Posted on 05/03/2002 2:58:53 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
IF the end of Kofi Annan's efforts to establish a fact-finding mission to Jenin caused many in the Middle East to exhale a sigh of relief, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, is certainly among those breathing easier tonight. That's because with the failure to launch an inquiry also passes the opportunity for the world body to address one of the most persistently disturbing elements of the Jenin affair: How was it possible that a refugee camp, operating under the authority and care of a U.N. agency, transformed into such a rabid center of terrorism?
The facts are unassailable and damning. Jenin was the center of a terror apparatus that trained 28 home-grown suicide bombers -- a statistic proffered not by Israel but by the terrorist organizations themselves. Twenty-three of them succeeded in detonating themselves in Israeli urban areas. The camp was riven with the terrorist networks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim. According to the Israelis, when the Israeli Defense Forces entered the camps, it discovered 30 small bomb-making plants, including small-scale factories for the manufacture of suicide belts and other explosives designed for use against Israeli targets.
If all these accusations are corroborated, then it is imperative to question how these networks flourished under the very eyes of U.N. representatives. U.N. Resolution 302 (iv) Paragraph 5, passed by the General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1949, established UNRWA to provide relief assistance to Palestinian refugees. But it also, just as emphatically, commissioned the new agency "to further conditions necessary for peace and security." It certainly did not envision the creation of factories of death. Nor did it foresee a wind of destruction that would sweep out of the camps to envelop Israel.
Unfortunately, such revelations will surprise no one who is familiar with UNRWA's organization. Among the 59 Palestinian refugee camps located throughout the Middle East, most UNRWA warehouses are operated by Palestinians themselves. It had been a source of severe complaint by U.N. auditors for years that these representatives were given to fleecing their own charges on such a scale as to make a mockery of their roles. Following the signing of the Oslo Accords, UNRWA received $238.1 million in contributions and pledges for 435 projects, most of which involved improving agency and refugee camp infrastructure or carrying out special activities within the framework of UNRWA's regular programs. Very few of these new programs or improvements have been instituted and the organization's accounting practices remain highly questionable to this day.
The very existence of UNRWA should be a point of contention in the international community. The suffering of Palestinian refugees, abandoned by the same Arab countries whose 1948 attack on Israel inspired their flight, has been cynically stockpiled as a propagandistic weapon to demonize Israel and vindicate the Arab cause for decades. These same 22 Arab nations, who bemoan the fate of their fellow Arabs, contribute less than 3 percent of UNRWA's total budget and repeatedly fail to respond to pleas by the international community to better Palestinian housing conditions. In Lebanon, where conditions are most dire, the camps' inhabitants cannot seek employment or health services outside the camps. Nor does any Arab country except Jordan -- and even then on a limited basis -- bestow the refugees with political rights.
UNWRA, in other words, administers a network of prison camps, with most policed by the Arab nations themselves.
Unsurprisingly then, UNWRA has become the world's longest-lived sugar daddy, a dispenser of welfare services providing the sole source of health, education and cultural services to Palestinian refugees while doing next to nothing to encourage their economic development. As social trends in the United States over the past 70 years have revealed, a consistent diet of welfare does not arrest the psychological torpor of the welfare recipient. It only exacerbates it.
But there are other questions. Where were the works programs envisioned by Resolution 302? What were U.N. representatives doing as shipments of explosives were casually being trucked into the town and camp? Where were the cultural institutions that should have been educating children toward peaceful coexistence and not toward revenge and the slaughter of innocents?
Given this grim reality, it is time for the international community to do now what it should have done years ago: dismantle UNRWA and replace it with an efficient international agency that encourages development and employment and spurns radicalism. At the same time, pressure should be applied against Arab nations to own up to their own responsibilities for fellow Arabs whose suffering was precipitated by their aggression and whose cause they have so miserably abandoned. And a true inquiry should be launched to investigate the reasons a refugee camp, operated under the aegis of an internationally sanctioned body, became a source of such depravity and horror.
Is Kofi Annan listening? The mission is over. Let the true fact finding now begin.
Davis is the senior fellow of the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies in Los Angeles and the senior editorial columnist for then online magazine Jewsweek.com.
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[The United Nations pays for Palestinian teachers and textbooks.] Palestinian Schools: Breeding Grounds for Hate ***Palestinian schools teach a form of anti-Jewish hatred and intolerance not unlike what was taught to German children during the Nazi era. For instance, ninth-grade Palestinian students study from official textbooks that assert, "Treachery and disloyalty are character traits of the Jews, and therefore one should beware of them." These books depict Jews as satanic, violent, "thieving conquerors" who have stolen Arab land and must be slaughtered.
Further, Palestinian textbooks glorify jihad and martyrdom as the only legitimate means to liberating "Palestine." Even children's poems are laced with calls to war. Fifth-graders memorize such lines as, "I shall take my soul in my hand and hurl it into the abyss of death." Sixth-graders read a story glorifying a young boy who is raised with "the love of jihad flowing through his veins and filling every fiber of his being"; a boy who experiences his greatest "joy" when he sees "the enemy lying dead" or "fleeing for their lives." An eighth-grade literary text denies any Jewish connection to the Western Wall, and teaches children to identify Muslim and Christian holy sites but completely omits any reference to Jewish sites.
