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- Mar 6, 2017
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Despite managing to raise $160 million in New York on Thursday, at a pledging conference of the Ad Hoc Committee of the U.N. General Assembly, the head of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was not pleased.
Trying to sound grateful for the ill-deserved windfall, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini simultaneously boasted about the international community’s “firm commitment” to the organization and bemoaned that the funds pledged were far from sufficient to keep the place running past the end of the year.
Addressing the press on Friday, Lazzarini said that even with the pledged sums, UNRWA still has a shortfall of $100 million. He added that if it fails to “close the funding gap in the next couple of months,” millions of Palestinians will lack primary healthcare, and their kids will be robbed of an education.
“We have entered a danger zone,” he stated, waxing poetic about all the wonderful “essential” services that UNRWA has been providing to Palestinian refugees, on a shoestring budget, no less. UNRWA, he stressed, “is indispensable in the lives of Palestinian refugees,” and contributes to a sense of “stability.”
You get the picture. The trouble is that it’s false.
In the first place, the word “refugee” in relation to the Palestinians is a hoax. To be more precise, the Palestinians referred to as such do not fit the definition spelled out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
According to the UNHCR, “Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country … The 1951 Refugee Convention is a key legal document and defines a refugee as: ‘someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.’”
The job of the UNHCR is to “assist in [such people’s] voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country.”
UNRWA, in contrast, has been helping the leaders in Gaza, Ramallah, Damascus and Beirut perpetuate, for political reasons, what they call the Palestinian “refugee crisis.”
Secondly, UNRWA—which was established in December 1949 to assist Arabs who were displaced in 1948 as a result of the Arab assault on the Jewish state that constituted Israel’s War of Independence—is far from being a “humanitarian” organization. It is, rather, a self-serving NGO that reinforces the victimhood and radicalism of the people it’s supposed to be extricating from their circumstances.
Indeed, the organization whose doors and coffers should have been nailed shut decades ago abets terrorists in a number of ways. One is by enabling Fatah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to hide weapons under and inside its schools.
It’s a perfect human-shield two-fer: providing the Jew-killers with rocket storage and launching space; and accusing Israel of targeting children when it fires at the source of deadly projectiles.
(full article online)
www.jns.org
Trying to sound grateful for the ill-deserved windfall, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini simultaneously boasted about the international community’s “firm commitment” to the organization and bemoaned that the funds pledged were far from sufficient to keep the place running past the end of the year.
Addressing the press on Friday, Lazzarini said that even with the pledged sums, UNRWA still has a shortfall of $100 million. He added that if it fails to “close the funding gap in the next couple of months,” millions of Palestinians will lack primary healthcare, and their kids will be robbed of an education.
“We have entered a danger zone,” he stated, waxing poetic about all the wonderful “essential” services that UNRWA has been providing to Palestinian refugees, on a shoestring budget, no less. UNRWA, he stressed, “is indispensable in the lives of Palestinian refugees,” and contributes to a sense of “stability.”
You get the picture. The trouble is that it’s false.
In the first place, the word “refugee” in relation to the Palestinians is a hoax. To be more precise, the Palestinians referred to as such do not fit the definition spelled out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
According to the UNHCR, “Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country … The 1951 Refugee Convention is a key legal document and defines a refugee as: ‘someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.’”
The job of the UNHCR is to “assist in [such people’s] voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country.”
UNRWA, in contrast, has been helping the leaders in Gaza, Ramallah, Damascus and Beirut perpetuate, for political reasons, what they call the Palestinian “refugee crisis.”
Secondly, UNRWA—which was established in December 1949 to assist Arabs who were displaced in 1948 as a result of the Arab assault on the Jewish state that constituted Israel’s War of Independence—is far from being a “humanitarian” organization. It is, rather, a self-serving NGO that reinforces the victimhood and radicalism of the people it’s supposed to be extricating from their circumstances.
Indeed, the organization whose doors and coffers should have been nailed shut decades ago abets terrorists in a number of ways. One is by enabling Fatah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to hide weapons under and inside its schools.
It’s a perfect human-shield two-fer: providing the Jew-killers with rocket storage and launching space; and accusing Israel of targeting children when it fires at the source of deadly projectiles.
(full article online)
Let UNRWA die already
The demise of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees is long overdue. Let’s hope that Commissioner-General Lazzarini is right to be worried.
www.jns.org
