Remember when B. Hussein Obama promised that his administration would be transparent?

Well, it certainly is…Profoundly transparent in its falsehoods. The man speaks through both sides of his mouth at once, blatantly (and yes, transparently) lies.

For example.

“Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security…I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat - from Gaza to Tehran.… Across the political spectrum, Israelis understand that real security can only come through lasting peace. And that is why we - as friends of Israel - must resolve to do all we can to help Israel and its neighbors to achieve it.”

[Obama Speech at 2008 AIPAC Policy Conference, 6/4/08]

While his website hands us one thing, his deeds demonstrate something entirely different.

From Atlas’ post:

The United States called on its close ally Israel on Tuesday to conduct credible investigations into allegations of war crimes committed by its forces in Gaza, saying it would help the Middle East peace process.

Michael Posner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, said that Hamas leaders also had a responsibility to investigate crimes and to end what he called its targeting of civilians and use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in the strip.

The U.N. Human Rights Council was holding a one-day debate on a recent report by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist and former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.

His panel found the Israeli army and Palestinian militants committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during their December-January war. Israel did not cooperate with the U.N. inquiry and has rejected the report as biased.

“We encourage Israel to utilise appropriate domestic (judicial) review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations,” Posner said in a speech to the Geneva forum.

“If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace,” he said.

Pure and simple, the gist is that any Israeli effort at self defense of any definitive nature is “disproportionate”. If x number of Palestinians are killed in the course of such an enterprise, then x number of Israelis have to be killed as well. Meanwhile, it’s perfectly acceptable for Hamas to fire rockets into Israeli cities and towns, destroyiong property and killing innocent civilians.

Going back to a meeting between B. Hussein and a couple of his Islamic butt buddies:

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama privately expressed his support for a new Arab state within Israel’s current borders, including eastern Jerusalem, during his meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah this summer.

According to a report published Tuesday in the Lebanese newspaper al-Ahbar, Obama told Abbas that he supports a PA state, and Arab “rights to east Jerusalem” as well. The sources said Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “heard the best things they ever heard from an American president” during the meeting. However, said sources quoted in the report, the candidate asked them to keep his declaration a secret.

East Jerusalem has no holy standing for Muslims like certain anti-Israel revisionists would have us believe, but Obama’s got that covered by grouping it in with the West Bank, rendering it a part of the “real estate” dispute.

The man attended an anti-Israel, pro-Islamic terrorist church in Chicago for over twenty years.

By backing Hamas and friends here against our old and faithful ally Israel, he is showing us, also, that no matter how hard the liberal media that got him elected tried to cover it up, the President’s name tells us exactly where he’s coming from and where he truly belongs (I’ll give you a hint: They have camels there — moooo!).

His words on one level call the Israelis friend, while on another level, along comes the kick in the groin.

Could it be that Barack Hussein Obama’s actual ambition for all of us is something like this?

…on some of the content of my 9/11 post, there was an interesting article in U.S.A. Today* the other day regarding the differences of opinion as to how strong a threat the terrorist organization actually is, or remains to be.

In the eight years since the 9/11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has spent nearly the entire time focused on one enemy: al-Qaeda.

Thousands of terrorist operatives have been killed or captured. Terrorist safe havens and training grounds in Afghanistan where operatives were trained have been destroyed. Military forces largely have shattered al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who once closely managed al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations, have been driven into seclusion.

Now, Mueller and counterterrorism analysts are tracking the emergence of a new threat. Al-Qaeda has morphed into a fractured network of small terrorist franchises strewn across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Yemen, according to Senate testimony by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, a “jihadist battleground” is rising amid growing political upheaval and poverty. Blair says there are concerns that al-Qaeda could establish a “regional base of operations” in Yemen to train operatives and plot new attacks against the West.

Okay.

Al-Qaeda’s transformation raises an unsettling question: Does its splintering help make the USA and its Western allies safer, or does it complicate efforts to guard against terrorism?

“Yes, they retain the capability of striking overseas,” Mueller says in an interview, declining to specify whether the USA is vulnerable to such an attack. “They are still lethal.”

Although al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 command structure no longer exists, its smaller terror cells are freer to conceive and direct their own operations, making them increasingly unpredictable. Several analysts worried about a terror resurgence cite evidence that pieces of al-Qaeda are gathering strength in Yemen and Somalia. Yemen’s stability is especially crucial to U.S. interests because of its strategic location on the Arabian Peninsula, its access to critical shipping lanes and its vast border with the world’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia.

There is “growing concern that al-Qaeda will begin providing social and civil services to the people of Yemen on a scale that could challenge the Yemen government for allegiance,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst based at Princeton University.

This is not at all unheard of where sizeable Islamofascist guerilla organizations are concerned. As a prime example, look how Hamas perpetuated and strengthened its influence by becoming a political party among the “Palestinians”, and Hezbollah has done the same thing in Lebanon, ostensibly providing services and other positive social products that are either not delivered or are not delivered as well by official government.

If al-Qaeda and its affiliates expand in Yemen and other weakened states, he says, the “danger to the U.S. is quite great.”

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who oversaw the bureau’s Baghdad operations, says that “in one sense, you are safer because al-Qaeda no longer has that (pre-9/11) chain of command. On the other hand, al-Qaeda has become so decentralized, it can be harder to stop. … It’s like a dormant volcano.”

This is true — fragmented, without a central chain of command, al-Qaeda leaves no single chain to follow to any one nucleus of command. As I said in the 9/11 post, what we see now are what amount to a number of franchises. Basically autonymous franchises.

Other terrorism analysts, however, say government officials refuse to admit the threat al-Qaeda once posed largely has passed.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and prominent al-Qaeda analyst, citing his own analysis, which suggests that al-Qaeda’s capability to strike targets in the West is declining. “There is not much left of al-Qaeda except in the minds of those inside the (Washington) Beltway.”

Sure, and pigs might fly.

We still see the hand of al-Qaeda active in places like Indonesia (Jemaah Islamiyah, for example, led by a demon-on-earth called Noordin Mohammed Top) in which terrorist attacks, because of their remoteness on the globe in terms of “relevant” political hotspots, don’t get nearly the fanfare in the media that the same events taking place, say, in Britain, Spain or France would.

And of course when terrorists strike in Israel, the world media, the U.N. and the E.U. tend not to notice that anything’s amiss until the Israelis retaliate or otherwise defend themselves. But that’s another story entirely.

At any rate, these now splintered off, independent franchises merely make it harder for the good guys to focus on a single, tangible enemy entity.

Mueller says much of the danger now comes from a “genre” of hybrid groups spawned by the destruction of al-Qaeda safe havens. Separate groups, which share al-Qaeda’s philosophy of eliminating Western influence from Muslim areas, have been inspired by al-Qaeda.

Among those groups, Mueller says, is the Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which he says is responsible for last November’s attack in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen claimed responsibility for two strikes against the U.S. Embassy in Sana last year. One was a coordinated assault last September that killed 17 people, including the six attackers.

