They are changing America by changing the people
Check out the short film on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) at Jihad Watch here. UNRWA is the special (highly controversial!)agency set up to specifically take care of the Palestinian multi-generation so-called ‘refugees.’
For more information, go back to Judy’s post here and follow links back to our extensive coverage.
By the way, UNRWA is heavily funded by you, the US taxpayer.
Whoa! This article from the Jakarta Globe earlier this week was stunningly frank. By the way, I am behind on my updates on the Rohingya situation; there are a dozen or more stories every day, and it’s hard to keep up.
Here is where we are: more Rohingya boatmen are coming ashore in Thailand and Indonesia and the clamoring is growing louder from their advocacy groups and from international human rights groups for them to be treated as asylum seekers and not illegal aliens. Asylum seekers can ask for refugee status from the United Nations and then possibly end up in the west (in your town!).
Now to the story that says a whole lot about the Palestinian issue and makes my point that Muslims don’t take care of fellow Muslims generally (except when they can make Israel the bad guy). Christians and Jews are guilt-tripped into doing the caring.
From the Jakarta Globe:
Indonesian Muslim hard-liners have adopted a cautious tone in their reactions to the plight of 193 Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled to Sabang Island in Aceh Province after being persecuted in their home country of Burma.
Their measured approach stands in sharp contrast to their hard-hitting outcry in defense of their Muslim peers in Palestine during the three-week Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in January. At the time, many groups were quite vocal in their condemnations of the Israeli attacks and in announcing their intentions to send fighters to the region.
Irfan Awwas, chairman of the Indonesian Mujahidin Council, or MMI, said on Monday that his organization was strongly committed to defending any Muslims who suffered mistreatment.
“However,” he continued, “our attention has been focused and our energy has been exhausted on the Palestinian issue.”
Irfan said that his organization would investigate what manner of persecution the Burmese government had exacted on the Rohingyas.
Taking care of Muslims is the government’s job, not our job!
Irfan stressed that providing for the refugees’ welfare was first and foremost the government’s responsibility, and not just the duty of fellow Muslims.
I will remind readers that wealthy Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are NOT taking in Muslim refugees anywhere that I know of. There will be much hollering that European countries, the US, and Australia take care of and resettle these Rohingya Muslim boatmen.
Human rights groups say there are hundreds of thousands of stateless Rohingya Muslims but I guess there is no political gain for the Islamists to criticize Burma.
Chep (Chep Hernawan, head of the Islamic Reform Movement) denied that his organization was treating the Rohingyas differently than their Muslim brethren in Palestine, saying that the emergency faced by Gazans was greater than the Rohingyas’.
Hey, Chep, I would argue that these Rohingya are in a much worse predicament then the Palestinians in Gaza who have an entire UN agency feeding them and taking care of their every need. These guys are hungry and desperate. I don’t see the Gazans getting in boats to try to find work and a place to live.
Then there is this! Can you imagine the western politically correct mainstream media making this point:
But Muslim scholar Anis Baswedan said Muslim hard-liners had to be careful in their advocacy to avoid appearing discriminatory, otherwise the public would wonder whether their primary concern was the welfare of Muslims or the welfare of Palestine.
Right on Anis!
Catch up on the Rohingya issue in our special category here.
Power Line blog has posted a stunning video of a demonstration at Minnesota’s state capitol in which the two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, brought their differences from the Middle East to our heartland. Power Line describes it:
On January 5, representatives of Hamas and Fatah rallied on the steps of the Minnesota state capitol in St. Paul. Their purpose was to condemn Israel, and an Israeli flag was burned. Mostly, though, the rally turned into a confrontation between the terrorist organization, Hamas, and the formerly terrorist organization–to give it the benefit of the doubt–Fatah. Congressman Keith Ellison attended, apparently at the invitation of the Fatah faction, but was shouted down by Hamas supporters who don’t consider him radical enough. This video, which was made by Minnesotans Against Terrorism, really has to be seen to be believed.
How did Minnesota get to the point where its state capitol can become an outpost of a terrorist organization from the Middle East? Until a few years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.
Hat tip: Mark Steyn at the Corner, who comments, “Time for Garrison Keillor to introduce a cutesie imam to Lake Wobegon.”
The former chief attorney for UNRWA has issued a report full of facts the “international community” needs to face up to. The Jerusalem Post’s Tovah Lazaroff reports here. The main point is the agency’s terrorism links, but there’s another important point within the article that I didn’t know, which I will go into later in this post. The article begins:
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees does little to check whether its staff or clients are terrorists, its former chief attorney, James Lindsay, says in a newly published report.
