The Truth About Refugees

WORLD
ISRAELI DEPUTY FOREIGN MINISTER BLASTS UN AGENCY ON ‘THE TRUTH’ ABOUT PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
Posted on December 9, 2011 at 9:27am by Sharona Schwartz

In a new YouTube video called “The Truth About the Refugees,” Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon takes a sharp look at the Palestinian refugee problem, and blasts the UN agency tasked with aiding them and their descendants. Ayalon asks:

Why after more than 60 years are the Arab-Palestinian refugees still not welcomed and absorbed among their own brethren? And how could their numbers have grown from 500,000 to 4.7 million? The sad reality is that Palestinian refugees never had a chance. Attempts at resettlement were blocked by a variety of discriminatory laws enacted in Arab countries such as: a ban on receiving citizenship – with the exception of Jordan; blocking them from entering many professions; restrictions on owning land; restrictions on movement…

From Israel’s perspective, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, with the encouragement of Arab states, has engaged in a highly political mission to perpetuate the refugee problem rather than finding a dignified solution for those living 63 years in substandard housing that is clearly no longer “temporary.” Ayalon quotes a former UNRWA director in Jordan Sir Alexander Galloway who said:

…the Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore…as a weapon against Israel.”

He also asks why the UN formed an entirely separate bureaucracy to aid Palestinian refugees, when all other refugees are handled by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR):

The answer is, because while the United Nations’ central refugee agency helps refugees resettle, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency helps perpetuate their status by applying unique criteria…Refugees lose their status after receiving citizenship from a recognized country – Palestinians do not. Refugees cannot transmit their status from generation to generation. Palestinian refugees can.

Arab states are all too willing to obstruct any livable arrangement for these mostly impoverished Palestinians by withholding citizenship, preventing moves to more adequate dwellings, and feeding the dream of their future “return” to their purported homes in Israel. Homes, it should be added, that many never actually saw since they were born years after the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars.

Now, even their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are granted refugee status by UNRWA and are daily fed the myth Israelis will eventually, after a violent struggle, vacate their homes leading to a so-called “return” of those who weren’t even born in 1948.

Instead of encouraging the refugees to move forward with their lives constructively, UNRWA – ceding to Arab state policies – has set up a massive bureaucracy predicated on handouts to the poor and perpetuating the problem, rather than acknowledging reality and allowing them to attempt financially-independent lives.

Ayalon explains in his video that there were more Jewish refugees – 850,000 – forced from Arab states than the estimated 500,000 Arabs who fled their homes in 1948. Also by contrast, the Jews were allowed to build free lives in Israel and were never granted refugee status. Ayalon is himself the son of a Jew who was forced to leave Algeria.

Ayalon’s first two videos on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the West Bank went viral. The Israeli Foreign Ministry hopes this one will also be widely viewed, offering the public a perspective not widely disseminated by the mainstream media, which like UNRWA tends to report on the issue without pointing to the basic logical complication – how can someone who was born decades after an armed conflict be considered a refugee?

Immigration Program Subject To Bribery And Fraud

May 7, 2009
Obama reinstating immigration program that has brought 24 suspected jihadists into the US

Here is today's Which-Side-Is-Obama-On Alert: "U.S. Importing Somali 'Pirate-Jihadists,'" by David A. Patten for Newsmax, May 6:

The Obama administration is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances, including two dozen Minneapolis men that the FBI fears may be planning a terrorist attack.
The FBI has launched an “aggressive” manhunt for the men, who have “gone to ground” and have mysteriously disappeared, terrorism experts tell Newsmax. Authorities fear the men may have been recruited by extremists to carry out suicide attacks inside the United States, or abroad.

Critics of the State Department programs that brought the Somalis to America express grave concerns about the practice of admitting refugees from failed nation-states known to harbor extremists. It can be difficult or impossible to verify a person’s identity in such a country, let alone obtain knowledge of their past associations, several experts tell Newsmax.

One Somali refugee who vanished in early November, Shirwa Ahmed, re-emerged in northern Somalia in February behind the wheel of a truck packed with explosives.

Ahmed, whose family immigrated to the Minneapolis area in the mid-1990s, drove his truck into a crowd and triggered a massive explosion that left some 30 persons dead. Ahmed’s case marked the first known suicide bombing conducted by an American citizen, according to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III.

“It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota,” Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that in the past two years, about two dozen Somali men have disappeared from their residences near Minneapolis.

Authorities say the men may have been recruited by al-Shabab, a terrorist group believed to have ties to al-Qaida. There has been speculation the men were radicalized at mosques in the area....

Conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, is among those who perceives a definite link between Somali’s pirates and its violent Islamic extremists.

“Shariah-adherent Somali pirates are a threat to the world's shipping,” Gaffney tells Newsmax. “Their refugee counterparts being dumped into American communities are a threat to our country and its people. It adds insult to potentially enormous injury that, as the State Department has acknowledged, 80 percent of those refugees are here on the basis of fraudulent family-reunification grounds.”

Gaffney says the State Department “imports pirate/jihadist types into this country.”

One major concern: The pirates’ statements following the freeing of Phillips appeared to be couched in jihadist terms. They identified America as their “No. 1 enemy,” and one pirate leader told The Associated Press: “In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying.”...

There are three State Department programs that vet and process refugees for admittance:...

# The Priority Three (P-3) program awards refugee status specifically for the purpose of family reunification with other refugees already legally residing in the United States....

The P-3 program was suspended in October, after reports of fraud led the State Department and DHS to conduct DNA testing on 3,000 applicants. Those tests revealed that as many as 80 percent of the family-reunification claims were false and did not involve relatives....

Barnett tells Newsmax that the State Department is prepared to resume the troubled P-3 program in June. He also criticizes the P-1 program, due to U.N. refugee programs he describes as “one big long running fraud.” He adds: “The U.N. referral program itself has been subject to bribery and fraud.”

The State Department spokesman tells Newsmax it is unclear if the P-3 program will be reinstated by June, adding, “We do anticipate that the program will restart. A little later this year, we will have this program reinstated.”...