Remember, having not evolved along with the rest of mankind over the centuries, Islam still resides in the age when Mohammed cursed the earth with his satanic presence.

Fundamentalist Muslims live with a mindset totally alien to our own, one that countenances mass, cold blooded murder of men, women and children in the name of their so-called god (allah) and the martyrdom of their youth (never, of course, of the so-called “holy men” who preach martyrdom and/or send these naive fools out to die) in the performance of butchery of the innocent.

“These guys think in terms of decades and centuries,” says Phil Mudd, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch. “The challenge is whether you can keep the pressure on.

“It’s a shark’s mouth,” he says of al-Qaeda’s resiliency. “You have to keep taking the teeth out again and again. You can’t allow the teeth to rotate to the front.”

Well said!

Read the entire U.S.A. Today article here.

* U.S.A. Today does have its “moments”, and this is one of them.

Chuck here (the durn contributor drop-down menu’s still not working).

Knowing that Middle east affairs, especially those of concern to Israel, are also of concern to Seth, I thought I’d bring up three items from that region.

The first is in response to a column by the excellent Caroline Glick, titled Et tu, Netanyahu?, that comes as something of a shock, considering that Benjamin Netaniahu has always been a strong defender of Israel’s right to its status as the Jewish Homeland, and was expected to resist, without compunction, any attempts by the Obama Administration to engender anything less.

This week we discovered that we have been deceived. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s principled rejection of US President Barack Obama’s bigoted demand that Israel bar Jews from building new homes and expanding existing ones in Judea and Samaria does not reflect his actual policy.

Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Attias let the cat out of the bag. Attias said that the government has been barring Jews from building in the areas since it took office four months ago in the hopes that by preemptively capitulating to US demands, the US will treat Israel better.

And that’s not all. Today Netanyahu is reportedly working in earnest to reach a deal with the Obama administration that would formalize the government’s effective construction ban through 2010.

Netanyahu is set to finalize such a deal at his meeting with Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell in London next Wednesday.

Say what!?

Unfortunately, far from treating Israel better as a result of Netanyahu’s willingness to capitulate on the fundamental right of Jews to live and build homes in the land of Israel, the Obama administration is planning to pocket Israel’s concession and then up the ante. Administration officials have stated that their next move will be to set a date for a new international Middle East peace conference that Obama will chair. There, Israel will be isolated and relentlessly attacked as the US, the Arabs, the Europeans, the UN and the Russians all gang up on our representatives and demand that Israel accept the so-called “Arab peace plan.”

That deceptively named plan, which Obama has all but adopted as his own, involves Israel committing national suicide in exchange for nothing. The Arab plan — formerly the “Saudi Plan,” and before that, the Tom Friedman “stick it to Israel ‘peace’ plan” — calls for Israel to retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It also involves Israel agreeing to cease being a Jewish state by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as citizens within its truncated borders. The day an Israeli government accepts the plan - which again will form the basis of the Obama “peace” conference” — is the day that the State of Israel signs its own death warrant.

What the hell is the Israeli prime minister thinking? Has he caught Livni/Olmert Syndrome? How do you say “lemming” in Hebrew?

And if that’s not enough, well how about this?

Then there is the other Obama plan in the works. Obama also intends to host an international summit on nuclear security for March 2010. Arab states are already pushing for Israel’s nuclear program to be placed on the agenda. Together with Obama administration officials’ calls for Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — which would compel Israel to relinquish its purported nuclear arsenal — and their stated interest in having Israel sign the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty — which would arguably force Israel to allow international inspections of its nuclear facility in Dimona — Obama’s planned nuclear conclave will place Israel in an untenable position.

Meanwhile, Barack, Hillary & the gang continue to pussyfoot around a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran.

Moving on

Recognizing the Obama administration’s inherent and unprecedented hostility to Israel, Netanyahu sought to deflect its pressure by giving his speech at Bar Ilan University in June. There he gave his conditional acceptance of Obama’s most cherished foreign policy goal — the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland.

Netanyahu’s conditions — that the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; that they relinquish their demand that Israel accept millions of hostile Arabs as citizens under the so-called “right of return;” that the Palestinian state be a “demilitarized” state, and that Arab states normalize their relations with Israel were supposed to put a monkey wrench in Obama’s policy of pressuring Israel.

Since it is obvious that the Arabs do not accept these eminently reasonable conditions, Netanyahu presumed that Obama would be forced to stand down. What Netanyahu failed to take into consideration was the notion that Obama and the Arabs would not act in good faith — that they would pretend to accept at least some of his demands in order to force him to accept all of their demands, and so keep US pressure relentlessly focused on Israel. Unfortunately, this is precisely what has happened.

Ahead of Obama’s meeting Tuesday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Al Quds al Arabi, reported that Obama has accepted Netanyahu’s call for a demilitarized Palestinian state. Although Netanyahu is touting Obama’s new position as evidence of his own diplomatic prowess, the fact is that Obama’s new position is both disingenuous and meaningless.

Obama’s supposed support for a demilitarized Palestinian state is mendacious on two counts. First, Palestinian society is already one of the most militarized societies in the world. According to the World Bank, 43 percent of wages paid by the Palestinian Authority go to Palestinian militias. Since Obama has never called for any fundamental reordering of Palestinian society or for a reform of the PA’s budgetary priorities, it is obvious that he doesn’t have a problem with a militarized Palestinian state.

The second reason his statements in support for a demilitarized Palestinian state are not credible is because one of the central pillars of the Obama administration’s Palestinian policy is its involvement in training of the Fatah-led Palestinian army. US Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton is overseeing the training of this army in Jordan and pressuring Israel to expand its deployment in Judea and Samaria.

Like they say, “SNIP”

There is another way. It is being forged by the likes of Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon on the one hand and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee on the other.

Ya’alon argues that not capitulating to American pressure is a viable policy option forIsrael. There is no reason to reach an agreement with Mitchell on the administration’s bigoted demand that Jews not build in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. If the US wants to have a fight with Israel, a fight against American anti-Jewish discrimination is not a bad one for Israel to have.

Ya’alon’s argument was borne out by Huckabee’s visit this week to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Huckabee’s trip showed that the administration is not operating in a policy vacuum. There is plenty of strong American support for an Israeli government that would stand up to the administration on the Palestinian issue and Iran alike.

Netanyahu’s policies have taken a wrong turn. But Netanyahu is not Tzipi Livni or Ehud Olmert. He is neither an ideologue nor an opportunist. He understands why what he is doing is wrong. He just needs to be convinced that he has another option.

Must read the entire column (yeah, there’s quite a bit more in there).

Speaking of Iran, while this isn’t all that surprising, it’s not exactly something to be taken lightly.

Ahmad Vahidi, nominated Thursday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to serve as Iran’s defense minister, is a suspected international terrorist sought by Interpol in connection with a deadly 1994 attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina.

