Thursday, September 20, 2018

Funding UNRWA: Are European Taxpayers Being Taken for a Ride?

by Bassam Tawil • September 20, 2018 at 5:00 am

Iran's average annual contribution to UNRWA in recent years has been $2,000.
Iran does spend billions of dollars a year outside its borders in the Middle East. Iran provides weapons and cash to terrorist groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Iran helps these groups because they want to destroy the "Zionist entity." Iran is now devoting huge resources in Syria to help dictator Bashar Assad in his fight against the rebels, as well as substantial sums of money helping Houthi militias in Yemen.
Lebanon's laws treat Palestinians as a special group of foreigners, even denying them the same rights granted to other foreigners. Palestinians in Lebanon are not only denied basic rights enjoyed by Lebanese citizens and other foreigners, but also denied rights as refugees under international conventions.
Arab and Muslim states could start to think of ways to help Palestinians achieve a better life and improve their children's future instead of sitting in refugee camps and waiting for handouts from the UN and other Western countries. Or is continuing to beg non-Arabs and non-Muslims for money the better deal?

Lebanon hosts nearly 500,000 Palestinians, most of whom live in ghettos called refugee camps. They are denied not only basic rights enjoyed by Lebanese citizens and other foreigners, but also denied rights as refugees under international conventions. Pictured: The Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, Lebanon. (Photo by Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)

At a meeting in Cairo this month, Arab and Muslim foreign ministers expressed concern about the fate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) after the US administration decided to cut all US aid to the agency. The ministers "underscored the importance of allowing UNRWA to continue playing a pivotal role in providing humanitarian aid" to Palestinian "refugees." They also warned that "harming" UNRWA will aggravate the crisis in the Middle East.

If these Arab and Muslim countries are so worried about UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees, why don't they step in to fill the vacuum and pay for the loss of the US funds? What is keeping them from pulling out their checkbooks and solving this "refugee crisis"?