“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA”
(Jared Kushner)
And, doing so would save the US a whole heck of a lot of money! (See chart below)
Jared Kushner and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley have a tough job ahead! It is worth the fight!
I’ve written about the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)over the years. It was specially set up in 1949 to care for the Palestinians displaced from what became the state of Israel.
However, unlike every other refugee situation under the UN umbrella, these ‘refugees’ are never permanently resettled and serve only one purpose—they perpetuate the Middle East hatred of Israel.
If they were legitimate refugees they should have long ago been taken care of by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
In fact, as you read this, the key thing you need to remember is that NO Muslim country wants to permanently resettle Palestinians and the UN never pressures those countries to take in their co-religionists as permanent citizens.
The other Muslim countries are perfectly happy to let the angry Palestinians create generation after generation of so-called ‘refugees’ on Israel’s border.
Update August 22nd: A new column by Solomon—the UN’s refugee welfare racket—here.
Update August 19th: As Palestinian demonstrators take to the streets to protest an Israeli ship planning to dock at Oakland, we should be organizing a major campaign for the US to stop funding UNRWA. And, of course, stop the migration of Palestinian trouble-makers to America!
We have written many times here at RRW about the ‘Palestinians’ as pawns, as the people doomed to be called ‘refugees’ from generation to generation perpetually cared for by a special agency (just for Palestinians!) known as UNRWA.
But, since those same ‘refugees’ have been in the news lately for building cross-border tunnels with money that came from your pocketbooks in order to more stealthily attack Israel, this article at the Financial Post is a good summary of what author Lawrence Solomon calls the “bizarro world” of UNRWA.
Solomon begins with this:
In the up-is-down bizarro world of UNRWA, the number of refugees only grows and grows
RIDDLE: You’re an American citizen, born and raised in the U.S., who has never set foot outside your country. You are also a refugee from a faraway land. What is the explanation?
HINT: Your parents and grandparents are also Americans, and they are also refugees.
ANOTHER HINT: Your children, born to you and your American spouse, are also refugees, and when they are old enough to have children of their own, their children will also be refugees.
This is not a trick question. Such refugees exist on this planet, not only in the U.S. but also in Canada and other countries. In fact, millions of refugees exist on this planet who have never set foot in the place from which they are deemed to have fled. But there’s only one place on this planet that these millions can have come from — Israel and the Palestinian territories — and there’s only one “people” on this planet who, for themselves and their children, can have this refugee status in perpetuity — Palestinians.
This bizarro alternate world is the creation of the United Nations, which established the United Nations Relief and Aid Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA for short.
Read it all. One of the new things I learned was that Canada has already turned off its funding spigot to UNRWA. Why are we funding tunnels and rockets? It is time for the US to follow Canada’s lead and do the same—cut them off!
Here is a very interesting article from The Jerusalem Post last summer that confirms what a bunch of suckers we are in the West. Rich Muslim countries give little to keep UNRWA going:
The total UNRWA budget for 2012 was $907,907,371. The permanent and hysterically supportive rhetoric for the “Palestinian cause” from the Muslim world might lead one to expect that UNWRA is mainly funded by Muslim countries.The truth, however, is that UNRWA is almost entirely funded by Western taxpayers. With a total of $644,701,999 in contributions, the US, EU, UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands and Japan pay 71 percent of the annual UNRWA budget.
And don’t forget that the funds from the second-largest donor, the EU, are of course already composed of EU taxation of member states.
So where do the Muslim states rank? First in, at No. 15, is Saudi Arabia. [And remember S.A. takes NO refugees—ed]
So now the Palestinian so-called “refugees” want even more of your money!
JALAZOUN, West Bank — At least 50 people were hurt on Sunday in a clash between Palestinian police and residents of a refugee camp protesting against a strike in a UN aid agency that has paralysed services, police and an ambulance service said.
The demonstration, in Jalazoun camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was the most violent in a series of protests over the past week stemming from a more than month-old strike for higher pay by local employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
UNRWA, which employs more than 5,000 Palestinians in 19 camps for some 730,000 West Bank refugees, has been forced to shut schools, clinics and suspend trash collection at the camps since the strike began.
“We have nothing to do with the strike and we want to make our voice heard,” said Mohammed Najar, a Jalazoun resident. “The situation in the camps cannot be tolerated: no schools, no clinics and trash is piled everywhere.”
We owe them! We owe them! 66 years later we owe them!
Many refugees fear UNRWA is slowly disengaging from its aid activities and believe the international community owes them support since it recognised Israel amid the war that led to its founding in 1948— during which they fled or were driven from their homes to Gaza, the West Bank and surrounding countries.
The UN agency has said it is trying to end the strike but does not have funds to meet the wage demands. It also says its employees get paid at least 20 per cent and in some cases 80 per cent more than public sector employees in equivalent fields.
Grrrr!
Learn more about Israel and refugees in our special category (142 previous posts) here.
