Yemeni Jewish refugees brought to U.S. in secret mission

Here’s a different kind of refugee story. The U.S. State Department has resettled about 60 Yemini Jews here since August, Miriam Jordan reports in the Wall Street Journal. The story begins:

MONSEY, N.Y. — In his new suburban American home, Shaker Yakub, a Yemeni Jew, folded a large scarf in half, wrapped it around his head and tucked in his spiraling side curls. “This is how I passed for a Muslim,” said the 59-year-old father of seven, improvising a turban that hid his black skullcap.

The ploy enabled Mr. Yakub and half a dozen members of his family to slip undetected out of their native town of Raida, Yemen, and travel to the capital 50 miles to the south. There, they met U.S. State Department officials conducting a clandestine operation to bring some of Yemen’s last remaining Jews to America to escape rising anti-Semitic violence in his country.

In all, about 60 Yemeni Jews have resettled in the U.S. since July; officials say another 100 could still come. There were an estimated 350 in Yemen before the operation began. Some of the remainder may go to Israel and some will stay behind, most in a government enclave.

An unusual story, to say the least. The Yemeni government is protecting the Jews; the persecution is from local Muslims.  The U.S. government initiated the action for geopolitical reasons.

The State Department took something of a risk in removing the Yemenis to the U.S., as it might be criticized for favoritism at a time when refugees elsewhere are clamoring for haven. The U.S. calculated the operation would serve both a humanitarian and a geopolitical purpose. In addition to rescuing a group threatened because of its religion, Washington was seeking to prevent an international embarrassment for an embattled Arab ally.

The Yemeni Jews may be the oldest Jewish community in the Arab world.

Jews are believed to have reached what is now Yemen more than 2,500 years ago as traders for King Solomon. They survived — and at times thrived — over centuries of change, including the spread of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula.

Most Yemeni Jews went to Israel years ago. Israel airlifted 49,000 to their country in 1949 and 1950, leaving only about 2,000. And that raises the question: Why didn’t these people go to Israel, which is experienced at bringing in relatively primitive groups like this, and teaching them to thrive in a modern culture? It might be because the action was initiated by Yemeni Jews in New York.

New York had a community of about 2,000 Yemeni Jews. Yair Yaish, who heads the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America, says he was barraged with “desperate calls from the community here saying we have to do something to get our families out.”

The U.S. Ambassador to Yemen urged Yemeni ministers to facilitate the departure. After initial reluctance — the government preferred to give the Jews safe haven in the capital city — Yemen agreed to issue exit permits and passports.

“It was the embassy’s view, and the Department concurred, that because of their vulnerability, we should consider them for resettlement,” says a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Unlike most refugees, these Yemenis have had money raised to help them.

Jewish Federations of North America raised $750,000 to help the effort. Orthodox groups also pledged to pitch in. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was tasked with their resettlement.

Maybe there’s a clue here:

In the U.S., the Yemeni refugees are being settled in Monsey, a suburban enclave of ultraorthodox Jews, lined with strip malls that sell black coats and wide-rimmed hats worn by Hasidic men.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s network established a Monsey office, where case managers arrange housing and disburse food stamps, cash and other refugee benefits to the Yemeni arrivals. Many of the adults, caseworkers say, aren’t yet capable of budgeting, following a schedule or sitting still in a structured classroom to learn English.

It doesn’t sound as if the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society initiated this, so it’s not for the money they receive from the government. Some ultraorthodox Jews (most? I don’t know) are not Zionists: they don’t believe in the State of Israel. Perhaps they were trying to get the Yemenis here to live in their community instead of going to Israel. This story doesn’t compute, and I’d like to find out more about it. Still, one thing about the article is quite routine: the way it ends, which is pretty much the standard kind of ending for refugee stories:

On a recent morning, Mr. Suleiman, a 36-year-old father of three, retrieved an alarm clock that he received with his furnished apartment.

“I still don’t know how to use this,” he said. “The children have been playing with it.”

Hat tip: Janet Levy.

A million refugees are trying to sneak into Israel

For some reason we keep getting hits on a story from last January, Asylum seekers head for Israel. Ann posted an update in July. Both of those stories put the numbers in hundreds or thousands. Now the Jerusalem Post reports IDF: ‘One million African refugees headed for Israel.’ The IDF is the Israeli Defense Force, Israel’s military.

IDF units responsible for guarding Israel’s expansive western border with Egypt said Thursday that there are one million would-be infiltrators from Africa waiting to cross the mostly barrier-less border and enter Israel illegally.

They were  briefing members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, who called on the government to implement a plan called “Hourglass” to significantly reduce the number.

Committee Chairman Ya’acov Katz called upon the defense establishment to begin immediate work on one of the salient features of the proposed project – the erection of an electronic fence along hundreds of kilometers of isolated borderlands with Egypt.

The fence will cost an estimated one million dollars per kilometer.

