More on "UNRWA's Hamas problem" from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to GG:
Much ink has been spilled about UNRWA's pro-Palestinian bias. Of course, it's biased. Today UNRWA is a Palestinian organization with a thin UN veneer.In its Gaza and West Bank field offices, UNRWA has 12,916 employees, of whom only 37 are not Palestinian.
No one should have been surprised when UNRWA Commissioner Peter Hansen admitted that UNRWA employs Hamas members or sympathizers. Can anyone expect those 37 internationals to screen almost 13,000 Palestinian employees – mostly residents of the refugee camps – for Hamas affiliation, even if they wanted to?
UNRWA cannot even prevent posters of suicide bombers from being plastered on the walls of its schools, or teachers from extolling suicide bombers.
THAT HANSEN did not see the hiring of Hamas members as "a crime" is just the latest example of his unfitness for the UN post.
During Operation Defensive Shield he lent credence to Palestinian lies about Jenin:
"I had hoped that the horror stories of Jenin were exaggerated and influenced by the emotions engaged, but I am afraid these were not exaggerated and that Jenin camp residents lived through a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history."
Apparently, Hansen's "recent history" did not extend back three weeks to the Passover massacre in Netanya, where more civilians died than in Jenin.
When the reports from Jenin, including his own, were completely refuted, Hansen offered no apology or even acknowledgement.
Peter Hansen is only part of the UNRWA problem. In addition to employing Hamas members or sympathizers, UNRWA likely feeds and loans them money too.
The US government's General Accounting Office asked UNRWA whether it screens its beneficiaries for ties with terrorist organizations, as required by section 301(c) of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.
UNRWA replied that it could not, because its staff would be endangered.
Reporting on one incident, the General Accounting Office highlights the extent to which the Palestinian street, not the UN, controls UNRWA.
The houses of six Palestinian families on UNRWA's registry were "destroyed during bomb-making activities," yet UNRWA concluded there was not enough evidence to deny them benefits under the terrorist-exclusion rule.
American and European taxpayers provide those benefits via the US government's and European Union's support for roughly 75% of UNRWA's budget.
Just great! Another Arab welfare state in the making. The unrwa has the perfected blueprints for sale, cheap, to any terrorist buyer.
The UN has proven itself to be worse than worthless. Wretchard's comments on the present state of the UN at Belmont club are noteworthy.
But fact remians it still offers some kinda structural framework for multilateral action. Can it be reformed, or even better replaced with somethingmore workable? Someone once suggested a UN consisting of democracies only as members. Problem is nations like Iran would even then manage to get in.
Americans, get out of the UN. No sane person anywhere could possibly blame you.
Geoff
Why does UNRWA exist, except as a an extension, practically indistinguishable from, all the other institutions of "Palestinian" life which are directed at prolonging whatever misery and whatever resentments can be kept alive. Its handouts, paid for almost entirely by the Infidel West, more than 55 years after the Arab attempt to strangle in its cradle the nascent infidel state of Israel, should end -- for they have done nothing except to encourage millions of Arabs to avoid work, and in avoiding work to spend their time in other ways (digging tunnels in Gaza, putting bombs at Passover services and on busses and in pizzerias, producing children's shows where little kids are praised for singing "I want to be a suicide bomber" and suchlike). Many Arabs who never had anything to do with Mandatory Palestine, never lived there, had no connection to it, have nonetheless over the years managed, especially in Lebanon and Jordan, to get on the same Western-paid dole that is UNRWA. If one were to believe Arab statistics, and keeping in mind the maximum number of so-called "refugees" from 1948 (there were no refugees in 1967 to speak of, for the Arabs knew perfectly well that there was nothing to fear, and everything to gain, from staying put -- they could see with thier own eyes the benign treatment of the Arabs who had not left Israel, a treatment far more generous that what was received by those who left, at the hands of fellow Arabs).
What is particularly maddening is that the Arabs themselves have been the recipients of the greatest unearned wealth, and the greatest transfer of wealth, in human history. Since 1973 Arab and Muslim oil states have received between 5 and 6 trillion dollars. Yet it is the United States, Japan, Australia, and Europe (and even Israel) that are the main contributors to UNRWA. Why?
And, while we are on the subject, why are the Infidel lands offering, in addition to the fantastic oligopolitic rents charged by the OPEC oil nations (and some of which could have been, and could still be, recaptured through entirely possible means -- i.e. taxes on gasoline at the pump and similar measures), a kind of vast Jizya? Why has the United States, having spent more than $200 billion freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, cancelled Iraq's $4.5 billion debt, offered to spend another $20 billion on reconstruction projects -- when Iraq has, or will have future, oil revenues, against which it can certainly borrow. And in addition, the United States has managed to get the Infidel countries to agree to cancel nearly $100 billion in debt to Iraq -- but there has not been a peep, outside the usual soothing words, that any of the Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Kuwait) are going to cancel Iraq's debt to them -- no, no, it is all a question of extracting money from the Infidels alone. For the game is seen clearly as one between the Infidels, viewed economically as one power, and on the other side, the Muslims, viewed as one.
