How many billions of dollars have gone to Palestinian “refugees” living in the Middle East? How many salaries are paid by UNRWA to descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948? And how often do we hear that the Palestinian “refugees” are in crisis because their Arab and Muslim brethren won’t support them, won’t allow them to work in their nations, won’t grant them citizenship, and, well, won’t really help them?
So when the real refugees show up in Israel, where is the UN on this issue?
Telling Israel to take care of the problem.
“Our objective is to have Israel host these people under proper conditions until the option arises for them to go home,” said William Tall, the envoy of the U.N. refugee agency office in Israel.
Note that he said nothing about the UN assisting Israel with the 60,000 refugees that have come over the Sinai in the past seven years. No, it’s all on Israel. Because the UN has more pressing refugee problems–like the Palestinians, who are all housed and clothed and fed by the UN.
Israelis are not helping the issue by attacking Sudanese migrants. And the AP, of course, is quick to jump on Israel.
Recent rapes blamed on African migrants have ignited a political and emotional backlash against their ballooning numbers, with Israelis and their leaders stridently – and in an alarming new development, violently – calling for their expulsion.
Israel, bound by an international refugees treaty it ardently promoted, doesn’t seem to have that option, and the gap between rhetoric and reality threatens to send simmering social antagonisms boiling over into open conflict.
It has raised questions, relevant all over the developed world, about how much is owed to the impoverished migrants who manage to sneak in.
But the AP isn’t writing articles about the developed world, just about Israel’s treatment of the African migrants. And it finds plenty of negatives to report.
The U.S. State Department criticized this practice in a report on global human rights released Thursday, noting that of 4,603 new asylum applications in 2011, Israel rejected 3,692 and approved one. According to the report, asylum seekers without refugee status are not allowed to work and have no access to public health care, and that the government negatively terms the migrants “infiltrators”.
The Christian Science Monitor is on the job as well. (There is no negative story about Israel they won’t emphasize.) Make no mistake, the mob violence against refugees in Tel Aviv was horribly wrong. But note the very last paragraph in the CSM article. (Funny how it’s the very last one. It makes you wonder if they thought perhaps not many people read to the end of an article. Oh. Wait.)
“No one except a psychotic racist would deny that the overwhelming majority of Africans here are law-abiding,” wrote Larry Derfner, a columnist for the left-wing +972 blog. “But with at least 60,000 here and 2,000 to 3,000 more arriving monthly, all of them crowding into a few neighborhoods of poor, conservative, frightened Jews, they are a threat to the fabric of this society. Given their numbers, there’s a limit to how much compassion Israel can show them. At this point, we have to worry about our own first.”
Exactly. Which is why the UN should be taking care of this problem. Hey, there’s plenty of land in the Sinai. Just ask the Bedouins to stop extorting and raping and robbing the refugees, and set up a refugee camp there instead.
Shyeah.
