[(Continued from p.4)]
Farah has observed, if only the U.S. economy could hyper-inflate like the number of refugees! Nor is this surprising. Haifa University economist Steven Plaut notes: "Since the world community was handing out free food and cash to those claiming to be Palestinian refugees, hundreds of thousands of other Arabs from the Arab countries of refuge signed up as refugees in order to get the handouts. It was as if a new TV show were invented with generous prizes, called "Who Wants to be a Palestinian Refugee?"UNRWA, originally an agency seeking to resettle Arab refugees, became transformed into one dedicated to perpetuating their refugee status, as indifferent as the notoriously corrupt Palestinian Authority itself to honest administration. In the mid 1980s, Israel launched a major project to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip, constructing new housing for them. UNRWA protested to the UN and on Dec. 3, 1986, the General Assembly duly passed a resolution demanding Israel "desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters." It declared that "measures to resettle Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return." When Israel built new homes for residents of a camp near Nablus, UNRWA forbade anyone to move into them and posted a guard at the empty houses to make sure no one moved in. The Shuafat camp is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and the city offered to give it full services in street paving, sewers and other urban amenities; UNRWA forbade it.
Corruption is endemic. Remarkably, given the normal media silence on this issue, the Boston Globe on July 8, 2002 published an expose by reporter Charles Radin. He interviewed refugees who spoke candidly about the misuse of international funds. UNRWA, they said, tolerates profiteering on food supplies supposed to be free. Coupons given to refugees to get emergency food aid are openly bought and sold as is food marked "Not for resale." One custodian in the camps said his neighbor had a Mercedes and sons with good jobs, yet was receiving rations as a hardship case -- in other words, he was getting free supplies of food over and beyond what other refugees received. Radin quotes Faez Abu Amri, a food-distribution worker, who said "90 percent of the people who are getting this food aid do not need it."
More serious, UNRWA, as Gerald Steinberg points out in the Jerusalem Post (April 19, 2003), has become a "central component in the Palestinian political structure. UNRWA is allowed to operate in the camps as long as it cooperates with the political 'rules of the road,' determined by the gunmen, thugs, and terrorists from Fatah, Hamas and other militias." Alan Baker, chief counsel of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, has said that "bomb-making, indoctrination, recruiting and dispatching of suicide bombers all are centered in the camps." The PA itself, in documentation seized by the Israelis in Ramallah, refers to the Jenin camp as the "suicide capital" because it has dispatched so many suicide bombers. Israeli intelligence reports that arrested Palestinians Arabs say that they have taken advantage of UNRWA's diplomatic immunity and the freedom of its vehicles to travel unsearched to transport suicide bombers and ammunition between terror cells. Nor should all this be surprising. The vast majority of UNRWA's 23,000 employees are themselves refugees and residents of the camps. UNRWA's administrators have become experts in anti-Israel slander (and probably could not otherwise survive on the job). Peter Hansen, the Danish political science professor who currently heads UNRWA, was the chief instigator of the campaign of lies against Israel after it finally took action against the terror infrastructure in the Jenin camp. Hansen falsely declared he had seen "bodies piling up in mass graves" and witnessed "a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history."
Alan Baker, chief counsel of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has said that "bombmaking, indoctrination, recruiting and dispatching of suicide bombers all are centered in the camps."
President Bush has repeatedly declared that the U.S. will target not only those who perpetrate but those who fund and support terror. How then can his administration directly fund suicide bombers and other terror activities, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into UNRWA, oblivious and uncaring of its abuse of its mandate? It is also worth noting that not a penny of the billions that have gone to the Palestinian Authority since 1993 have been used to improve living conditions in the camps -- even though refugees make up the overwhelming majority of Gaza's population.
Even less noted than the escalating incitement and terror in the camps has been the escalating demands by refugee representatives -- demands that have reached insane proportions. The "right to return" -- of over four million Arabs to a Jewish state that comprises a mere 8,000 square miles and that even now houses only six and a half million people, five million of them Jews -- is itself an insane demand. And that demand has been reiterated by the supposedly "moderate" government of Abu Mazen. On August 16th, the Jerusalem Post reported a speech in Lebanon by Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's "Foreign Minister." "The right of return is no longer an illlusion. It is an integral part of the Arab peace initiative, which is
[(Continued on p.6)]
September 2003 - 5 - Outpost