Why the Palestinian “refugees” are not refugees

Sol Stern has written the best brief account I’ve ever read of the origins of the Palestinian “refugees.” It shows the change over time of the way the story is presented in the west, as the truth that was understood at the time the “refugees” were created has become a tissue of lies.  It’s called The Nakba Obsession and it’s in the summer issue of City Journal. I’ll give you the beginning here; if you’re interested in this subject, read the whole thing.

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster”; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948. This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it’s also, as it happens, a myth—a radical distortion of history.

Hat tip: Ron Radosh

Newt Gingrich gets that sharia is the enemy

In a piece titled It’s About Sharia: Gingrich resets our national security debate, Andy McCarthy reports in National Review today on a speech Newt Gingrich gave at the American Enterprise Institute. A link to the video of the speech is here.

We should thank Gingrich because he has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?

The former speaker of the House gets the war on terror. For one thing, he refuses to call it the “war on terror,” which should be the entry-level requirement for any politician who wants to influence how we wage it. Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system.

He specifically talked about stealth jihad.

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic,  and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

. . . . Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.

McCarthy points out that Gingrich didn’t talk much about how to win the war, which Gingrich said could be even longer than the Cold War. This is the point on which I worry. I think Gingrich’s strength is analyzing problems, getting to the heart of the matter. I am not convinced that he is tough enough to lead such a war. Look how he collapsed in the face of attacks by Democrats when he was Speaker of the House. He did a great job leading the Republicans to win the majority, and a pretty poor job of cementing his victory and overcoming his foes. I think the following is McCarthy’s opinion, not his reporting on Gingrich’s speech:

Debate over all of this[how to win]  is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich … gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender.

I went to Gingrich’s website to see his positions on sharia-related matters. He’s solid. Here’s a recent article, No Mosque at Ground Zero, which includes this vital point:

In a deliberately dishonest campaign exploiting our belief in religious liberty, radical Islamists are actively engaged in a public relations campaign to try and browbeat and guilt Americans (and other Western countries) to accept the imposition of sharia in certain communities, no matter how deeply sharia law is in conflict with the protections afforded by the civil law and the democratic values undergirding our constitutional system.

He goes through a number of cases, many of which we’ve reported here, of stealth jihad and authorities backing down in the fact of Muslim demands. And he closes with these words on the ground-zero mosque:

We need to have the moral courage to denounce it. It is simply grotesque to erect a mosque at the site of the most visible and powerful symbol of the horrible consequences of radical Islamist ideology. Well-meaning Muslims, with common human sensitivity to the victims’ families, realize they have plenty of other places to gather and worship. But for radical Islamists, the mosque would become an icon of triumph, encouraging them in their challenge to our civilization.

Apologists for radical Islamist hypocrisy are trying to argue that we have to allow the construction of this mosque in order to prove America’s commitment to religious liberty. They say this despite the fact that there are already over 100 mosques in New York City.

In fact, they’re partially correct—this is a test of our commitment to religious liberty. It is a test to see if we have the resolve to face down an ideology that aims to destroy religious liberty in America, and every other freedom we hold dear.

I’ll be interested to see if he develops some specific policies on how to combat stealth jihad. Will he know the refugee resettlement program has to be reformed to keep out jihadist, stealth and otherwise? Will he make recommendations on immigration policy? (Maybe he has; I haven’t researched this.) Will he call for changes in our federal, state and local laws to make it possible to treat Islam as a political movement rather than a religion? We’ll see.

One last comment. Gingrich apparently didn’t touch on this, and neither does McCarthy. But I think it’s important to use the power of Christianity’s message to convert as many Muslims as possible. I’ve read of large numbers of Muslims in the Middle East being converted, some of them secretly. The message that resonates with Muslims is this: Islam is about hate and revenge and punishment. Christianity is about love and forgiveness.

A religious tactic like this would be difficult for a politician to promote. But I believe it is the key to the war. One reason communism collapsed when it did is that the people who lived under that system had lost all their faith in it. It was rotting from within. And our government had helped that happen, in a variety of ways. I’m not sure how such a missionary effort to Muslims could be official policy. Maybe it has to be done entirely privately. But it must be done, and I would like commentators like Andy McCarthy to include this as one tactic in the war.

Where to find the federal regulations that guide the refugee program

I haven’t had much time to post lately, but still get many requests for help and questions about the refugee resettlement program.   Although we have posted this before, here is a link to the Code of Federal Regulations that are supposed to be followed by the agencies and contractors that run the program (45 CFR 400) Refugee Resettlement Program.  One area that is most often the subject of complaints from citizens is the consultation requirement sections.   Here is just one post I’ve written about the consultation process (or lack of it!).