The propaganda campaign is relentless. A fourth-grade religion book reads, "The Jews are enemies to the prophets and believers." According to an eighth-grade text, "Mankind has suffered from the yoke of racism at all times, because Satan has made their evil deeds seem beautiful...Such people are the Jews." In a book used by sixteen-year-olds, the Nazi Holocaust is depicted as a response to the Jewish people's "greed and religious fanaticism." Still another volume suggests, "Perhaps Allah brought the Jews to our land, so their death would take place here, as it did in their wars with the Romans." These can hardly be mistaken for the words of a "peace curriculum."
Palestinian schoolbooks make no mention of the concept of peace with Israel, nor of the peace process initiated at Oslo. Indeed the Jerusalem Post reported in November 2001 that the word "peace" has entirely disappeared from these books. Moreover, the maps contained therein do not even acknowledge Israel's existence, instead depicting "Palestine" as an Arab land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The Palestinian "problem," students learn, is not Israel' s control over the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel's very existence. They are further taught that Jews are not only enemies of Islam, but constitute an illegitimate, foreign presence in the region. From the earliest age, children learn of their religious obligation to help drive out the infidels and reclaim "every centimeter" of "Palestine," the "stolen" land.
These anti-Jewish attitudes filter down from the very highest level of the Palestinian Authority. During a recent visit to a school for Palestinian girls, Yasser Arafat himself told the students of the glorious exploits of two female terrorists, Abir Wahidi and Dalal Magrabi; the latter not only participated in a deadly bus attack against Israelis, but further distinguished herself by snatching a Jewish baby from its mother and hurling it into the already burning bus.***
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SELF REPRESENTATION AS PEASANTS***The peasant identity is reinforced by the emphasis on speaking the Palestinian peasant dialect. Members of the community are quick to criticize those who mix their Palestinian peasant dialect with other words from Jordanian or urban Palestinian dialects. Women and children who spend most of their time in the valley speak the peasant's dialect more or less unalloyed. Boys and girls from the community who attend UNRWA schools until the ninth grade continue to speak the same peasant Palestinian dialect. These completely free schools are only for Palestinians and most of the teachers are also Palestinian refugees. When the students move to the secondary governmental schools with other students from different backgrounds, the boys start to mix their peasant dialect with the Jordanian dialect while the girls adapt terms from the urban Palestinian dialect. But both boys and girls speak only the peasant Palestinian dialect when they go back to their homes and their community in Wadi al-Rimam.
….. An older man from Wadi al-Rimam described this refugee identity: "when we first came to Jordan we hated to be referred to as refugees. This was disgracing and humiliating; it meant that we are poor, waiting for aid from the relief agencies, and no one believed that we [once] had land and big beautiful houses. But now we are proud that we are refugees, and we will stay as refugees until we return to our homes. My refugee card and not my Jordanian passport proves my Palestinian asil (origin). Although the name of Falasteen (Palestine) has been changed, my village was demolished and given a Hebrew name, the day will come when all Palestinian refugees and all of their descendent Will return home and build Palestine as we built all the Arab countries. After 1948, UNRWA issued refugee cards for Palestinian refugees to receive aid and UN services. Now although many of these services do not exist any more, almost all refugees have kept their cards and they apply for refugee cards for their newborn children. Not only have needy Palestinians in camps demanded identity cards from UNRWA, but also some wealthier people have argued that refugee cards should be issued to all refugees regardless of their need for relief. The refugee card is a signifier of a temporary, unique status, and a tangible representation of the UN commitment to effect their return to Palestine. "The UNRWA identity cards were like the 'promissory note' on their right to return to Palestine" (Plascov 1981:49).***
I'm glad to see someone else making the connection to welfare. The Palestinians as a "nation" have been the only nation in history founded on welfare and surviving on welfare for the past 54 years. Is it any surprise that this nation seems to be made up of psychopaths divorced from reality?
A couple days ago, Brit Hume interviewed *somebody* (foo, I can't remember who) who broke down the figures, and also said that this program on the ground was run by the Palestinians with very little oversight from either the UN or the countries giving the money.
It probably isn't a surprise to those who've orchestrated this pathology.
I saw the same segment. The answer to the question posed in the title of this article is, No! Did you see the clip on Brit's show last night where the Palestinian "corpse" being carried on the stretcher was dropped and the "corpse" got up and laided back down on the stretcher and they wrapped him back up in the flag and went on their mornful way?
Yeah, and had the best laugh I had all day. If they're going to fake a funeral, the key is to find a fake corpse that's a lot skinnier & doesn't wiggle around as much.
In this, the United Nations is complicit. At schools funded and run by the UNRWA, depictions of Jews as monkeys and Israelis as Nazis are common fare. U.N. employees have abetted the vehement anti-Semitism that is bread and butter to the Palestinian Authority. A few days ago, the U.N. Human Rights Commission voted (without the approval of Canada, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany or Guatemala) to condemn Israel for "acts of mass killings" (which never happened) and endorsed Palestinian "armed struggle" (i.e., terrorism). The cruel decision by Arab governments to use the Palestinians as ticking time bombs against Israel has paid off more handsomely than they could have imagined in 1948. Their metaphorical bombs have become real. What a victory for their people.***
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