A year after the Arab world declared war on Israel, the world body established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in 1949. All the rest of the world's refugees, irrespective of the origination of their plight or the privation of their circumstances, fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.The attention paid to Zimbabwe is in reverse proportion to that being paid to Palestinian refugees, whose UNRWA-supervised camps are hotbeds of terrorist activity.
In 2006, the Unrwa budget was $462 million while the Unhcr budget was $1.4 billion. The Palestinians, most of whom cannot even claim the status of "refugee" in international law, receive about a quarter of the U.N. budget allotted to refugee affairs. The Unhcr's definition of a refugee is an individual who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted … is outside the country of his nationality."
Unrwa, however, defines refugees as either those who were "in Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, and lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict," or the "descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." Due to this special definition, less than 5% of those Palestinians deemed "refugees" by the agency would be considered refugees in any other conflict.
Of all the world's refugee populations, the Palestinian Arabs are least deserving of our sympathy. Never mind the international aid that has gone into the bank accounts of Yasser Arafat and his associates, but this is a people killing each other in an internecine civil war. A dispossessed people, perhaps, but they are a people who have turned that dispossession into a decades-long terrorist campaign against a democratic member state of the United Nations. [emphasis added]
Technorati Tag: UNRWA and UNHCR and Palestinian Refugees and Zimbabwe and James Kirchick.
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