Although these people flooding Israel are termed refugees they are actually more akin to the illegal aliens we get from Mexico. They are coming for economic reasons, because their countries are a mess and Israel has a good economy. And although most Israelis believe they should be stopped, there is a group pushing for their continued entrance into the country:

Katz has said that according to the data he has received, between 600 and 1000 people infiltrate across the desert border each month. But not all residents of the South are quite so enthusiastic regarding any cuts to the number of foreign workers in the work force. Even as Katz and his committee toured the Negev, farmers in the isolated Arava Valley put the finishing touches on their plans to launch a massive demonstration this coming Sunday to protest cuts to the number of foreign workers that they can employ on their farms.

The farmers complain that as they are located beyond commuting distance from any major cities, if they are not allowed to import hundreds of foreign workers – mostly from Thailand – they will simply not be able to harvest the produce that makes their farms viable.

It’s unclear whether the farmers want the Africans to continue to come, or if they are just afraid all foreign workers will be limited. Israel does depend a great deal on foreign workers, but they are usually from faraway places (like Thailand) where they have families, so they usually return home.

Israel’s population is about 7.4 million. Having a million would-be immigrants trying to sneak across the border is equivalent to having 42 million people at our Mexican border in terms of the percentage of our population.

But I have a question. If Israel is as oppressive as advertised, why do so many people want to get in? Of course, we’ve wondered the same thing about our country, which is now being apologized for around the world by our president.

Hat tip: Mark Krikorian.

Attempt to block UNRWA’s terror ties stalled in Congress since January

FrontPage Magazine published an interview yesterday with  Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East analyst and Adjunct Scholar at the Middle East Forum, who brings our attention to a bill in Congress dealing with UNRWA. That’s the UN agency in charge of the Palestinian refugees; we’ve written about it extensively. Briefly, we give it a lot of money, much of which goes to funding terrorism. Romirowsky writes (somewhat inaccurately; see below):

 After much pressure from Congressman like Mark Kirk (R – IL) and Steve Rothman (D – NJ) and others we are now seeing a new bill entitled UNRWA accountability. It demands transparency and responsibility from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). The bill seeks to ensure that the monies funneled to UNRWA from the United States do not fund acts of terrorism in any way (bringing the funding into compliance with the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961).

The bill goes further, underscoring the need to evaluate the text books used in Palestinian UNRWA schools; to ascertain there is no “inflammatory and inaccurate information about the United States and the State of Israel, anti-Semitic teaching, as well as the glorification of terrorists.” Something that has been a constant problem in UNRWA schools which have acted as a catalyst for terrorist activities against innocent civilians in Israel.

This is rather sloppy reporting on a number of fronts. He does not give the number of the bill nor its entire title, nor report that it was introduced in January 28 of this year. After searching around I found information at Open Congress, a useful, searchable site which not only reports on bills in Congress, but collects comments from news sources about each bill. It says:

H.Con.Res.29 – Expressing the sense of Congress that the United Nations should take immediate steps to improve the transparency and accountability of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Near East to ensure that it is not providing funding, employment, or other support to terrorists.

The entire bill is at Thomas, the official government website.  I highly recommend reading it for its outstanding summary of the problems with UNRWA; it’s quite short. Its recommendations are excellent and to the point, but unfortunately do not have the force of law. It

(1) strongly urges the Secretary of State to take all necessary measures to certify that United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) operates in full compliance with section 301(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act and therefore, no American taxpayer dollars are being directed to terrorists or to further terrorist propaganda;

 (2) calls on UNRWA to improve their transparency by publishing online copies of all educational materials used in UNRWA-administered schools; and 

(3) urges UNRWA to improve their accountability by implementing terrorist name recognition software and other screening procedures that would help to ensure that UNRWA staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries are neither terrorists themselves, nor affiliated with known terrorist organizations.

Apparently it hasn’t gone anywhere, since Thomas reports:

Latest Major Action: 1/28/2009 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

I know the Democrats in Congress are routinely ignoring or defeating Republican legislation, but this is a bi-partisan bill, introduced by a Democrat, with many Democrat co-sponsors. A Concurrent Resolution, which this is, doesn’t have much force anyway; it only “strongly urges”  and “calls on” the State Department and UNRWA, with no power to compel. But I guess even these recommendations to prevent our money being funneled into Hamas aren’t as important as all that messing around with our economy, our freedom and our security that occupies the time of the House of Representatives.

I’m grateful to FrontPage for bringing the stalled bill to my attention, but some fact-checking would have been in order.

Gaza refugee rumor has eternal life

Last January President Obama signed a Presidential Determination about refugees in Gaza. Its purpose was to send $20 million in aid to  Gazans who had suffered in the war with Israel. (Would he ever send aid for the traumatized Israeli children who lived under constant bombardment by rockets from Gaza? Fat chance!) An email has been circulating ever since, saying that this order meant that we were bringing hundreds of thousands of Hamas members into the United States, probably because the funds were directed to “urgent refugee and migration needs.” “Refugees” refers to the people in Gaza, who have been awarded perpetual refugee status, unlike all other refugees around the world. “Migration” is not the same as immigration; it refers to people moving around over there, not coming here.

I’ve been seeing references to this inaccurate email since the directive was signed. The rumor was so widespread that Senator Jon Kyl sponsored an amendment based on it, and had to withdraw the amendment when he realized it was false.