Mr. Vahidi, a former commander of the elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard known as the Quds Force, was one of 15 men and three women named to Cabinet posts by Mr. Ahmadinejad as he begins his second term in office. The choice is likely to further chill relations between Iran and the international community, especially Israel.

Interpol, the international police agency based in Lyon, France, placed Mr. Vahidi and four other Iranian officials on its most-wanted list in 2007 at the request of Argentine prosecutors, who say the men played a role in planning the July 1994 attack on the seven-story community center in Buenos Aires.

Obama’s friends, the Iranian government.

The bombing, which killed 85 people, is thought to have been carried out by members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia and political party with close links to Iran.

Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst on Iraq and Iran at the Congressional Research Service, said that Mr. Vahidi is also suspected of having played a role in a 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia known as Khobar Towers.

Mr. Vahidi is not the first prominent Iranian to be wanted in connection with terrorist attacks. Presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, a former revolutionary guard commander, was among the five Iranians identified by Interpol in 2007, as was former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

But Mr. Vahidi’s ascension to the high-profile post of defense minister suggests that Mr. Ahmadinejad will continue his policy of defiance toward the West.

Obama’s good friends, the Iranian government.

Lastly, there’s this Op-Ed in the Washington Post by Crown Prince of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.

We need fresh thinking if the Arab Peace Initiative is to have the impact it deserves on the crisis that needlessly impoverishes Palestinians and endangers Israel’s security.

This crisis is not a zero-sum game. For one side to win, the other does not have to lose.

The peace dividend for the entire Middle East is potentially immense. So why have we not gotten anywhere?

Our biggest mistake has been to assume that you can simply switch peace on like a light bulb. The reality is that peace is a process, contingent on a good idea but also requiring a great deal of campaigning — patiently and repeatedly targeting all relevant parties. This is where we as Arabs have not done enough to communicate directly with the people of Israel.

An Israeli might be forgiven for thinking that every Muslim voice is raised in hatred, because that is usually the only one he hears. Just as an Arab might be forgiven for thinking every Israeli wants the destruction of every Palestinian.

Essentially, we have not done a good enough job demonstrating to Israelis how our initiative can form part of a peace between equals in a troubled land holy to three great faiths. Others have been less reticent, recognizing that our success would threaten their vested interest in keeping Palestinians and Israelis at each other’s throats. They want victims to stay victims so they can be manipulated as proxies in a wider game for power. The rest of us — the overwhelming majority — have the opposite interest.

It is in our interest to speak up now for two reasons. First, we will all be safer once we drain the pool of antipathy in which hatemongers from both sides swim.

Second, peace will bring prosperity. Already, the six oil and gas nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council have grown into a powerful trillion-dollar market. Removing the ongoing threat of death and destruction would open the road to an era of enterprise, partnership and development on an even greater scale for the region at large.

That is the glittering prize for resolving the dilemma of justice for Palestine without injustice to Israel. Effectively, this is the meta-issue that defines and distorts the self-image of Arabs and diverts too much of our energies away from the political and economic development the region needs.

The wasted years of deadlock have conditioned Israelis to take on a fortress mentality that automatically casts all Palestinians as the enemy — and not as the ordinary, decent human beings they are.

Speaking out matters, but it is not enough. Our governments and all stakeholders also must be ready to carry out practical measures to help ease the day-to-day hardship of Palestinian lives.

The two communities in the Holy Land are not fated to be enemies. What can unite them tomorrow is potentially bigger than what divides them today.

Both sides need help from their friends, in the form of constructive engagement, to reach a just settlement.

What we don’t need is the continued reflexive rejection of any initiative that seeks to melt the ice. Consider the response so far to the Arab peace plan, pioneered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. This initiative is a genuine effort to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in return for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territory and a fair resolution of the plight of the Palestinians, far too many of whom live in refugee camps in deplorable conditions.

We must stop the small-minded waiting game in which each side refuses to budge until the other side makes the first move. We’ve got to be bigger than that. All sides need to take simultaneous, good-faith action if peace is to have a chance. A real, lasting peace requires comprehensive engagement and reconciliation at the human level. This will happen only if we address and settle the core issues dividing the Arab and the Israeli peoples, the first being the question of Palestine and occupied Arab lands. The fact that this has not yet happened helps to explain why the Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel are cold. They have not been comprehensive.

We should move toward real peace now by consulting and educating our people and by reaching out to the Israeli public to highlight the benefits of a genuine peace.

To be effective, we must acknowledge that, like people everywhere, the average Israeli’s primary window on the world is his or her local and national media. Our job, therefore, is to tell our story more directly to the Israeli people by getting the message out to their media, a message reflecting the hopes of the Arab mainstream that confirms peace as a strategic option and advocates the Arab Peace Initiative as a means to this end. Some conciliatory voices in reply from Israel would help speed the process.

Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.

Once we achieve peace, trade will follow. We can then create a “virtuous circle,” because trade will create its own momentum. By putting real money into people’s hands and giving them real power over their lives, trade will help ensure the durability of peace. The day-to-day experience would move minds and gradually build a relationship of trust and mutual interest, without which long-term peacemaking is impossible.

When stability pays, conflict becomes too costly. We must do more, now, to achieve peace.

The question is, is the crown prince truly sincere about finding a lasting, peaceful solution to the Israeli-Arab problem, or is this just more of the usual Arab hype?

…the wheels grind slow in Congress, but who cares, right? It’s only the taxpayer’s money that’s often flushed down the commode of politicians’ ineptitude.

Back on 28-October-2005, I posted this on the UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees ) quagmire.

If I was able to learn about it from sources totally accessible to the public, the rest of the media and, though it might have taken them awhile, the government surely knew what was going on then and what has been going on since at UNWRA.

However, they have not been at all diligent about addressing the Palestinians refugees’ expansion vs its cost on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer.

Here we are, over three years since I posted that article and five decades plus change since the scurrilously corrupt, incompetent U.N. agency began UNWRA.

Finally, now (all emphasis mine),

111th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. CON. RES. 29

Expressing the sense of Congress that the United Nations should take immediate steps to improve the transparency and accountability of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Near East to ensure that it is not providing funding, employment, or other support to terrorists.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 28, 2009

Mr. ROTHMAN of New Jersey (for himself, Mr. KIRK, Mrs. MYRICK, Ms. BERKLEY, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mrs. TAUSCHER, Mr. ENGEL, and Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Expressing the sense of Congress that the United Nations should take immediate steps to improve the transparency and accountability of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Near East to ensure that it is not providing funding, employment, or other support to terrorists.

