Posted on 09/07/2018 10:34:45 AM PDT by SJackson
When delusions and fantasies are substitutes for reporting.
How did the Washington Post cover the end of America's UNRWA Funding?
The United States will no longer contribute to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, the State Department announced Friday [August 31], amid widespread Palestinian outrage charging that the decision violates international law and will aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation, particularly in Gaza.
The Washington Post should explain to readers, if it can, what international law the Palestinians claim has been violated. I do not think there is any. Contributions to UNRWA are voluntary. In any case, the invocation, without more, of a vague and unexplained international law should be noted by the reporters.
The statement called the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, an irredeemably flawed operation and criticized other countries for not sharing the burden of supporting the Palestinians.
Nowhere in this report is there any information about other donors to UNRWA. One would like to know, for example, how much the Gulf Arab states, with their hundreds of billions received annually from an accident of geology, have contributed to UNRWA. But nothing is said in the Post article about what Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar have given to UNRWA over the years. Would it not be relevant to point out that of the top fourteen contributors to UNRWA, all but one Saudi Arabia are non-Muslim Western countries? If, as the Palestinians claim, international law requires the funding of UNRWA, why are the Muslim Arab states not contributing? Why has UNRWA been almost entirely funded by non-Muslims?
Blaming UNRWA and other international donors for failing to reform the organizations way of doing business, the statement said the United States remained very mindful of and deeply concerned regarding the impact upon innocent Palestinians, especially school children.
Among the administrations many complaints about the agency to which the United States contributed about one third of a $1.1 billion 2017 budget is the way the United Nations calculates the number of Palestinians officially recognized as refugees. It would like to decrease the number from the more than 5 million who are counted today to the few hundred thousand alive when the agency was created seven decades ago, according to U.S. officials.
There is a serious error in this paragraph. It misstates how the American government thinks the number of legitimate Palestinian refugees should be calculated. It is not a matter of the few hundred thousand alive when the agency was created, but rather, of how many who were refugees in 1949 are still alive today. There are no longer a few hundred thousand such survivors, but rather, at most between 20,000 and 40,000 legitimate refugees, and it is only these whom the Administration thinks merit its support.
The administration has generally tried to cut back foreign aid, refocusing its attention on those countries and organizations that match U.S. policy priorities, officials said. The UNRWA pullback is also a response, in the words of Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to Palestinian hostility toward the United States, which intensified after U.S. policy changes that Palestinians deem pro-Israel.
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the pro-Israel bias of President Trumps administration has disqualified it from any role in the peace process.
If the Palestinians refuse to deal with the United States, then there will be no peace process. Thats not a bad thing. For Israel, that can be a good thing. Israel keeps the peace in only one way, through deterrence the same way that NATO kept the peace with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As long as Israel is perceived by Muslim Arabs as overwhelmingly more powerful, they will not try a full-scale onslaught. Putting an end to all this peace-processing is not something to lament, but to welcome. For such a peace process with Muslim Arabs could only lead to a treaty like the disastrous Oslo Accords whereby Israel would give up something tangible, such as control of land important for its defense, in exchange for promises from Palestinians that will be broken at the first conceivable opportunity, on the model of Muhammads treaty with the Quraysh at Al-Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D.
By cutting aid, the U.S. is violating international law, Erekat said, speaking several hours before the State Department announcement. He argued that UNRWA is not a Palestinian agency but was established by the United Nations, and there is an international obligation to assist and support it until all the problems of the Palestinian refugees are solved.
UNRWA is a Palestinian agency insofar as it is staffed almost entirely by Palestinians, distributes largesse only to Palestinians, and lobbies governments worldwide to contribute ever larger amounts to those same Palestinians. There is no international obligation to assist and support UNRWA until all the problems of the Palestinian refugees are solved. We know what Saeb Erekat means by that: he means that such aid should continue indefinitely until the Palestinians get what they want, and what they want is the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, and its replacement by a Muslim Arab one.
Erekat added: Some may argue that it is U.S. taxpayers money and that it is up to them how it is spent. But by the same token, who gave Trump the damn right to steal my land and my capital and my future and my aspirations and my freedom by deciding to blindly support the occupying power called Israel?
Erekat has it partly right: it is up to American taxpayers, and their government, to decide if they want to keep funding this unique class of refugees consisting not just of real refugees, but of their ever-increasing number of descendants.
Notice the hysterical blaming of America: how did Trump steal my land and my capital and my future and my aspirations and my freedom? Doesnt the PA right now have the ability to mold much of its own destiny? Wasnt it the Palestinians themselves who by making incessant war have done so much to destroy their own futures? Was it Trump who caused the Palestinians to destroy the greenhouses that in 2005 had been handed over to them intact by the Israelis, in the hope that the Arabs would continue with the business, and even expand it, only to find that the Palestinians in Gaza ruined them all? It is Trump who has caused Hamas to divert so much money, time, and energy to the digging of terror tunnels from Gaza into Israeli territory, where terrorists might travel through them into Israel, and attack Israeli civilians, or might tunnel, in the other direction, into the Egyptian-held Sinai, in order to smuggle weapons back in to Gaza? Blame Trump, blame Israel, blame the West for all the supposed ills endured by the Palestinians, who for 70 years have been the most spoiled of all refugees in modern history, taken care of by UNRWA, a special U.N.agency devoted entirely to lavishing support on every descendant, no matter how distant, of every original Arab refugee. No other group of refugees has a U.N. Agency devoted solely to its indefinite care and feeding.