And if that were not enough, the United States has poured more than $60 billion into Egypt in the last two decades. Egypt has failed utterly (now it is making transparent attempts, especially for the Israeli audience, and of course Washington, to pretend to be slightly friendly, and this farce may continue for a few months even after Israel is induced to follow through on this withdrawal from Gaza).
Add it all up. 5-6 trillion in the OPEC revenues. $60 billion to Egypt. Whatever sums Infidel France transfers to the countries of the Maghreb. A few hundred million a year now to Jordan. $200 billion to free Iraq, and tens of billions, apparently, to "rebuild" Iraq when Americans need that money for social security, health care, and so on. And of course, that sinister organization, a kinid of Hamas lite, with emphasis on the care and feeding of those who promote, through propaganda or through terrorism, the same agenda, which has also taken billions in Western money to feed the huge, deliberately huge, families of "Palestinians." And now, one reads, the American govenrment is actually thinking of contributing, along with its "allies" (i.e. European Infidels, not the Arabs)another 6-8 billion dollars, to the "Palestine Authority."
The transfer of wealth to Muslims, from Infidels, for any reason, is madness. It is not only counter-intuitive, but flatly wrong. Think of the world as the Muslims do: dar al-Islam, and dar al-Harb. They are careful to extract every last concession or aid they can, either for themselves, or where that is not possible, for other Muslim states or groups. And the Western world keeps doing it. If some of the Arabs are poor -- that should be of no concern to Infidels, not only becasue there is no causal nexus between poverty and terrorism, but becuase there is, if anything, a reverse nexus. Those who are truly poor, and have to work all day, have less, not more time, to sit around and make terrorism their hobby. If the entire Muslim world were as poor as Mauritania, or as wretchedly chaotic as Somalia -- that, from the Infidel point of view, would be splendid.
All one asks, as an Infidel, is that one's rulers do nothing to transfer further wealth -- which is what permitted the doctrine of Jihad, dormant whenever the wherewithal to conduct it is lacking, whether of men, materiel, or money, but coming alive, as it has over the past 30 years, with that wherewithal supplied in the main by OPEC oil money -- from the Infidel world, to the Muslims. Any Muslims, whether through absurd foreign aid to Egypt, or the hundreds of billions already spent to free Iraq being added to with tens of billions in aid when, instead, future Iraqi oil earnings should be borrowed against, and of course the "Palestinians" who will be brought to heel only when the Western world stops financing them, and their gigantic population increase. And the same attitude should be taken in regard to Musoims within the Infidel lands. Make it hard to get on the dole. Offer work, work that must be taken. Make sure that no one can have more than one wife, and that there is no fraud so that the numbers of scandals -- the Venissieux imam with the plurality of wives (Fenelon updated for modern France) and the 16 children, all paid for by the French Infidel taxpayers -- are diminished. No Infidel state should be paying, as Belgium will now be paying, for hundreds of imams. Everything should be done to discourage the ability to hire imams. One can monitor, or ban, the "bad" imams without supplying, and paying for, supposedly "good" imams (exactly what texts will those "good" imams rely on?).
No money, no more building of mosques, or maintaining the upkeep on those already built, all over the West. No money, no more madrasas, all over the Muslim world, where people who have memorized 6,200 verses of the Qur'an, and fit for nothing but to be Jihadis, are churned out -- especially, now, in Pakistan and Indonesia. No money, and no money for p.r. men and hangers-on, and propagandists, and paid-for chairs in universities to be filled by Arab hirelings of richer Arab paymasters in the Gulf. No money, no satellite Al-Jazeer and Al-Manar. No money, and no buying of weaponry or plans or Western knowhow in the well-honed style of A. Q. Khan. No money, and the threat has been "ridimensionato" -- that is, cut down to a size we, the Infidels, can deal with. Before 1973 the same things were taught, the same hostility to Infidels, the same hatreds, the same desire to spread Islam which "must dominate and not be dominated." But they didn't have the money. That changed everything.
We must work to take away, everywhere we can, that money.
Oh, and not unimportantly, since that will require in addition to ending all foreign aid from Infidels to Muslims, in order to limit the further transfer of wealth from Infidels to Muslims, one must put at the center of foreign policy what should be at the center of domestic policy: cutting down the use of fossil fuels. Fight the Jihad, and save the environment. The time-frame for each, that is the point beyond which it will be too late to prevent either the islamization of Europe, or the irreverible large-scale damage to the environment, are nearly identical.
What a remarkable state of affairs. A race: who wakes up, how fast, when. And who doesn't. That's what it comes down to.
Hugh: Nobody does it better! You need to get into the MSM, you gotta get the message out!
When the money stops, the Jihad stops!
We know all that and more, but how do we get the 'silent majority' behind us?
How do we get funding to trigger this avalanche which will bury this spook?