Michael Curtis in American Thinker shows how the Palestinian “refugees” are treated completely different from all other refugees in The Right of Return to Manhattan and Other Places and how absurd it is. I don’t have time to write anything at length, but here are a few excerpts:
On why there were Palestinian refugees:
The problem started with Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in the area of Palestine even before the establishment of the State of Israel. As a result of the violent Arab Revolt of 1936-39, mainly led and orchestrated by the Arab High Command under Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, over ten per cent of the adult Palestinian population was killed, injured, or imprisoned. This Arab wave of terror directed against British personnel, Jews, and other Arabs opposed to the Mufti and his followers resulted in the first wave of refugees, perhaps as many as 40,000 Arabs who fled the area.
But the main refugee problem was caused by the militant Arab activity in the mid 1940s and then by the 1948-49 War that was initiated by the Arabs. The “catastrophe,” as the war is named by the Palestinians, was brought on by the invasion of Israel immediately after its establishment on May 14, 1948, by troops from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and other Arab countries. As a result of the fighting, and for reasons that are still disputed, Palestinians fled their home in large numbers.
On the origin of the Palestinian refugee organization:
Oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. For more, see http://www.idfblog.com/2013/08/12/what-happened-to-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-gaza/
Before the end of the war, the United Nations General Assembly on November 19, 1948 passed Resolution 212 (III) to create the UN Relief for Palestinian Refugees (UNRPR). This body was replaced by decision of UNGA Resolution 302 (IV) on December 8, 1949, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
About this UN concern for Palestinian refugees, two aspects are worth noting. One is the fact the UN ignored, and indeed still ignores, the reality that 700,000 Jews, probably a larger number than the actual number of Palestinian refugees, made exodus from the Arab lands in which their families had lived for centuries. The second is that this instance is the only time that the UN has set up an agency only for one group of people and that this unique agency has remained in existence for 64 years.
Putting this in context:
The initiation of a Palestinian refugee relief agency was a remarkable and inexplicable departure from established relief activity. On December 14, 1950 the UNGA set up the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHRC), originally with a three-year mandate. Its function remains to coordinate international action to protect refugees and to resolve refugee problems worldwide. Since then it has helped more than 50 million people restart their lives. Among the various refugee populations it has assisted are the 4 million from Afghanistan, the 12 million ethnic Germans after World War II, the 5.5 million from Sudan, and the 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs after the 1947 Indian-Pakistani war.
Then contrasting the staff and budgets for the two agencies:
With a budget in 2012 of $3.59 billion the UNHRC has a staff of 7,600 in more than 125 countries. Currently, it is concerned with 33 million people. About 14.7 million are internally displaced; 10.5 million are refugees; 3.1 million are returnees; 3.5 million are stateless; 800,000 are asylum seekers; and 1.3 million considered to be in danger. To these figures must be added the millions now fleeing countries like Syria, Iraq, Mali, South Sudan, and Libya.
These figures make an extraordinary contrast with the existence and activity of UNRWA involved with much smaller numbers but with a much larger staff at its disposal. It employees 29,000 people, mostly Palestinians, and has 2 headquarters, 5 field offices, and representatives abroad, including in Washington, DC. A member of the latter group was Chris McGrath, former aide to Senator Harry Reid.
He concludes that UNRWA keeps up a welfare state for Palestinians, something which does them a great disservice. The cause of the whole thing was an order to Arab states long ago not to take in any of the refugees so they could be used as an ongoing weapon against Israel.
Since World War II, over 50 million people worldwide have been displaced as a result of armed conflict, yet the only group of refugees anointed by the United Nations for specific attention is the one composed of Palestinians. On their behalf, the U.N. created an exclusive agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Most of the world believes the Palestinians are uniquely oppressed above all peoples. In actual fact, it is their eternal refugee status and their own behavior that have doomed them to such sorry lives. The article points out:
The Jewish population forced out of Arab countries was nearly double that of the number of Arabs who left after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War of Independence.
Most of these Jews went to Israel and were never classified as refugees by the UN. They were simply absorbed into the population. At the same time, Arab countries refused to take in the Palestinians who were called refugees. They didn’t want them. And strategic thinkers like the KGB realized that a continuing population of pathetic refugees would be a terrific weapon against Israel. And they were right.
So the UN created UNRWA. Here’s what Schachtel says about that:
UNRWA is currently the largest agency-subdivision of the United Nations, employing a staff of 30,000, most of whom are Palestinians. From its creation in 1949 to the present day, the number of refugees recognized by the UNRWA has grown from roughly 750,000 to 5,000,000.
The agency now considers “refugees” to include not only the first generation of Palestinians who were displaced in the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, but also their progeny, the children and grandchildren of the initially displaced population. Given the U.N.’s liberality in designating refugees, it would not defy expectations if the next generation of Palestinians were similarly designated as such, or even if the policy continued in perpetuity.
Despite its purported mission, UNRWA has drawn attention for its ties to radical Islam, rather than its humanitarian relief efforts. Credible information has surfaced linking UNRWA-funded sites to keeping suspected terrorists on payroll and unreported surrendering of ambulances and supplies to Hamas.
In addition to the refugee agency, the UN has created a number of committees and other entities to promote the Palestinian cause. And the flow of money to UNRWA has funded all kinds of things of no benefit to the Palestinians, like Yasser Arafat’ Swiss bank account and the terrorist group Hamas. All of this effort has certainly borne fruit. Israel is hated more than ever before and more people are openly admitting that it’s not just Israel, it’s “the Jews” that they would like to get rid of.
