Why don’t Palestinian leaders get the “refugees” out of their camps?

Israeli diplomat Lenny Ben-David writes on National Review’s Corner:

Recently announced plans for a new, upscale Palestinian settlement in the West Bank are impressive. The projected town, some six miles north of Ramallah, will one day house some 40,000 people, making it the same size as the Israeli settlement towns of Beitar and Modiin. The settlement is named Rawabi, and Qatar is a primary investor. Details are being negotiated with Israeli authorities on issues such as free access across Israeli-controlled areas.

He goes on:

Meanwhile, in a pro-peace op-ed in the Washington Post this summer, Crown Prince Khalifa of Bahrain lamented that “far too many [Palestinians] live in refugee camps in deplorable conditions.” Such camps exist in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon, but Khalifa’s contention is particularly true for those living in areas under Hamas and Palestinian Authority control. Why are these Palestinians stuck in teeming refugee camps when new towns like Rawabi could be built for them?

Ben-David points out that this new town is for the elite of the West Bank. Arab leaders do not want to do anything for the suffering masses. Why? First,

Because “Palestinian” is an artificial category, and a very weakly felt one. The track record dating back to 1947 provides little evidence that the Palestinians’ new-found national identity trumps their clan, religious, political, or class differences. In Israel, we shuddered at the barbarism of the Fatah-Hamas fratricide in Gaza in 2006 — the Palestinian “wakseh” or humiliation — when Palestinian families were gunned down by other Palestinians and political opponents were thrown from tall buildings.

And second,

Beyond the Palestinians’ lack of community feeling lies the so-called “right of return.” Palestinian leaders claim that each family has a right to reoccupy the land it held before Israel’s war for independence. Settling refugees comfortably in other areas would weaken their claim to this “right,” while keeping them in camps is a harsh but effective way to maintain pressure against Israel from the international community. What stands in the way of prosperity for Palestinian-controlled areas is the deep brainwashing of Palestinian children that there must be an actual physical return to their ancestral homes, along with an international and Israeli recognition of the “injustice” done to them.

His diagnosis is better than his prescription. Briefly,

When new communities for the Palestinian refugees are established within the PA- and Hamas-controlled areas — and not before — “Palestinian Heritage Houses” will also be constructed inside a number of Israeli communities or regions.

Okay, but he doesn’t address how you get Arabs to give up the “right of return,” which is the key to the whole thing.  Usefully, though, he has pointed out that there are some Arab leaders thinking about a way out.

Poor Malta: EU countries can’t even be paid enough to take “refugees”

We’ve been writing about the tiny island nation of Malta for over two years.   The island is one of the first bits of  land that thousands of illegal aliens see as they flood out of Africa across the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to get to Europe.   Recently the big shots at the European Union came up with a plan that pays EU countries to help Malta, but only 100 of Malta’s present 2000 economic migrants turned “refugee” have been spoken for.

From the Times of Malta:

The six EU member states who have indicated they intend to help resettle some of Malta’s 2,000 refugees pledged to take a total of 100 people altogether, EU sources revealed yesterday.

Although the Commission has kept the number of pledges under wraps, sources yesterday confirmed that only “token pledges” were made and that “Brussels is finding it difficult to convince member states to share Malta’s burden”.

[....]

During a presentation to EU Justice Ministers last Monday, Commissioner Jacques Barrot said that out of the 26 member states invited to participate in the Malta pilot-project last July, only France, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Luxembourg and Lithuania replied favourably. He urged the other member states to follow their example as this was “a test of their solidarity” with other member states.

The EU under a pilot scheme, is offering EU member states €4,000 for every migrant they resettle.

How much is that in American dollars?  I wonder did the US get paid for the hundreds of illegal aliens turned refugee that we brought to the US from Malta?

A few other countries are considering taking a few, but Germany won’t decide until they see how the election turns out!  I’m sure taking these immigrants would be an unpopular move in advance of the election.

The sources said some member states like Germany and Sweden have not ruled out their participation. Germany, which usually takes a leading role in such solidarity programmes, is expected to make its position official once next Sunday’s federal elections are over.

I’ve previously been extremely critical of the US State Department’s controversial decision to take Malta’s illegal immigrants because I believe it encourages more human trafficking and more dangerous attempts to reach Malta in overloaded boats.  I guess these four nations agree with me!

On the other hand some member states are flatly refusing to take part, including the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria. “These four member states have made it clear that they don’t agree with such a programme as they believe it will serve to attract more illegal migrants towards the EU,” the sources said.

