Let Turkey Pay for UNRWA

Claudia Rosett
pajamasmedia.com
26 June '10

More money! is the cry from Filippo Grandi, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. Speaking in Beirut on Saturday, Grandi was lamenting what he described as the agency’s growing funding shortage.

Another way to describe it would be UNRWA’s ever-expanding budget, which in places like Gaza is spent on providing the staples of a welfare enclave, thus freeing up the ruling terrorists of Hamas to spend their pocket money on things like weapons to attack Israel — the state they are dedicated in their charter to destroying.

Grandi, in his remarks, was rattling the can for the European Union to make up an anticipated $100 million deficit in UNRWA’s budget — which last year soared to $1.2 billion — by some standards a whopping handout. Grandi thanked “generous” Arab donors, but apparently forgot to thank the U.S., which is the single biggest donor (an interesting situation, given the UNRWA beneficiaries who danced for joy and passed out candies when news broke of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America).

UNRWA was set up by the UN as a “temporary” agency more than 60 years ago, and today has a “refugee” clientele about five times the size of the original refugee population it was meant to serve, with more than 20,000 Palestinians on its payroll. This whole scene is one of the UN’s most astounding swamps of warped incentives, perverse payoffs, and ballooning budgets, dangerous to the Israelis and damaging to the Palestinians themselves — in looking at it I have thought more than once that the best move for all concerned would be to just dissolve UNRWA and turn over its entire budget to private missionaries trying to help North Korean refugees escape from China. That, folks, is a genuine, wrenching, refugee crisis, which the UN over many years has done virtually nothing to address.

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.