Erekat also predicted that the potential end of UNRWA, if other funding is not forthcoming, would spell disaster for places where large numbers of Palestinian refugees reside, leaving them at risk for recruitment by extremist groups such as the Islamic State.
Erekat makes hysterical claims. He promises that without Americas $360 million contribution to UNRWA, there will be disaster. Then he offers a bit of standard blackmail. Give us the funding we Palestinians are used to getting, he insists, for otherwise some of our refugees may join the Islamic State and similar groups. If that reasoning were to be accepted, then Muslims everywhere could join in, with similar threats give us more aid money (in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Nigeria, you name it), or else extremist groups may prevail. There is no logical end to this kind of threat. And the biggest blackmailer has been UNRWA, for if America and the West decrease the amounts they give or, worse still, cease to contribute to UNRWA at all, it will supposedly collapse (not the slightest hint is dropped that rich Arab donors could easily replace the Americans) and so the threat goes the radicalization of Palestinian refugees will inevitably follow. Thy will have no alternative except to join the ranks of the extremists.
UNRWA provides aid, mostly in the form of education, health care, food security, and other essentials, to some 800,000 Palestinians registered as refugees in the West Bank and 1.3 million people in the Gaza Strip, as well as 534,000 in Syria, 464,000 in Lebanon and 2 million in Jordan.
The United Nations, both among Palestinians and others, defines refugees as anyone who has been driven from their homes by war, persecution or violence. Descendants of refugees are included, as long as the displacement continues.
This is the single most misleading statement in the entire piece. The United Nations does not define refugees as including their descendants for any group other than the Palestinians. People who fled India, or Pakistan, during Partition in 1947, may be refugees, but for the U.N., their descendants are not. The children born in South Korea to refugees from North Korea are not considered to be refugees. The children of Vietnamese boat people, born in the United States, are not considered by the U.N. as refugees. Nor are any of the tens of millions of descendants of other refugees from the many conflicts that have been waged since World War II.
All U.N.-registered refugees maintain an internationally recognized right of return to their land and homes, an issue that has long been one of the core points of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reducing the number of eligible refugees as the administration would like to see happen, although only the U.N. General Assembly can do it would drastically change the dynamic as the White House prepares to release its own peace plan to resolve the conflict.
Separately, the Trump administration said last week that $200 million slated for direct U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority would be redirected elsewhere.
The loss of funds will be hard on the Palestinians, said Ghassan Khatib of the West Banks Birzeit University, but will do little to change these peoples status as refugees, he said.
It is only the U.N. that is entitled to give legal status or a description of refugees, and not individual countries, he said. The change in the American position will not have an impact on the international understanding of refugees.
If the American government not only ceases to support UNRWA, but explains, at every conceivable occasion, and at every forum as, at the U.N., the indomitable and articulate Nikki Haley can be counted on to do that there is no reason to have one definition for Palestinian refugees and another that is to be used for all other groups of refugees, whoever they may be.
In Gaza, Amal Khalil, a 53-year-old widow, is worried. She has relied on aid from UNRWA to feed herself and her family for many years.
It has already been reduced more than once. I do not know that it will be further reduced or stopped completely, she said.
Here we have the personal stories of individual hardship, designed to appeal to our sympathies and to close off our reason. If Amal Khalil a widow has relied on UNRWA all of her life, why was nothing done to teach her, or her children, during all those decades, some skill by which they might end their apparently total dependence on aid from UNRWA? Why is the culture of permanent dependence encouraged by UNRWA, if not to keep alive the refugee question, rather than to help solve it? Part of the political plan is to prevent Palestinianrefugees from integrating into the societies they now live in. Millions of them are forbidden to buy housing in their host countries; they are forced to live in refugee camps, where they also find certain professions are not open to them.
Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA in Gaza, told a local radio station that if funds to the organization were suddenly stopped, the entire education system would be in danger of collapsing, with only enough money to last through September.
More of the same Dire Warnings. As Saeb Erekat insists that the cuts in American aid would end in disaster, and others speak of catastrophe, a spokesman for UNRWA in Gaza claims that the entire education system would be in danger of collapsing without that all-important funding from the Americans. But why? Arent there 57 Muslim countries, including four states that are fabulously rich (Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar) that could easily make up for any shortfall caused by an end of American aid to UNRWA?
Hit particularly hard would be Jordan, where the 2 million Palestinian refugees a fifth of the countrys population use UNRWAs services. Providing them all health care, education and shelter would fall to the cash-strapped Jordanian government.