Malta is hoping to be able to resettle the majority of its protected persons through this EU project. This will happen only if every member state pledges to take an average of 80 refugees each from Malta.

And next year twice as many immigrants will arrive and it will require each country to take 160 and so on, and so on.

For more on Malta just type the word into our search function.

Iraqi Sunni Muslim commander denied US refugee status

This is from the Los Angeles Times yesterday (Hat tip:  Center for Immigration Studies). 

Reporting from Amman, Jordan – The man who had fought Al Qaeda in Iraq sat in the waiting room of the immigration office. He watched others go up before him. After several hours, they called his name: Saad Oraibi Ghafoori.

In a way, the waiting burned him. He had once led more than 600 men in Baghdad; Iraqi officials and U.S. commanders came to him for help. Now he lived in a nondescript home in Jordan’s capital with an upset wife and two restless children — a 9-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl — who had been hoping for more than a year to get the call to go to America.

He had sat in classes given by the International Organization for Migration, learning about U.S. apartment rental prices and how to apply for food stamps. He was ready to do whatever the Americans wanted: If they wished him to train U.S. forces heading to Iraq, he would do it; if they wanted him to fight in Afghanistan, he would go.

[.....]

In the office that day in July, Ghafoori was finally summoned to a table. The case officer was blunt: He had been rejected and there was no point in appealing the case.

We let all sorts of other Iraqis into the US, this article suggests we need to consider the fighters too!

Last year, the U.S. government removed hurdles that had made it difficult for its Iraqi employees whose lives were endangered to flee to America. It also cleared similar obstacles for Iraqis working with U.S. companies. The number of Iraqis accepted in America through the State Department’s refugee assistance program jumped from 1,600 to nearly 14,000 in 2008 and is expected to reach 18,000 this year.

But Ghafoori’s case poses a policy challenge for the U.S. government. How should it handle the pool of 100,000 paramilitary fighters called the Sons of Iraq, many of them former insurgents, who have little in common with the Iraqi translators and civil servants that the refugee assistance program aims to help?

Does the United States have any obligation to men like Ghafoori, whom the U.S. military once funded and fought with against a common enemy?

Here is my question, were the Sons of Iraq fighting to rid their country of the Al Qaeda scourge or were they fighting for a plane ticket to the US?  I thought it was the former.

Finally, I’ve never heard of this and it bears looking into:

One of the few routes available to him would be Homeland Security’s Significant Public Benefit Parole program, which is run in close association with the Pentagon to bring in people who served the war efforts. But the program operates in near secrecy and is the equivalent of winning the lottery: The combination of official backing and luck must align to bring the person inside.

Bosnians from North Dakota attempt to kidnap 14-year-old girl in Kentucky

We have resettled over 100,000 Bosnian refugees in the wake of Bill Clinton’s Balkan war*.  Every once in awhile they turn up in crime stories, like this one in Bowling Green, Kentucky last year where a Bosnian teen was shot dead trying to break into a home, or this one where Bosnians concocted a truck driving school scam,  or how about the one from Ft. Wayne, IN where Bosnians with AK-47′s are believed to be involved in gangs.

Now comes a story, hat tip Blulitespecial, that former Bosnian refugees from Fargo, ND travelled to Bowling Green, KY (yes, Bowling Green again) to attempt to kidnap a 14-year-old student so that she could marry into their family in North Dakota.  They must be Muslims because child brides are encouraged for followers of Islam and I guess their refugee resettlement agency failed to tell them that in America we don’t kidnap minor girls to be wives.  Here is the whole short AP story:

FARGO, N.D. — Two men are accused of trying to pick up a 14-year-old girl from her Kentucky school and take her to North Dakota to marry the 14-year-old son of one of the men.

Bowling Green, Ky., police spokesman Barry Pruitt says the teens had been communicating over the Internet and decided they wanted to get married. Pruitt says the boy, his father and another man drove 15 hours to Kentucky. School officials called police when they tried to check the girl out of class on Monday.

Pruitt said the girl was not old enough to legally consent.

The men, 42-year-old Dragan Jovanovic and 18-year-old Elvis Tahirovic, were arraigned Tuesday on one charge each of attempted kidnapping. Their attorney did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday.

Note that AP doesn’t bother to tell us that they are Bosnians, but KXMBTV in Bismark does give their nationality.

Also, readers should know that Bowling Green, KY, Fargo, ND and Ft. Wayne, IN are all “welcoming” cities for refugees, or so the State Department and its resettlement contractors say.