Whereas the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established in 1949 as a temporary agency to provide relief services to Palestinian refugees and is the only United Nations agency dedicated to one specific group of refugees;

Whereas UNRWA’s definition of refugees includes not only the Palestinian refugees themselves, but also their descendants, resulting in a more than 400 percent increase in the number of beneficiaries from 900,000 in 1950 to 4,500,000 today;
Whereas since 1950, the United States has contributed more than $3,400,000,000 to UNRWA and is the largest single donor to this United Nations organization;

Whereas as of September 2008, the United States has already contributed $148,000,000 to UNRWA for fiscal year 2008;

Whereas UNRWA employs approximately 24,000 staff to care for a population of 4,500,000 registered refugees in camps located in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Palestinian Territories;

Whereas, in contrast, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the agency tasked with resolving refugee problems worldwide, employs approximately 6,300 staff to care for a population of 11,400,000 refugees worldwide;

Whereas despite the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) military disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the 1993 creation of a Palestinian Authority that has jurisdiction over the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, UNRWA remains the primary professional, medical, educational, and social service provider for Palestinians living in `refugee’ camps in the Palestinian territories;

Whereas according to UNRWA Report of the Board of Auditors for the biennium ended December 31, 2005, UNRWA does not track recording, deleting, renaming, or manipulation of financial information by staff members or volunteers, and therefore has no means of detecting the alteration of financial data or other types of redirection of UNRWA funding, leaving UNRWA unable to technically comply with section 301(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which ensures that no United States tax dollars support terrorism;

Read the rest of H. CON. RES. 29 here.

If members of the U.S. Congress worked in private companies…

…ah, yes, a four decades old, give or take a year, song recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

I suppose it’s not all that unusual for different cultures to perceive different meanings for the same old song titles, as is noted here.

A televised graduation ceremony at a Palestinian kindergarten in Gaza shows little boys dressed in black masks, camouflage fatigues, carrying toy guns, and waving green Hamas flags.

The children vow that their most “lofty aspiration” is death for the sake of Allah.

Not “I wanna be a doctor”, “I wanna be President”, “I wanna be an astronaut”, “I wanna be a truck driver, just like my dad”, as children might reply, in civilized societies, to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The boys shout, “Allah Akbar” (Allah is great).

“Who is your role model?” the boys are asked. “The Prophet,” they respond.

“What is your path?”

“Jihad,” they shout.

“What is your most lofty aspiration?”

“Death for the sake of Allah.”

And so many ignorant morons buy into the “Religion of Peace” bit, championing the bloody cause these people purport to represent in their aggressions against Israel? Last I heard, the Jews over there, like human beings in most parts of the world, raise their children to be productive and successful, have families of their own and continue the family line into the future.

These so-called “Palestinian” animals, on the other hand, raise their children to die at the earliest possible opportunity, and not even as soldiers, but as murderers who take innocent people with them.

And these evil pig-monsters call us the Great Satan?

In engaging his full scale Holocaust denial campaign (even to the extent of having held his global conference on the subject earlier this week), the Iranian president is embacing a multifaceted and highly effective strategy that demonstrates he is, indeed, no dummy (or perhaps he is, and the leaders of certain western countries are just dumber than he is), according to an on-point analysis by megaperceptive columnist Caroline Glick.

So why is the guy who is gunning for a new Holocaust belittling the last one?

First of all, by doing so he empowers those Germans and friends of Germany who carried it out. By denying the Holocaust Ahmadinejad turns the Nazis into victims and so provides a space for them to express themselves after a sixty year silence. Indeed, in Germany neo-Nazism is a burgeoning political and social force that proudly parades its links to Iran.

The German fascist party NPD’s followers demonstrated in support of Iran at the World Cup in Germany last spring. This week, Der Spiegel reported that attacks against Jewish children have increased markedly in recent years. Jewish children and their non-Jewish friends have been humiliated in anti-Semitic rituals unheard of since the Nazi era. “Jew” has become one of the most prevalent derogatory terms in use in Germany today.

Iran’s adoption of Holocaust denial as an official, defiant policy gives legitimacy to this striking phenomenon. This is especially the case since Iran is blaming the Jews for silencing these poor fascists. In his same letter to Merkel Ahmadinejad wrote, “The perpetual claimants against the great people of Germany are the bullying Zionists that funded the Al Quds Occupying Regime with the force of bayonets in the Middle East.”

of course does not limit his efforts to the Nazis. He is also setting the cognitive conditions for the annihilation of Israel for the international Left by presenting Israel’s existence as a direct result of the Holocaust. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said this week, “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt.”

In short, Iran views Holocaust denial as a strategic propaganda tool. By downgrading the Holocaust, Iran mobilizes supporters and paralyzes potential opponents. Its coupling of the last Holocaust with the one it signals daily it intends to carry out, wins it support among the Nazis and the Sunnis alike. Its presentation of the Holocaust as a myth used to exploit Muslims wins its support in the international Left which increasingly views Israel as an illegitimate state. So by denying the Holocaust Iran raises its leadership profile both regionally and globally.
Indeed, even if the Left doesn’t buy into Holocaust denial, it can still agree with Iran’s conclusion that Israel has no right to exist. As Mottaki explained, “If during this [Holocaust denial conference] it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis’ crimes?”

Truncating,

Merkel and her fellow Germans have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past three years condemning the Nazi Holocaust. This week they even organized a special Holocaust condemning conference in response to the Iranian Holocaust denying conference.

over the same time period, they have conducted negotiations with Teheran as part of the EU-3 that have enabled Iran to continue its nuclear progress; obstructed US efforts to levy sanctions on Iran; and maintained active trade relations with Iran. Merkel’s government has continued the practice of providing loan guarantees to German firms doing business with Iran. In 2005, German-Iranian trade stood at about $5 billion.
Now, after three years of disastrous negotiations with the mullahs, Germany has finally come around to supporting the European draft sanctions resolution against Iran being debated in the UN Security Council. The problem is that the proposed sanctions are so weak that they will have no impact on Iran’s ability to move on with its nuclear bomb program.

The obvious fact that the sanctions will have no impact on Iran has not made a dent in Merkel’s refusal to support military action against Iran under any circumstances - a refusal she reiterated while standing next to Israel’s Prime Minister on Tuesday.

Yeah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that completely clueless waste of skin who is as much a threat to the future of Israel as is the Iranian President.

Olmert was apparently too busy admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons only to take back his admission hours later, absurdly praising Russian President Vladimir for his opposition to the “nuclearlization of Iran” which Putin is actively promoting, and promising to give Judea and Samaria to Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas to take issue with Merkel’s statement. And that is a pity, because by taking issue with it, he would have gone far towards destroying the effectiveness of Iran’s Holocaust denial strategy.

Read the entire OpEd here.

It is purely amazing that western leaders still haven’t figured out what happens when they extend Arab Muslims any kind of trust, as in the trust that they will honor peace agreements.

While it’s true that Israel left a lot of room for improvement in strategizing their ground war in Lebanon — not the fault of the IDF, but the fault of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his jolly retinue for taking it upon themselves to manage the war rather than let his generals do what they’re paid to do — the result has been a sort of aimless deployment of reservist troops who don’t have a clue as to what, exactly, their objectives are — President Bush lived up to the liberals’ claim that he is “dumb”, in this case, by reversing his earlier policy and endorsing a cease-fire. As a two-time Bush voter, I am, at the very least, profoundly disappointed.