Again, the Post report misses the main point about Jordan. That country is hardly without rich friends it can count on. Just this June, Jordan received a new commitment of $2.5 billion from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Kuwait. This might have been mentioned, as well as the likelihood that the amounts given to UNRWA by those three countries could easily be raised by 10-15% (which would more than offset the decrease in Americas contribution to UNRWA in Jordan), but of course, the Palestinians dont want any of this to be mentioned: for them, it is important that the West be made to feel guilty, the West that should come up with whatever funds are now needed. The worlds non-Muslims owe us, the Palestinians, a living, and we mean to shame or terrify them into providing it.
On Friday, Germany and Japan pledged to donate more, but it is unlikely the increases will cover the U.S. withdrawal.
Again, we see Western nations stepping in to make up the shortfall created by Americas ending its contributions. But why should they? Seventy years after the Palestinian refugees were created at the same time, many more Jews, leaving behind far more property, had to flee Arab lands as Jewish refugees the assumption still seems to be that the West should be supporting this group of Muslim Arabs and all of their descendants till the end of time, through UNRWA. Why? On what theory? Let the Deep-Pocketed Big Four in the Arab Gulf Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar come up with a few hundred million dollars more per year for UNRWA, sums the donors will hardly miss so that a much greater proportion of the contributions to Palestinians through UNRWA are supplied by other Muslim Arabs. Otherwise, these payments to UNRWA from the West may come to be regarded by their Palestinian recipients, or more likely are already, as a kind of proleptic jizyah.
The American government has done a very useful thing. It has, by its forthright policy of ending its entire contribution to UNRWA, raised in the public consciousness the question that needs to be asked of the propagandists for UNRWA: why should the Palestinian refugees have been treated, over the last 70 years, so differently from how all the other hundreds of millions of refugees since World War II have been treated? The world deserves an answer, something a bit more helpful than Saeb Erekats vague reference to international law. Why is it only the Palestinian refugees who get to include, in their ever-expanding number, all of their descendants, no matter how distantly removed they may be, by both time and place, from the land their ancestors felt they had to leave? Why are the Palestinians the only refugees whose numbers always increase? And why do so few of the dead refugees ever get taken off the rolls?
Let the Palestinian leaders warn of disasters and catastrophes and a doomsday scenario for their people all they want. Let Saeb Erekat mutter darkly about the violation of international law, but note that he is unable to cite any such international law that requires either the United States, or indeed any other country, to support any particular group of refugees. And above all, let the marvelous Nikki Haley and others similarly situated keep asking aloud, at the U.N. and at every other forum, why there is only one group of refugees in the world, the Palestinians, who have been allowed to constantly increase their numbers by counting all the descendants of the original refugees as refugees themselves. Eventually, if asked repeatedly and loudly, someone is going to have to answer that unanswerable question.
If youd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Surprising Europe hasn't stepped up. They could easily make up the American contributions. UN contributions too.
I’m beyond ‘tired’ of being a piggy bank to the world. The Palestinians can do for themselves as far as I am concerned.
This us a very serious issue for the PLO, aka, PA. Without all the external support the Palestinians cannot pay the “retirement” benefits to all the families of the suicide bombers.
The entire structure of the Jihadi society government is threatened.
The Palestinian leadership may have to sell off assets like their 45 bedroom mansions in the north to forestall violent protests, against HAMAS.
Nor educate the next generation of terrorists
They’re not so-called palestinians. They’re arabs. And to hell with them.
Tl;DR
Suck it, Palis. It’s your own fault.
By cutting aid, the U.S. is violating international law, Erekat said... Some may argue that it is U.S. taxpayers money and that it is up to them how it is spent. But by the same token, who gave Trump the damn right to steal my land and my capital and my future and my aspirations and my freedom by deciding to blindly support the occupying power called Israel?
A bullet in between Erekat's eyes or right in his lying mouth would be great to have on video. BTW, what's his FR nick? Thanks SJackson.
There is no international law.
There is international custom that is widely accepted but lacks the force of law.
The laws of the sea, for example, are customs existing since forever and generally agreed to by the masters of ocean vessels in international waters.
...Let the Palestinian leaders warn of disasters and catastrophes and a doomsday scenario for their people all they want...
What are they gonna do attack us?
If we lose the midterms democrats will work to get this crap reinstated...
DOes anyone want to make a bet with me? I bet that if you dry up the money going to PA, there will be a deal worked out between them and Israel before Trump leaves office.
Welfare from the West is what enabled Palestinians to become professional terrorists. Remove all aid, and they will have no choice but to find jobs somewhere.
“...they will have no choice but to find jobs...?”
But, what can they do except breed goats? Or is it breed WITH goats?
They will, they’ll try to change lots of things but they need both houses to pass legislation and in any event won’t be able to override a veto.
Additionally, if they take the House, impeachment will be the focus.
If you are upset Zucker, you can donate YOUR MONEY!!!
Comforting... we're safe until 2020... Thanks Jackson.
It’s not too late for The Post to pay the tab instead of the American voters.
They could chip in. Our cut was about $350 million. The EU, the Arab states, either or both could easily cover it. Heck, they Brits could, they started the problem by bailing on their commitment to the League of Nations/UN at the cost of Jewish lives. The French could help, they created Syria and supported carving out Jordan. Not really much money, but the secret is they don’t really give a s*it about the local Arabs, it’s just a means to attack Israel and not criticize the cuts to bash the US and Trump.
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