*  The Clinton Administration was happy to resettle so many Bosnians to help their friends in the meat packing industry, here.

More evidence that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book

I told you about this controversy back in December, here.  It doesn’t involve refugees, but does help to continue to flesh out our category on ‘community destabilization’ in which we’ve contended immigrants play a huge part.  They are the “have-nots” for the war with the “haves” that Saul Alinsky (Obama’s community organizing inspiration) said would bring “chaos” to communities and ultimately “change.” 

Plus, this whole theory is interesting as hell!

Yesterday at American Thinker researcher Jack Cashill reported that there is proof in the new book about the Obama marriage that Ayers played a substantial role in writing “Dreams from my Father”—a book every one of you should read!

In his new book, “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage,” Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.

Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published — just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from “his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, “These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.” Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.”

Andersen continues, “In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant–so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.”

More to come!

I can’t wait!  When contemplating the magnitude of this fraud (if it’s true), always remember Alinsky taught that the ‘ends justify the means.’  So it would not have been as big a deal for anyone trained in Alinsky methods to do this—to lie.

Al-Amriki says he wants your kids!

Just like the ACORN story that took weeks for the “state-run” media to report, so too FOX News is initially dominating this story of an Alabama boy going to Somalia and becoming a leader of a Jihadi terrorist organization—Al Shabaab.  I’m guessing this whole concept—American born Muslim convert becoming an Al Qeada wannabe—is outside of the mainstream media’s world view.

Abu Mansour al-Amriki — or Omar Hammami as he was known — appears in a video posted online Tuesday by the group al-Shabaab, which has ties to Al Qaeda and was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government last year. In the new video, al-Shabaab fighters pledge their allegiance to Usama bin Laden.

“I ask Allah to grant victory to the [Muslim fighters] in every land and under every sky,” says one fighter in the video, excerpts of which were provided to Fox News by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “We ask Allah that the Islamic Nation be liberated from invaders by the next [end of Ramadan] and [an Islamic state] be established by then.”

During the 50-minute video, titled “We Are At Your Command, Usama,” al-Amriki pops up in scenes of apparent military training. In one scene, he stands in the background – a black, bulging vest strapped to his chest – while at least four people whose faces are hidden by cloth point rifles forward.

Al-Amriki has been in Somalia for several years, but he first became a public figure in October 2007, when Al-Jazeera TV featured him in a report on the “common goal” of Al Qaeda and hard-line militants in Somalia. He kept his face hidden.

He showed his face for the first time in April, when a video posted online featured him purportedly leading a group of al-Shabaab militants in an ambush of “the enemy.”

We need more western kids!  (Six former refugees, American-Somalis, have died so far in Somalia.)

Speaking about one man killed in the fight, he said, “We need more like him, so if you can encourage more of your children and more of your neighbors, anyone around, to send people like him to this jihad, it would be a great asset for us.”

Read the rest of the FOX report on how Al-Amriki came to be in Somalia in the first place.

We first reported to you about Al-Amriki here in April.

Kennedy got big UN prize for his refugee work

No surprise here.   The UN High Commissioner for Refugees this week announced that Senator Ted Kennedy received the top award for helping refugees get to America (except not to Hyannisport or any other community where the very rich and powerful live). 

The late United States Senator Edward Kennedy has been awarded the most prestigious United Nations refugee award for his record of more than 45 years as an unparalleled champion of refugee protection and assistance.

“Senator Kennedy stood out as a forceful advocate for those who suddenly found themselves with no voice and no rights,” [like Mary Jo?]  UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres said today in announcing the 2009 Nansen Refugee Award.

The award is given annually to an individual or organization for outstanding work on behalf of refugees.

They told him about the award in June.  Whew! That’s a good thing.

Mr Kennedy’s work in establishing US refugee admissions, resettlement and asylum programmes directly helped millions of persecuted individuals to find protection and start new lives in the US, UNHCR said in a statement.

He was the chief sponsor of more than 70 refugee-related measures and was instrumental in codifying international refugee obligations into US law.

“UNHCR is grateful it was able to inform Senator Kennedy of the Nansen Committee’s decision in June, and deeply saddened by his passing,” the agency said. He died in August.

Iraqis learn about American life from on-line forums

I guess forums like this one fill in the gaps refugees are experiencing in their supposed orientation programs offered by US State Department-funded outfits.