I mean, what does it take for the most powerful politician in the world to finally “get it?” A man who’s been spearheading a global war against Islamic terrorists for nearly five (count ‘em 5) years, who has had all that time to learn, from vast experience, the charactar of the enemy. This has to be one of the biggest screw-ups of our President’s career, one that will ultimately result in putting our troops in Iraq and elsewhere in greater danger than they need be, to say nothing of what Israel will now have to deal with.

And Olmert shares the blame, for signing off on the cease-fire.

Naturally, the Lebanese government and Hezbollah also signed off on it — why not?

Just as the Arab Muslim world viewed Israel’s previous withdrawal from Lebanon as a victory for Hezbollah — giving the terrorist organization the dubious reputation as the only Arab entity ever to beat Israel in war, they will do so once again. U.N. resolution 1701 is not law, Olmert could have told Bush, Kofi and the capitulative socialist powers of Europe to go piss up a rope, instead he agreed to a plan that not only may never see the return of two abducted Israeli soldiers, assuming they’re really even alive at this point, but one that places the responsibility, for the moment, of disarming Hezbollah in the hands of their comrades in the Lebanese Army. It also leaves, for the time being, the same impotent U.N. presence in southern Lebanon — you know, the one that has thus far been more a help than a hindrance to the terrorist organization — that’s been there since the last U.N. resolution regarding the Israeli-Lebanese border area. This means that in short order, Hezbollah can be back to the business of firing rockets into Israel and launching the occasional cross-border raid.

In the convoluted, primitive Muslim mind, this will be a major victory for Hezbollah and, as we’ve seen in the aftermath of past perceived terrorist victories, this perceived victory will inspire Hezbollah and all other Islamic terrorist groups to increase their attacks, not only against Israel, now that they will have perceived weakness there, but also against U.S. forces in Iraq, as President Bush’s support for the cease-fire plan will send the Islamofascist terrorists and backers of terrorism in Iran, and indeed throughout the Arab world, the message that our resolve has been weakened by world opinion.

Caroline Glick has an on-point analysis up at GAMLA’s website.

There is a good reason that Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah has accepted UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which sets the terms for a cease-fire between his jihad army and the State of Israel.

The resolution represents a near-total victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria, and an unprecedented defeat for Israel and its ally the United States. This fact is evident both in the text of the resolution and in the very fact that the US decided to sponsor a cease-fire resolution before Israel had dismantled or seriously degraded Hizbullah’s military capabilities.

While the resolution was not passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and so does not have the authority of law, in practice it makes it all but impossible for Israel to defend itself against Hizbullah aggression without being exposed to international condemnation on an unprecedented scale.

This is the case first of all because the resolution places responsibility for determining compliance in the hands of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan has distinguished himself as a man capable only of condemning Israel for its acts of self-defense while ignoring the fact that in attacking Israel, its enemies are guilty of war crimes. By empowering Annan to evaluate compliance, the resolution all but ensures that Hizbullah will not be forced to disarm and that Israel will be forced to give up the right to defend itself.

The resolution makes absolutely no mention of either Syria or Iran, without whose support Hizbullah could neither exist nor wage an illegal war against Israel. In so ignoring Hizbullah’s sponsors, it ignores the regional aspect of the current war and sends the message to these two states that they may continue to equip terrorist armies in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq with the latest weaponry without paying a price for their aggression.

The resolution presents Hizbullah with a clear diplomatic victory by placing their erroneous claim of Lebanese sovereignty over the Shaba Farms, or Mount Dov - a vast area on the Golan Heights that separates the Syrian Golan from the Upper Galilee and is disputed between Israel and Syria - on the negotiating table. In doing so, the resolution rewards Hizbullah’s aggression by giving international legitimacy to its demand for territorial aggrandizement via acts of aggression, in contravention of the laws of nations.

Truncating {that’s the “sophisticated” version of snip}

Aside from the resolution’s egregious language, the very fact that the US has sponsored a resolution that leaves Hizbullah intact as a fighting force constitutes a devastating blow to the national security of both Israel and the US, for the following reasons:

It grants the Lebanese government and military unwarranted legitimacy. The resolution treats the Lebanese government and military as credible bodies. However, the Lebanese government is currently under the de facto control of Hizbullah and Syria.
Moreover, the Lebanese army is paying pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in battle, and its forces have actively assisted Hizbullah in attacking Israel and Israeli military targets.

Indeed, the seven-point declaration issued by the Lebanese government, which the UN resolution applauds, was dictated by Hizbullah, as admitted by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Nasrallah last week.

It incites Shi’ite violence in Iraq. From a US perspective, the resolution drastically increases the threat of a radical Shi’ite revolt in Iraq. Hizbullah is intimately tied to Iraqi Shi’ite terrorist Muqtada al-Sadr. In April 2003, Hizbullah opened offices in southern Iraq and was instrumental in training the Mahdi Army, which Sadr leads. During a demonstration in Baghdad last week, Sadr’s followers demanded that he consider them an extension of Hizbullah, and expressed a genuine desire to participate in Hizbullah’s war against the US and Israel.

It should be assumed that Hizbullah’s presumptive victory in its war against Israel will act as a catalyst for violence by Sadr and his followers against the Iraqi government and coalition forces in the weeks to come. Indeed, the Hizbullah victory will severely weaken moderate Shi’ites in the Maliki government and among the followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

It empowers Iran. Iran emerges as the main victor in the current war. Not only was it not condemned for its sponsorship of Hizbullah, it is being rewarded for that sponsorship because it is clear to all parties that Iran was the engine behind this war, and that its side has won.

The entire article can be read here.

So now, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is suddenly interested in complying with UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. One can’t help but wonder why his government made no effort to comply with the resolution until the Israeli Defense Force {IDF} began pounding the bloody crap out of his country.

Of course, the anti-Israel U.N. never enforced Lebanon’s failure to comply with the resolution, since it was more a cosmetic kind of thing than anything the corrupt global organization actually intended to be taken seriously.

Siniora said the Israel Defense Forces assault had devastated his country, and called for international aid.

Go, IDF!

Deploying Lebanese troops on the southern border, now controlled by Hezbollah, would meet a repeated United Nations and U.S. demand. This demand is also backed by UN resolution 1559, calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese army in its stead. But the government fears that using force against Hezbollah could trigger another sectarian conflict in Lebanon, which was ravaged by civil war between 1975 and 1990.

Hey, guy, who’s running your country? A legitimate and responsible government, or a terrorist organization? If you expect anyone to take your government seriously, it has to enforce order in your country and has to be the only governing authority — that means it needs to take whatever risks are necessary to do away with the power Hezbollah enjoys in Lebanon. If you have to deploy troops in the south to fight tooth and nail against Hezbollah guerillas, then that’s what you have to do.

