When It Comes To Inflating Numbers, Did UNRWA Learn From The Best?

In a post about the scandalous way the UNRWA conducts itself in Lebanon, Elder of Ziyon quotes from an article in Al-Arabiya on how UNRWA tracks refugees:

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) lists nearly 400,000 [descendants of 1948 refugees.]

But Lebanese and Palestinian officials say the number of refugees actually resident in Lebanon may be as low as 250,000 as UNRWA does not strike off its figures Palestinians who move to other countries.

If true, this 60% padding is more than just a numbers game--UNRWA uses its numbers in determining the amount of funding it requests from donor countries.

This sort of Voodoo Demographics was made into an art form by the Arabs themselves, whose inflated numbers have been taken as fact not only by the West but by Israel itself.


Bennett Zimmerman points out the degree of Palestinian deception when it comes to demographics:

By double-counting the Jerusalem Arabs and counting Arabs living abroad, the Palestinians inflated their base data for 1997 by 648,000. By predicting unrealistically high rates of natural population growth, the number was inflated by an additional 276,000; and by falsely predicting massive immigration to Gaza and the West Bank, and ignoring the significant net emigration of Palestinians from the territories, the pcbs [Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] further inflated the numbers by another 415,000. If we add these figures together, by 2004 the pcbs figures had managed to inflate the population in the West Bank and Gaza by some 1.34 million people-more than 50 percent. When the pcbs numerous errors are corrected, the Palestinian Arab population for Gaza and the West Bank drops to 2.49 million people, with 1.42 million in the West Bank and 1.07 million in Gaza in mid-2004.

In this case, Zimmerman's demographic research is important for the US. Back in March 2006, it was already pointed out to the Middle East Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee that aid the US is providing to the Palestinian Arabs might be under fraudulent circumstances:

almost $3 billion in United States taxpayer funds may have been provided as aid to the Palestinians in part based on fraudulent data.

"American tax dollars and other international humanitarian aid have been based on inflated population numbers which have been accepted without question by governments and aid agencies. Our researchers pointed out that money has been spent to help Palestinians who were double-counted, never born or not present in the West Bank and Gaza," Bennet Zimmerman, head of the new study, titled "Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza," told WND.

Apparently nothing much came of the revelation back then.
Meanwhile, the debate continues as to whether the Palestinian birthrate constitutes a 'demographic bomb'.
But little attention seems to be paid to the accuracy of the numbers UNRWA that provides

Technorati Tag: UNRWA.