see more solid evidence than I’ve seen so far, I’ll spend my hysteria quota on other things Obama is doing, like causing the economy to collapse around us.

Hamas members are NOT flooding into the U.S. from Gaza

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update Feb. 21st:  More on this issue here.

In the last few days Ann and I have seen numerous references to a presidential directive that supposedly opens the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of people from Gaza “migrating” to the United States.  Two of these articles, by usually credible sources, are here and here, and we saw several others. They all refer to a Presidential Directive that reads as follows (from the White House web site):

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 4:11 pm

Relief for Gaza

President Obama signed a memorandum today directing more than $20 million for “urgent refugee and migration needs” in Gaza.

You can read the full text of the memorandum below.

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
­
For Immediate Release February 2, 2009
January 27, 2009
Presidential Determination

No. 2009-15

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE
SUBJECT: Unexpected Urgent Refugee and Migration
Needs Related to Gaza

By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 2(c)(1) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 (the “Act”), as amended (22 U.S.C. 2601), I hereby determine, pursuant to section 2(c)(1) of the Act, that it is important to the national interest to furnish assistance under the Act in an amount not to exceed $20.3 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs, including by contributions to international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations and payment of administrative expenses of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the Department of State, related to humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza.

You are authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

It must be the word “migration” in the headline and body of the directive that has set so many people to reporting President Obama’s treachery in planning to flood us with Gazans. That’s not what the directive says, folks. We are sending emergency funds to Gaza, by way of international organizations, and that’s all.

Just to be sure, I talked to an official at the State Department. He said the fund in question, known as ERMA (the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance fund), is run out of the White House. That is, the president has discretion to use it for what he determines are emergencies. It is for providing funds for people in place — that is, where they are in need in other countries, not here.  He pointed out that “migration” is not the same as “immigration.” It means people moving around, that’s all.

Ann posted on this directive on January 30, when it was issued. We both understood at the time that it referred to aid to Gaza civilians in Gaza. In her post Ann was critical of the emergency aid because we are well aware that much of such aid ends up in the hands of Hamas.

George W. Bush also used the ERMA fund. In September 2007 I posted on a $24 million expenditure, quoting from Reuters:

President George W. Bush authorized up to $24 million to meet “unexpected and urgent” needs of refugees from conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka, according to a memorandum released on Monday.

The amount from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund was not to exceed $24 million “for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs,” Bush said in a memorandum to the Secretary of State.The funds were for international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations, and administrative expenses of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, the memo said.

It is understandable that the directive would be interpreted as it was. We have learned that we cannot trust anything President Obama says or does. And he has been positively obsequious toward the Muslim world since he took office — no, since well before he took office.

But in this case the interpretation is wrong. And it needs to be corrected. Remember that our side was hurt when we allowed false rumors about Bill Clinton to circulate unimpeded. There are enough true bad actions to pin on Obama; we don’t need this false one.

Here’s a good, factual article on the matter, mostly quoting the State Department press release. Ironically, it comes from TASS, the Russian news agency.

Update Feb. 13th: More on ERMA here.

Update Feb. 18th:  Snopes is now on the case.  I suspect Snopes used this post or an email circulating about it for leads to the facts, since its discussion references the George W. Bush authorization of funds.

Iraqi Palestinians blast Arab countries, call them hypocrites

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have written in many past posts that the Palestinians are kept as refugees from generation to generation to fuel Arab hatred toward the Jewish people and  to serve as the sore in Israel’s side.    So I am completely stunned to read at the Times this account of Iraqi Palestinian’s anger toward Arab countries and other Muslim groups for not helping them.   These Palestinians trapped in a no-man’s land between Syria and Iraq are speaking out.

Arab solidarity is not a phrase that Salim Ahmad wants to hear any more. On a battered television inside a windblown tent he watches with scepticism as the crowds demonstrate in the streets of Damascus over Israel’s war in Gaza.

“If they really cared anything for Palestinians, they would not leave us here in this terrible place,” he said, gesturing around him. “Don’t tell me about solidarity when nobody cares that we are here at all.”

For the past three years this desolate spot between the Iraqi and Syrian border posts has served as home to hundreds of Palestinians fleeing persecution in Iraq. Favoured by Saddam Hussein as proof of his solidarity with the Palestinian cause, they were among the first targets of vengeful Shia militia after the fall of the regime.

When they tried to flee to Syria, however, they found their paths blocked. While Iraq citizens swanned through the border post Palestinians were turned back, unable to enter Syria but unable to return to Iraq either. Stateless and without passports the Palestinians sat down where they were dumped, in the walled-off layby by the road between the two glowering border posts.

Screw Palestine!

Shiia Muslim Militia men (no doubt displaying that famous Muslim charity toward fellow Muslims) captured some of the Palestinians:

“They shouted screw Palestine, screw Jerusalem,” Mr Abdullah said. “They said, ‘We want to empty Iraq of Palestinians’.”

When the UN wanted to set up more comfortable camps for the displaced Iraqi Palestinians, other fellow Muslims in a Muslim country disallowed it.

The Syrian authorities forbid the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from providing any help that might make the camp more permanent, so the refugees live in tents by the side of the road.

Now for the astounding truth:

Resettling the refugees was not an option then. “Resettlement is a dirty word when it comes to the Palestinians,” Laurens Jolles, the head of the UN refugee mission in Damascus, said. The Palestinian Authority and the governments of Arab states oppose resettlement on grounds of political principle, an abrogation of the right to return to Palestine and an abandonment of hopes of a Palestinian state. “We don’t agree with that,” Mr Jolles said.

Neither do the refugees.”We don’t have a nationality, a passport, a home,” Mr Ahmad said. “We want to be settled. Who are they to tell us what is good for Palestinians? No Arab country wants us so if a European one does then I will go there. It is about our children’s future.”

The government in Gaza is a hypocrite!

“We wanted to end our isolation from the world,” Yunis, one of them said. Another member of the group contacted news organisations when the Gaza protests began, telling them: “The Government are hypocrites. We are Palestinians and they don’t care about us at all.”

Now if only more news organizations would join the Times in telling the truth we would be making major strides in bringing peace to the Middle East. 

Here are some of our previous posts on the plight of the Iraqi Palestinians.