“I declare today that Lebanon is a disaster zone in need of a comprehensive and speedy Arab plan… and [it] pleads to its friends in the world to rush to its aid,” he said.

The Lebanese army is about 70,000 strong, equipped with American, French and Russian weapons but virtually no air force.

The UN Security Council on Saturday again rejected pleas that it call for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon after the United States objected, diplomats said.

Emphasis mine. Bravo, Condi, Bolton & Bush!

If Fouad’s government isn’t “up to” addressing the Hezbollah problem, maybe they ought to sit back, break open a can of pomegranate cola and weather things out while Israel gives their country the terrorism-purging enema it so badly needs….

H/T James Taranto

I hate to say this, but the reference to French weapons brings to my mind a few thousands of cases of white flags on hand-held poles. France must be the only country in the world whose military employs personnel whose job it is to declare, “We Surrender!”

Later.

War is not a good thing, but it is sometimes an unfortunate necessity. That said, in forcing that necessity upon Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas have, to all intents and purposes, all but pleaded with the Israelis for the exciting experience they are having now.

BEIRUT — Israel intensified its air assault on Lebanon yesterday, bombing central Beirut for the first time and pounding seaports and a key bridge as it tightened a noose around this reeling nation.

Trying to defuse the crisis, Lebanon’s prime minister indicated he might send his army to take control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah — a move that might risk civil war.

Mighty nice of you, friend. You and your citizens have no problem whatsoever with a major terrorist organization being part and parcel of your country until they bring the wrath of the most powerful war machine in the Middle East down on your country. Suddenly, you are going to “take control”, even at the risk of civil war. Now that the country you govern is being physically dismantled right before your eyes and well beyond your control, you want to get up on your hind legs and do what you should have done some time ago, except for your support of the terrorists and the support for the terrorists by most of your citizens.

Like the Israeli government has said on the subject, “Seeing is believing”.

On Israel’s second front, against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, Israeli aircraft yesterday struck the Economy Ministry of the Hamas-led Palestinian government and three other targets, killing two persons, Palestinian and Israeli officials reported.

Israeli tanks approached the town of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza this morning, residents and Palestinian security forces said. The town lies across the border from an Israeli town, Sderot, frequently hit by Hamas guerrilla rockets.

What did these Islamofascist zealots expect? That they could attack Israel forever and with impunity, and not eventually (like now) face the wrath the Jewish State’s awesome military forces are capable of dishing out when it is time to defend the homefront?

In a recent post, I referred to an expression: If you mess around with the bandwagon, you have to expect to get hit with the horn.

Wellllllllllllllll……………….

Washington Times bossman Wesley Pruden, as brutally frank as always, tells us,

If you’re looking for a fight in a dark and dangerous neighborhood, you can usually find one. If you pick on the wrong man, you deserve the bloody nose, cracked teeth or broken jaw.

Hmmmmm, sounds sort of like what some critters in Lebanon and some other critters in the Gaza Strip are learning to identify with, even as we speak.

Read Wesley Pruden’s OpEd Here.

If you’re an American liberal, anybody at the NYT {except William Safire} or an Islamofascist, read it and weep.

Overshadowed by news of terrorism and Middle East political issues is the “Palestinian” refugee situation, which even after more than half a century is still an ongoing problem. It is one the United Nations, who took responsibility for resettling some half to three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees after Israel achieved statehood, does not like to discuss — that number of unsettled people has since grown to over four million, demonstrating abject failure on the part of the U.N. and the agency it created specifically to address the problem, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA.

Arlene Kushner has written a thorough report and analysis on this problem, including references to terrorism involvement by UNRWA members and the entire wasteful, mismanaged, horrendously criminal undertakings of the U.N. agency in Azure, an outstanding Jewish magazine. Access to the article requires registration{free}, but it is definitely worthwhile.

The article is here.

In the aftermath of World War II, when it became apparent that millions of destitute refugees were not going to be attended to by existing organizations, the United Nations saw fit to establish an agency–the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)–to coordinate assistance to them. The UNHCR worked in accordance with the binding parameters and regulations of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in Geneva in 1951. In the decades that followed, as the problem of refugees increasingly took on a global dimension, the need arose for a global organization dedicated to their assistance. Thus did a relatively small and specialized agency expand into an organization with offices in over 100 countries, an annual budget of $1 billion, and the ability to provide both legal protection and emergency relief. Today, the UNHCR’s makeshift blue tents have become immediately recognizable symbols of humanitarian assistance to millions of displaced people around the world. Combined with measures such as monitoring national compliance with international refugee law, the UNHCR takes as its ultimate goal the attainment of long-term or “durable” solutions to refugee crises, such as voluntary repatriation or resettlement in countries of asylum or “third” countries. To date, the UNHCR has helped over 25 million people successfully restart their lives.

There is one group of refugees, however, for whom no durable solution has been found in the more than fifty years since their problems began: Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel in the period 1948-1949 as a result of its War of Independence. Originally numbering between 500,000 and 750,000 persons, there are today more than 4 million refugees, the majority of whom live in or near one of 59 camps in five areas, making for one of the world’s largest and most enduring refugee problems.1 There is no practicable solution to their situation in sight.

The plight of the Palestinian refugees is, at first glance, fairly surprising. Whereas the rest of the world’s refugees are the concern of the UNHCR, the Palestinians are the sole group of refugees with a UN agency dedicated exclusively to their care: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operates independently of the Convention on refugees. The differences between the two agencies are striking: In addition to classifying Palestinian refugees by a distinct set of criteria, UNRWA, through an international aid package of several hundred millions of dollars a year, serves as the main provider of healthcare, education, relief, and social services for its client population–the sort of assistance UNHCR usually devolves to refugees’ countries of asylum. Moreover, while the UNHCR actively seeks durable solutions to refugee problems, UNRWA has declined to entertain any permanent solution for the Palestinian refugees, insisting instead on a politically unfeasible “return” to pre-1967 Israel.2

By operating outside the norms accepted by the international community, UNRWA has succeeded in perpetuating a growing refugee problem. By establishing its own definition of a “Palestinian refugee” and actively encouraging resettlement in Israel, UNRWA not only has failed to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue, but has also lost sight of its original humanitarian goals, subordinating them instead to the political aims of the Arab world. Moreover, by hiring from within its own client population, UNRWA has at best created a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to terrorist activity in its midst, and at worst has become so enmeshed in the terrorist population as to be effectively held hostage by it. In the final analysis, UNRWA’s handling of the Palestinian refugee issue is both antagonistic to the achievement of peace in the Middle East and detrimental to the plight of the refugees themselves.

As the author points out, UNRWA have been perpetuating their job, as it were, by redefining the criteria for their constituency in order to multiply it while setting stated resettlement goals that would require the destruction of Israel to actually reach fruition.