This McClatchy article made me laugh:

Forum regulars offer do’s and don’ts for airport screenings and remind new arrivals to report any changes of address “so you don’t become a national security concern.” They get into the nitty-gritty of an Iraqi household in America: Long skirts for Muslim women? Bring them, because U.S. shops are filled with miniskirts and shorts. Electrical appliances? Leave them in Baghdad because of the voltage difference. Hookah pipes? Don’t worry, the tobacco and coals are available. Need cheap furniture and household goods? Try a site called Craigslist, “where you can buy and sell anything!”

Wal-mart exploits old people?  

An Iraqi refugee whose online handle is “Arizona” is a particularly astute observer of his new world. One of his most recent posts describes how he walked into a Wal-Mart and was shocked to be welcomed by “a person who’s over 85 years old and works as a tracker of shopping carts.” Apparently unfamiliar with Wal-Mart greeters, who are often senior citizens, Arizona made a phone call to make sure that the chain wasn’t exploiting the elderly, and later he published relevant labor laws for other Iraqis to see.

Do we have a budding social justice activist here?  Arizona needs to find the nearest ACORN office!

Another time, Arizona wrote of a stroll through a park and his first encounter with homeless street performers. He struck up a conversation and learned about their tenuous lives. He wrote with admiration that the U.S. government provides them with food assistance and medical care.

“God bless you, my brother,” an Iraqi named Basel commented on Arizona’s post about the street musicians. “I always see you trying to shed light on American society and to show us the corners we’ve never heard of.”

Obama: We aren’t taking care of the world anymore!

Whew!  I can’t believe it—I agree with Obama for a change. According to AP, Obama told the UN yesterday that it’s time for world leaders to do more for their own problems and not depend on the US to save their necks.

UNITED NATIONS – President Barack Obama challenged world leaders Wednesday to shoulder more of the globe’s critical burdens, promising a newly cooperative partner in America but sternly warning they can no longer castigate the U.S. as a go-it-alone bully while still demanding it cure all ills.

“Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone,” said Obama in put-up-or-shut-up comments before a packed U.N. General Assembly hall. “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

I will be anxiously awaiting the letter from Obama to Muslim countries (such as Saudi Arabia) demanding they take care of Muslim refugees—starting with the Palestinians!

Fatwa: Iraqis must not become U.S. citizens

The invaluable MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, which translates things in the Arabic-language media that we need to know, reports:

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, head of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), recently issued a fatwa stating that an Iraqi exile may not become a U.S. citizen; the fatwa came in response to a question from a viewer during his Ramadan television special. Al-Qaradhawi explained that a Muslim must not become a citizen of a country that is occupying his homeland – and that the ruling was inspired by similar rulings issued by Muslim clerics during France’s occupation of Tunisia.

Al-Qaradhawi qualified his pronouncement by saying that it did not apply to Iraqis who had fled Iraq at the beginning of the occupation and had already taken foreign citizenship in the U.S. or Europe, but only from this day forward.  It also applied to Afghan exiles, he said.

Others  disagreed.

Al-Arabiya TV director ‘Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed wrote an op-ed in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat criticizing Al-Qaradhawi’s ruling. The following are excerpts from the English version of his article, as it appeared in the English edition of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat:

“However, this fatwa has nothing to do with the reality on the ground, and contains more political absurdity then it does religious guidance. Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi himself is an Egyptian who has Qatari citizenship – given to him after he opposed the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. However, when an Israeli office was opened in Doha, Al-Qaradhawi did not renounce his Qatari nationality. This is a personal issue that does not concern us as much as we are concerned with the usage of religion, especially the weapon of the fatwa, in highly politicized cases.”

….

“The truth is that the fear is from the opposite side. In the U.S. there is a strong lobby opposed to the naturalization of Muslims and Arabs, for racist and political reasons. Immigration to the U.S. eventually results in citizenship, and the granting of full citizens’ rights – something not granted to Arab refugees in any Arab country, regardless of the humanitarian situation.

“Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi should ask about the Palestinian refugees who live a tough life and are treated like animals in many Arab countries. They are forbidden from working and earning a livelihood – and some are even forbidden from traveling and visiting their families.

“In the future, before speaking, Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi should ask any Arab immigrant who has been lucky enough to gain citizenship in the [country of the] infidel, in order to find out the difference between myth and reality.”

So it is unclear what effect the fatwa will have, if any. Probably those Iraqis who are having a hard time in the U.S. will end up going back, as we’ve seen they are doing, and those who stay will want citizenship. I don’t get the impression that most Iraqi immigrants are ruled by faraway Imams.