This post is archived in our ‘where to find information’ category.  You might find other interesting and useful information there if you are new to the program.

I look forward to returning full time to researching and writing about refugees when the election season is behind us.

Andy McCarthy: Arizona ruling just the beginning, will anger “most of the country”

I’m sure just about everyone following immigration issues in the country has heard about Judge Susan Bolton’s decision to basically gut the so-called Arizona law in her decision handed down yesterday in Phoenix.  Andy McCarthy writing at National Review Online had a quick and clear response as to why the Judge is wrong and the case will likely now go to the Appeals Court.

Read his comments here that primarily centered on his assessment of where the Judge went wrong legally, but he concluded with this political prediction.  We agree!

However this ruling came out, it was only going to be the first round. Appeal is certain. But the gleeful Left may want to put away the party hats. This decision is going to anger most of the country. The upshot of it is to tell Americans that if they want the immigration laws enforced, they are going to need a president willing to do it, a Congress willing to make clear that the federal government has no interest in preempting state enforcement, and the selection of judges who will not invent novel legal theories to frustrate enforcement. They are not going to get that from the Obama/Reid/Pelosi Democrats.

I was at a political gathering last night in my county and everyone in the room was aware of what happened in Arizona only hours before and the anger was palpable.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: whole refugee program needs to be revamped

Why?  Everyone lies, she says.   And, besides asylees and refugees should be judged on what they can contribute to the receiving country and if they will assimilate —- good luck with that!

From The Australian:

AYAAN Hirsi Ali has called for a radical change in the way refugees should be assessed.

Ms Hirsi Ali, arguably one of the most high-profile asylum-seekers in the world, believes the 1951 United Nations convention on refugees is out of date and unable to cope with the scale of migration, and says Australia is well-placed to lead moves to replace it.

Ms Hirsi Ali, a prominent critic of Islam, said it was futile for countries to attempt to establish the bona fides of would-be refugees, not least because many asylum-seekers will say anything in order to qualify for asylum.

She said refugee claims should be rigorously assessed on the applicant’s ability to make a contribution to the host nation and to accept its values and culture.

“Everybody lies,” she told The Australian yesterday.

To learn more about Somali-born Hirsi Ali, see our archives.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) says communities overburdened with refugees, requests GAO investigation

Update July 26th:  Friends of Refugees has more commentary on this story, here.

Update July 25th:  More from Ft. Wayne including shocking statistics about the number of refugees arriving there with TB, here.

Well finally someone in Congress has noticed.   Senator Richard Lugar, the US Senator for Indiana, home to one of the most stressed refugee resettlement cities in the US—Ft. Wayne—has taken action with the release of a report this week and a request for a GAO investigation of the program!

From the Journal Gazette:

The federal government must do more to help communities like Fort Wayne that are home to thousands of refugee immigrants, according to a report released Wednesday by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

The report, given to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cited Fort Wayne numerous times as an example of the challenges facing cities that receive large refugee populations. It said many refugees have no English knowledge, many are illiterate even in their native languages and many arrive with numerous health concerns – all of which put a financial burden on the new community.

“Staff found that resettlement efforts in some U.S. cities are underfunded, overstretched, and failing to meet the basic needs of the refugee populations they are currently asked to assist. Especially in a difficult economic climate, the current structure of the U.S. resettlement system is proving a strain on local resources and community relations,” Lugar wrote in the report.

For example, Lugar listed how local health officials in Allen County “stumbled upon” increased rates of hepatitis B among the Burmese refugee population. Treating the lifelong condition added further cost to the community, according to the report.  [We told you about this and the TB rate in Ft. Wayne as early as 2007, here, in 'Ft. Wayne freaking out!']

Thank goodness someone in a position to do something has taken notice of the unfunded mandates the refugee program places on communities.  Hopefully the answer from Washington won’t be, let’s just throw more taxpayer money at the problem.  Maybe finally there will be a discussion about why we are importing poverty!

Toward the end of the Journal Gazette story, we see this interesting information, and something we have been wishing for too—a request for a GAO investigation.

“In the future, the administration may determine that an increase in Federal funding or decrease in refugee admissions is warranted. But the practice of passing the costs of resettling refugees on to local communities should not continue,” Lugar wrote. “The administration and Congress must ensure that the refugee resettlement system is properly structured so that it continues to be perceived as a benefit and not a burden.”

In addition to releasing the report, Lugar asked the Government Accountability Office to conduct a comprehensive review of the U.S. refugee resettlement system.