UNRWA, the first UN agency charged with the task of aiding refugees, was established by General Assembly Resolution 302 on December 8, 1949. The agency was tasked with directing relief and works programs for the Palestinian Arab refugees of Israel’s War of Independence, who had fled into the neighboring Arab regions of Gaza (then under Egyptian control), Judea and Samaria (then controlled by Jordan), Jordan proper, Lebanon, and Syria.

From the outset, UNRWA was granted an extraordinary degree of autonomy, largely due to pressure from the UN’s Arab bloc. Unlike most other UN agencies, for instance, the appointment of UNRWA’s commissioner general does not require any approval or confirmation from the General Assembly, but is rather left to the discretion of the UN secretary general, in consultation with UNRWA’s ten-member Advisory Committee. In addition, UNRWA’s Advisory Committee wields no executive or operative authority.3 Bound by no existing statute or international compact, it was free to set its own definitions and guidelines–definitions which differ markedly from those used by UNHCR. Thus, it described “Palestinian refugees” as

persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.4

The use of this definition is remarkable in itself, not least because its very short residency requirement–just two years–allows the inclusion of a great number of people who had recently arrived in Palestine, and were thus newcomers to the region; indeed, many of the people who fled Israel at that time had only just arrived from neighboring Arab countries in search of work.

Contrast this with the definition provided by the UNHCR, established just two years later and charged with functioning within the parameters of the UN’s Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UNHCR was bound by the Convention, the universal standard for refugee status and the only definition recognized by international law. In this version, a refugee is someone who is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence; has well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.5

By emphasizing “country of nationality or habitual residence,” the UNHCR clearly intends to exclude the kind of transients– for example, a new arrival to the area in question for the purpose of employment–embraced by UNRWA’s definition.

This is not the only way in which the two definitions differ. The UNRWA definition also encompasses many other persons who would otherwise be excluded by the UNHCR. The latter, for example, outlines in detail the conditions under which the status of “refugee” no longer applies, stating that formal refugee status shall cease to apply to any person who has voluntarily re-availed himself of the protection of the country of his nationality; or having lost his nationality, he has voluntarily re-acquired it; or, he has acquired a new nationality, and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality; or… he can no longer, because the circumstances in connection with which he has been recognized as a refugee have ceased to exist, continue to refuse to avail himself of the protection of the country of his nationality.6

By excluding people who have found legal protection from established states, or who have refused to do so when offered, UNHCR has sought to prevent expansion of the definition in ways that would encourage the improper use of UNHCR’s services for political ends. UNRWA, however, has done just the opposite: Not only has it declined to remove the status of refugee from those persons who no longer fit the original description, such as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been granted full citizenship by Jordan, but it confers indefinitely the status of refugee upon a Palestinian refugee’s descendants, now entering the fourth generation. As the organization’s official website explains: “There are several groups and categories of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs): UNRWA-registered 1948 refugees and their descendants, unregistered 1948 refugees and their descendants, internally displaced Palestinians in Israel, and persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 war and their descendants.”7 When UNRWA was first conceived, it did not explicitly include the descendants of Palestinian refugees; however, as its refugee population entered the second generation, UNRWA relaxed the definition of the term “Palestinian refugee” altogether, explaining that “for the purposes of repatriation or compensation… the term ‘Palestinian refugee’ is used with a different, much less restrictive meaning as compared to UNRWA’s need-based definition.”8

Sounds to me like what they used to call a “goat fuck.”

So, too, did the General Assembly resolution establishing UNRWA intend its mandate to be temporary: It sought “the alleviation of the conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestinian refugees” with “a view to the termination of international assistance for relief” at an early date.10 The provision of direct relief was originally set to end no later than December 1950; yet its mandate has been renewed by the General Assembly every few years, and its current term now runs through June 2008. This begs the question: If UNRWA was set up as a temporary agency, why is it still operating more than half a century later?

One reason, again, lies in its singular definition of a refugee: By conferring the status of refugee on descendants, UNRWA has ensured an ever-growing population in need of its services. Yet a more significant reason has to do with its policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: UNRWA refuses to consider any resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue other than that demanded by the Arab world–the “right of return” to Israel. As explained on its website, UNRWA claims its services to be necessary until repatriation, “as envisaged in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948,” is enacted.11 While the legitimacy and applicability of resolution 194, which states that refugees wishing to return to their original countries of residence under certain conditions should be permitted to do so, can be, and is, debated ad infinitum, the fact remains that by staunchly adhering to this resolution, and actively encouraging its beneficiaries to do the same, UNRWA is denying the Palestinian refugees the one thing that the UNHCR takes as its essential purpose for existence: An end to their unwanted status.

Keep in mind, here, that the U.N., which funds this agency, is financed by the tax dollars of working Americans and citizens of other member countries.

Finally, it should be noted that, over the years, groups of Palestinian refugees have been offered opportunities to move into permanent housing–opportunities that have almost always been thwarted. In 1985, for instance, Israel attempted to move refugees into 1,300 permanent housing units constructed near Nablus with the support of the Catholic Relief Organization–without, it must be stated, demanding that they relinquish the “right of return.” Yet the UN intervened to prevent such an occurrence.23 In response to Israel’s attempts to provide housing, a General Assembly resolution was passed asserting that:

measures to resettle Palestine refugees in the West Bank away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return… [the GA] calls once again upon Israel to abandon its plans and to refrain from… any action that may lead to the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the West Bank and from the destruction of their camps.24

Put simply, if UNHCR struggles to bring an immediate end to the plight of refugees through any means available, UNRWA’s entire efforts are geared towards a single “solution” which is both extremely unlikely ever to happen and not in the best interests of the refugees’ humanitarian needs. Rather it is in the interests of their political leaders’ aims.

The difference between the two organizations is felt also in the respective services they provide and the extent to which they are willing to place a burden of assistance on sovereign states. The UNHCR aims to provide basic material assistance only as necessary, and with the expectation that host or new countries of residence will cooperate as far as they are able in providing for refugee needs. The Convention states clearly that UNHCR is “charged with the task of supervising international conventions providing for the protection of refugees,”25 and the UNHCR website maintains that “UNHCR’s main role in pursuing international protection is to ensure that states are aware of, and act on, their obligations to protect refugees… and cannot be considered as a substitute for government responsibility.”26 UNRWA, by contrast, has been providing material assistance to Palestinian refugees for over fifty years in the form of “educational services, including general and higher education as well as vocational, technical and teacher education” and “a wide range of health services, including disease prevention and treatment, health protection and promotion and environmental and family health programs”–services far beyond the scope of “emergency relief” envisioned by UNHCR as a temporary measure on the road to self-sufficiency.27 Indeed, Palestinian Arabs provided for by UNRWA are the only refugees in the world to have guaranteed health care, primary education, and welfare benefits–as befitting a quasi-governmental body aimed at nurturing a people over the long haul rather than providing humanitarian relief. Not surprisingly, in the course of providing these services, UNRWA has developed an extensive bureaucracy–according to its website, UNRWA’s staff currently stands at 24,324 members28–with one staff person per 164 refugees (compared to one staff person per 2,803 refugees in UNHCR), and 99 dollars spent per refugee annually (compared with the UNHCR’s 64 dollars per refugee).29 The result is a kind of mutual dependence: The Palestinian community has become dependent on UNRWA’s services, support, and employment; and UNRWA has become dependent on its clients for its own survival and operational growth.