Allegations linking terrorists to UNRWA are not new. Israel has said many times its troops were fired on by gunmen using UNRWA facilities, that UNRWA vehicles transported weapons and that some of its staff members were terrorists.
UNRWA has denied those charges and Israel has often retracted them or found them hard to prove.
This latest claim against UNRWA, contained in a 67-page critique of the organization published at the end of January by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has more authority behind it, because Lindsay was a senior lawyer for UNRWA from 2000 to 2007.
We’ve posted on UNRWA’s terror links previously, here, here and here, and several more linked to in the last link.
Lindsay seems to be soft-pedaling UNRWA’s connections to terrorism.
“These failings have occurred not because UNRWA consciously supports terrorism but rather because it is not particularly concerned about the issue. Its main focus [is] the provision of services and protection of Palestinian refugees,” he wrote.
“Even if terrorism constituted a greater concern, the agency is not equipped to undertake the extensive security investigations that a thoroughgoing anti-terrorism effort would require,” he said.
Lindsay cited examples of past charges against UNRWA staff, including a 2002 UNRWA driver who was accused – but never charged – with carrying weapons in an ambulance and a Gaza headmaster employed by UNRWA who was also an explosives experts for Islamic Jihad. The headmaster was killed by Israel last year.
UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization’s anti-terrorist rules, Lindsay wrote.
“Evidence of area staff members who have had second jobs with Hamas or with other terrorist groups does occasionally come to light,” he wrote.
Even so, Lindsay noted, of the 5,000 UNRWA staff who worked in the West Bank and the 10,000 in the Gaza Strip, most of whom were Palestinians, few had been convicted of terrorism-related charges.
And who would convict them? The Hamas government? The article also includes some good background information about UNRWA.
Now here’s the part I didn’t know.
But not all those serviced by UNRWA need the organization, Lindsay wrote in his study, particularly given that a majority of them have been resettled.
In Jordan, where 2 million Palestinian refugees live, all but 167,000 have citizenship, and are fully eligible for government services including education and health care.
To continue to call citizens of recognized states refugees is suspect and suggests “that the agency’s continued existence is due at least in part to political purposes” even though UNRWA was not designed as a political organization, Lindsay said.
Eliminating UNRWA services in Jordan to all but the 167,000 noncitizens could reduce its refugee list by 40%, Lindsay said.
In deciding to whom UNRWA provides services, it assesses “refugee status,” not need, he wrote.
Some recipients of aid could afford to pay for the services they now received for free, he wrote.
I knew there were a lot of Palestinians in Jordan, but I didn’t know that almost all of them were citizens. Yet they continue to receive aid as if they were refugees! That’s outrageous. It’s natural that UNRWA would try to serve all the people it could, increasing the number of Arab refugees by giving children refugee status in perpetuity, and discouraging resettlement to keep the numbers high. That’s what bureaucracies do — try to perpetuate themselves and increase their turf.
But UNRWA isn’t an independent entity. It’s an agency of the United Nations. There must be general agreement within the UN that the Arab refugees should be treated like dirt, that UNRWA deserves ever-growing funding, and that these refugees should never be resettled until Israel is wiped off the face of the earth, which is the fate it deserves. If those who control the UN thought otherwise, they would at least take the step of taking away UNRWA’s responsibility for those Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of real countries.
Not that there was any doubt about the UN’s attitude toward Israel. But this Jordanian citizenship business does make a nice point on which some western country could raise a fuss. I’m sure if it were brought to President Obama’s attention he would immediately insist on CHANGE. (No HOPE of that!)
I’m tacking on another link here, which isn’t directly about refugees, but makes a terrific and related point about Israel and its enemies. It’s a piece in on Commentary Magazine’s website called The Addicted Palestinians.
Your tax dollars:
The State Department announced just now, at the end of the day on a Friday, that the US government is dipping into emergency funds for refugees to send $20 million to Palestinians in Gaza. That brings our FY2009 total to $120,000,000 (FY 09 began on Oct. 1, 2008).
President Barack Obama has authorized the use of $20.3 million from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) Fund to address critical post-conflict humanitarian needs in Gaza. U.S. Government support for humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees and conflict victims now totals nearly $120 million in FY 2009, including nearly $60 million in Gaza.
[….]
Today’s contribution to UNRWA augments the $85 million the United States contributed in December 2008 toward UNRWA’s 2009 appeals.
We have written critically of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) on several previous occasions (here and here are just two posts to get you started). Many believe the “humanitarian funds” end up in the hands of Hamas and that UNRWA is in the business of perpetuating the Palestinian “refugee crisis” instead of bringing it to an end.