For Senator Lugar’s press release that includes a link to his report, go here.

We have written dozens and dozens of posts on Ft. Wayne and its refugee problems, use our search function for Ft. Wayne to learn more.

Note from Ann: I know I’m missing some really good stories and wish I could post more at RRW, but am really busy in Maryland for the election season, see for example, here.

Honor killings in America: in Marie Claire, of all places

I was amazed to see a cover story about honor killings in America in Marie Claire. I hardly ever look at the magazines at my hairdresser’s,  but this jumped out at me so I read the article, An American Honor Killing by Abigail Pesta. Pesta is an editor of the magazine, and this was clearly a big investigative project.

It’s the story of Noor Almaleki; Ann has reported on the case in several posts. It begins:

Around the sprawling, sunbaked campus of Dysart High School in El Mirage, Arizona, not many people knew about the double life of a pretty, dark-haired girl named Noor Almaleki.

At school, she was known as a fun-loving student who made friends easily. She played tennis in a T-shirt emblazoned with the school mascot — a baby demon in a diaper. She liked to watch Heroes and eat at Chipotle. Sometimes she talked in a goofy Keanu Reeves voice. She wore dark jeans, jeweled sandals, and flowy tops from Forever 21. She texted constantly and called her friends “dude.” In other words, she was an American girl much like any other.

But at home, Noor inhabited a darker world. She lived a life of subservience, often left to care for her six younger siblings. Noor’s father, 49-year-old Faleh Almaleki, was strict and domineering, deeming it inappropriate for her to socialize with guys, wear jeans, or post snapshots of herself on MySpace. Her responsibility was to follow orders, or to risk a beating. From her father’s perspective, the only time Noor’s life would ever change would be when she married a man he selected for her — back in his homeland of Iraq. Noor, however, had a different vision for herself. Having lived in the U.S. for 16 years, she held dreams of becoming a teacher, of marrying a man she loved, and, most importantly, of making her own choices.

So her father ran over her with his SUV crushing her face and her spine. She died of her injuries.

The fact that this was an honor killing was minimized in the media that reported on the crime. But the Marie Claire article confronts it.

Local police characterized the incident as an attempted “honor killing” — the murder of a woman for behaving in a way that “shames” her family. It’s a practice with deep, tenacious roots in the tribal traditions of the Middle East and Asia. (The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women die annually from such crimes.) Women are stoned, stabbed, and, in the recent case of a teenage girl in Turkey, tied up and buried alive. But honor killings in America are a chilling new trend. In Texas, teen sisters Amina and Sarah Said were shot dead in 2008, allegedly by their father, because they had boyfriends. That same year in Georgia, 25-year-old Sandeela Kanwal was allegedly strangled by her father for wanting to leave an arranged marriage. Last year in New York, Aasiya Hassan, 37, was murdered in perhaps the most gruesome way imaginable: She was beheaded, allegedly by her husband, for reportedly seeking a divorce. And this past spring, 19-year-old Tawana Thompson’s husband gunned her down in Illinois, reportedly following arguments about her American-style clothing.

Amazingly, honor killings in the U.S. have been largely ignored by the national media. That’s because these incidents are typically dismissed as “domestic” in nature — a class of crime that rarely makes the headlines. Since the murderer is a member of the woman’s family, there’s no extended investigation to capture the public’s attention. Also, the family of the perpetrator rarely advocates for the victim, due to either fear or a belief that the woman got what she deserved. “From the family’s point of view, if the goal is to end rumors about their female relative, the last thing they want is to have the press talk about the case,” says Rana Husseini, a human-rights activist and author of Murder in the Name of Honor. Still, the lack of media coverage or public outcry cannot erase the evidence: Honor killings have washed up on our shores.

They don’t emphasize the Muslim aspect, but they don’t completely ignore it. Their main emphasis is the crushing of a girl who wanted to become American, and the reaction of her friends and acquaintances. One friend established a Facebook group that now has almost 4,000 members, in Noor’s memory and to discuss honor killings.

My surprise at this article might be unfair — since I’ve never read Marie Claire, for all I know they might cover significant issues regularly. But to get this kind of mainstream coverage for the horrifying issue of honor killings is a big step. This is the kind of thing feminists should be covering, and I’m glad they’re starting to.