In short, by introducing broad parameters of inclusion, UNRWA has inflated the original numbers on its rolls; by declining to exempt those refugees who subsequently acquire citizenship elsewhere, it has sustained those large numbers over the years; and by counting successive generations, it has succeeded in indefinitely expanding the number of refugees. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, by encouraging the expectation of and desire for a “return” to Israel that is in all likelihood impossible, UNRWA has done a grave disservice to the refugees themselves–in effect, subordinating the humanitarian aims of refugee assistance to the political aims of Arab leaders. Unlike other refugees, who have been helped to regain some measure of autonomy, the Palestinian refugees remain mired in a sense of helplessness and frustration, condemned to an existence as stateless, displaced persons.

So we’re paying welfare and all sorts of other benefits to four million people through an agency whose purpose was to exist for a relatively short time, long enough to relocate roughly one seventh of that amount of refugees, it’s fifty six years later and they can’t even claim to see a light at the end of the tunnel, nor even the tunnel itself. And we’re paying a staff of over twenty four thousand people for this!

As if that isn’t more than enough to make one at least a little angry, the percentage of our tax dollars that find their way into the coffers of UNRWA also aid and abet terrorism.

Of all the problems inherent in UNRWA’s policies, however, the practice of hiring from within its own client population is perhaps the thorniest. Of the approximately 24,000 persons in its employ, all but the roughly 100 “internationals” in executive positions are Palestinian Arabs, the vast majority of whom are themselves refugees.30

UNRWA claims that hiring refugees ensures a greater degree of sensitivity on the part of employees toward the problems facing their client base. Yet there is a general rule of thumb that it is not appropriate for an agency to do large-scale hiring of staff from the population it serves. No other UN agency does this; the UNHCR, for example, maintains by design a certain distance from its client base. The reason for this distance is clear: Employers who share the situation of their clients are vulnerable to conflicts of interest. UNRWA staff naturally share the passions and perceptions of their fellow refugees, and can easily be led to act on them inappropriately. In some cases, this means turning a blind eye to beneficiaries of UNRWA services engaged in terrorism; in others, it means outright involvement in terrorist activity itself.

Unfortunately, there is abundant evidence of such involvement. Incidents like the one on July 6, 2001 are not uncommon: The terrorist organization Hamas convened a conference in an UNRWA school in the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza with the full participation of school administrators and faculty. Students were addressed by Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who spoke about the “liberation of Jerusalem.” He was then joined by Saheil Alhinadi, UNRWA’s representative from the teachers’ sector, who praised the Hamas students who had carried out suicide attacks against Israelis in recent months. “The road to Palestine,” he orated, “passes through the blood of the fallen.”31

It is also common knowledge that Hamas-affiliated workers control the UNRWA union in Gaza.32 Within the teachers’ sector of the union, for example, all representatives are Hamas-affiliated, and Hamas candidates constitute the union’s entire executive committee, as well. Moreover, an organization called Islamic Bloc, ideologically similar to Hamas, has been charged with furthering the goals of Hamas within UNRWA schools; it prepares the next generation of Palestinians for the “liberation of Palestine” by organizing special events and distributing printed materials. Retired IDF colonel Yoni Fighel, a former military governor in the territories, explains how radical Islamic movements have come to dominate the refugee camps: “As long as UNRWA employees are members of Fatah, Hamas, or pelp [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine],” he says, “they are going to pursue the interests of their party within the framework of their job…. Who’s going to check up on them to see that they don’t? UNRWA? They are UNRWA.”33

The full extent of the terrorist infiltration in Palestinian refugee camps was revealed during the IDF’s Operation Defensive Shield, mounted in the spring of 2002 in response to an unprecedented wave of terror attacks inside Israel. The evidence gleaned from that operation is both irrefutable and damning: Hardly innocent residential areas, the UNRWA-run camps which the army entered were riddled with small-arms factories, explosives laboratories, Kassam-2 rocket manufacturing plants, and suicide-bombing cells. The camp in Jenin, site of the most intense fighting, provides the most dramatic example of the terrorist takeovers of UNRWA camps. A letter written by Fatah members in Jenin to Marwan Barghouti in September 2001 grants some insight into the situation:

Of all the districts, Jenin boasts the greatest number and the highest quality of fighters from Fatah and the other Islamic national factions. The refugee camp is rightly considered to be the center of events and the operational headquarters of all the factions in the Jenin area–it is, as the other side calls it, a hornets’ nest. The Jenin refugee camp is remarkable for the large number of fighting men taking initiatives in the cause of our people. Nothing will defeat them, and nothing fazes them. They are prepared to fight with everything they have. It is little wonder, therefore, that Jenin is known as the capital of the suicide martyrs.34

It should come as no surprise, then, that the IDF found a number of wanted terrorists hiding inside UNRWA schools; that a large number of youth clubs operated by UNRWA in the camps were discovered to be meeting places for terrorists; and that an official bureau of the Tanzim, or Fatah-affiliated, militia was established inside a building owned by UNRWA. UNRWA’s donors might be surprised to learn that funds intended for humanitarian relief sometimes end up serving the goals of Palestinian terror: In an interview with CNN in February 2002, PA Minister of Labor Ghassan Khatib remarked that every young man in UNRWA’s Balata refugee camp has his own personal weapon, since the local steering committee–an official UNRWA body–had voted that charitable donations received would be used for guns rather than food or other relief. UNRWA’s role in the terrorist activity of the Palestinian refugees is not only a passive one. Rather, UNRWA employees themselves sometimes engage in terrorism. According to the 2003 report by the United States General Accounting Office,35 for example, UNRWA employees were arrested and convicted by Israeli military courts of throwing firebombs at an Israeli public bus; possession of materials that could be used for explosives; and transferring chemicals to assist in bomb-making. Also, the IDF demonstrated that UNRWA ambulances have been used to transport terrorists and firearms in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, himself saw shahid (martyr) posters on the walls in the homes of UNRWA workers during a visit to Jenin in April 2002. “It was clear,” he said in a December 2003 interview, “that UNRWA workers were doubling as Hamas operatives.”36

Given the U.N.’s record for being anti-Israel, the UNRWA sounds like their dream come true. Foreign tax dollars to finance an organization that supports terrorism while breeding an ever-growing population of “refugees” Palestinian terrorist groups can blame on Israel as another excuse to murder innocent people.

There is much more in the article, register free with a great online magazine and read the whole article…