Conflict in Arizona: Africans vs. African Americans

This story shows how stupid it is to think skin color is an important category. From the article:

Africans make up a small but growing part of the black population in metro-Phoenix, which limits opportunities for interaction. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, “foreign-born Africans” number around 18,500 in Maricopa County, or 10.8 percent of the area’s black population. The refugee population in Arizona is much smaller, although that figure more than doubled from 2006 to 2009, to 4,327, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

In a 2008 supplemental report entitled “The State of Black Arizona, Volume I,” ASU associate professor Lisa Aubrey and colleagues found that many African Americans hold new arrivals “responsible” for their ancestral enslavement and “correlate Africa . . . with poverty and feel ashamed.” Aubrey and her coauthors call today’s African Americans “old diasporans,” descendants of slaves and other earlier African arrivals. The scholars refer to modern continental Africans, including refugees who fled strife in their countries, as “new diasporans.”

Most American Blacks are descended from Africans who came here hundreds of years ago, longer ago than the ancestors of most of us arrived. It is ridiculous to suppose that they should have anything in common with newly arrived Africans. And if many of them hadn’t been conned into thinking that their African ancestry is more important than their status as Americans, nobody would try to make an issue of these differences.

Old documents discovered: Palestinian “refugees” say they were not driven out of Israel

I want to bring to your attention this item by Ruth King at her blog. It’s about interviews conducted by John Roy Carlson, the pen name of an Armenian-American investigative reporter who went undercover among Nazi groups in America in the 1930s.

Then, in 1948, presenting himself as an Armenian American, he traveled to the Middle East and – incredibly – fought in Israel’s War of Independence – on the Arab side!  Of course, he was undercover yet again, reporting honestly – but secretly – about the genocidal nature of the war against the Jews and lauding the Zionists’ courage and sacrifices.  Decades before Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” – so demeaned today among Islamists and their fellow travelers – Carlson understood the threat of Jihad not only to the nascent Israel, but to the West as well.  One of his chapter headings reads, The World of the Koran: “Islam Uber Alles.”

Then she goes on to report:

Now, another, unpublished and untitled manuscript has emerged from the Derounian collection housed at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.  It was written in the early 1960′s and consists of interviews and observations on the Arab world from Beirut to Baghdad.  Perhaps the most fascinating excerpts from the book have to do with Carlson’s sojourn in Amman, Jordan.  He interviews a number of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and, most importantly, UNRWA officials, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, established in 1949 exclusively for the benefit of Palestinian Arab refugees.  No other refugee group since then has been assigned a special UN agency.  Currently UNRWA’s budget is close to half a billion dollars.  All other refugees fall under the jurisdiction of the UNHCR (United Nations High Committee for Refugees).   Perhaps most controversial of all, UNRWA has become the unofficial trough for HAMAS.  In the words of former UNRWA General Counsel, James G. Lindsay,

“UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff. UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization’s anti-terrorist rules. No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services.”

There are some examples of the interviews — photos of the typed pages. I can’t copy them here, but the gist is that Arab families left because they didn’t want to live among Jews, or because they were told they could return and they didn’t want to be where there was fighting (remember, the Arabs started the war). Carlson asked specifically whether the Jews drove them out. He said he asked the question a hundred times and didn’t find anyone who claimed they were driven out.

Update: Here is the original source for this story, JStreetJive.

Comment worth noting: evil grows when good men do nothing

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not writing as much these days because I’m working on a political campaign,* but here is a comment we received from a Ms. Chesterman to this post about the Al-Qaeda operatives infiltrating Europe as asylees and refugees.  I thought this was too important to overlook especially as I hear this morning that another Somali has been implicated in a terrorist attack in NYC (as soon as I have a link, I’ll post it).

Here is the comment worth noting:

The old saying that goes something like this..” evil grows when good men do nothing.” its a tragedy that the actions of a few have ruined tainted the plights of the genuine refugees…but its a fact that refugees are infiltrated by the terrorists.

No matter whereabouts we are talking about them..they are very much active and using the plight of genuine refugees to push their own agenda and use open doors.

The time is gone when we can just put our heads in the sand and say that its o.k. because its not. if we dont rise up and become vigilant, we are going to be run over by Muslim Militants…i said…militants… when its over its over, and we wont have a voice.

In an effort to try and keep freedom of religion the basic right of every citizen we are also opening the door to those who have evil motives..and there is no way that we can take away freedom of religion . its a fundamental right.

So… we have to be very vigilant. To the point of seeming to be uncaring and insensitive. Believe me, there are many out there who are only too willing to use this as an open doorway.

We have a responsibility to our generation and the generations to come to see that they are safe. This war is being fought at an entirely different level…and its going to win by stealth if we dont rise up and take note..

*See Potomac Tea Party Report to follow the campaign, here is a post relating to immigration.