Lately it seems to be reviving; I’ve been seeing more references to it. Today I saw a blog post that simply reproduced the email — or rather, an embellished version of it that added another mistake: that HR 1388 was passed behind our backs (this happened in February and was reported on widely) and that this bill about volunteerism had a stealth measure about bringing Hamas members here. So I thought I’d better deal with this issue again, in case our readers are coming across this nonsense. If you want to see the wrongheaded blog post, here it is, though I hate to give such an incompetent blogger any traffic.

Here is the comment I left there. As of this writing it has not been approved, so let’s see if “Compass” can redeem himself by issuing a correction. Responsible journalists who repeated the rumor have corrected themselves when I informed them of the error.

This post is completely inaccurate. You are conflating two different things. HR 1388 was passed last January and became law in April. It is about volunteerism and has nothing to do with Palestinian refugees. See this.

Obama signed the Presidential Determination about the Palestinians in January. It was a reaction to the Gaza-Israel war and was meant to provide aid IN GAZA. The information is based on an inaccurate email that apparently is still circulating. I have written on the issue extensively on my blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch; here is one post.  Snopes also deals with it accurately here.  The Snopes account also mentions the conflation of HR 1388 with the Presidential Determination.

So, whoever you are, Compass Blog, you have just reproduced an old and inaccurate email with any fact-checking at all. Your supposed link to the Federal Register doesn’t work, so you probably didn’t even click on it yourself, just left it in the email you copied. You give blogging a bad name.

Obama has done many terrible things, and is set to do many more. He is the worst president ever by far, an enemy of America and all we stand for. Perpetuating false rumors does not help the fight against him; it just makes his opponents look silly and ignorant.

I will add that since this memo was signed in January we have not seen any refugees from Gaza come here, in case you need a further fact check. And it wouldn’t make sense anyway. Obama is an enemy of Israel and would want its foes to remain where they are. They can’t fight Israel from our land, whereas in Gaza they can continue to prepare for their final solution. Much of the aid money flowing into Gaza goes right to Hamas, as we reported here.

Update 10/16/09: The offending blog did not post my comment. Contrast that with Phyllis Chesler and Michael Ledeen who made corrections based on the information I sent them. That’s the difference between serious writers and sensationalist bloggers.

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.

Jeffrey Goldberg takes on myths about Gaza “refugees”

In The Lucrative Business of Israel-Bashing in the current Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg quotes an Israel-bashing statement from a current MacArthur grant recipient, James Longley, and corrects every single sentence in it. Great job. Read it if you want the Gaza “refugee” situation in a nutshell.  The reason for the title of his piece is that MacArthur “geniuses” receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached.

Palestinian “refugees” are getting restless, and so is their staff

ISRIA, a Paris-based consulting and information publishing service, reports: 

The United Nations agency tasked with assisting millions of Palestinian refugees may not be able to pay the salaries of its 29,000 staff through the end of this year because of a funding crisis, its top official said today as she urged Member States to donate more generously.

….Most of UNRWA’s running costs go to staff salaries, she said, and without an injection of nearly USD 17 million each month the agency will not be able to guarantee salaries into 2010.

Ms. AbuZayd said she has written in the past week to every country that has ever donated to UNRWA to ask them to contribute “special pledges” given the current situation, and she hopes they will respond urgently.

All the donor countries have fulfilled their pledges, but the agency needs more because of inflation, exchange rates, and other issues. Imagine that! Has an agency anywhere of any sort ever announced it needed less?

Two points to note. One is this:

She said that both staff and refugees were “becoming restless” about the funding problem and contingency plans may have to be taken unless money is provided soon.

What contingency plans would those be? Stepping up terrorist attacks so donor nations would realize they really, really, really need more money? And as for “both staff and refugees,” they are often the same people as most of the staff is drawn from the local population. In Gaza that means most are from Hamas, and we’ve written about how much of the donated money goes to Hamas. With all the, um, obligations Hamas has in other areas, it’s no wonder UNRWA’s humanitarian mission is running short.

The second point is this:

UNRWA… provides education, health care, social services, microfinance, camp improvement and emergency aid to an estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Has the world lost sight of how weird that is? How many Jewish refugees are living in Israel? None, because Israel takes in every Jew who wants to come, including the 900,000 who were expelled from Arab countries. But do Arab countries take in Palestinians, who are also Arabs? No! We’ve written about the Iraqi Palestinians, who were not welcomed back into Iraq, and now the U.S. is taking some in. What is wrong with these Arab governments? Oh, maybe it’s because the Jews whom Israel takes in don’t produce suicide bombers. They don’t plot against their host government. The Arab governments created the Palestinian refugee problem, and they don’t want anything to do with the pathology they brought about. So the civilized nations of the earth have to keep ponying up money to keep these “refugees” quiet.

(See our Israel and refugees category for our previous posts on this subject.)

UN releases budget: plenty for all, especially Palestinian “refugees”

A column by George Russell, executive editor of Fox News, gives a detailed account of the UN budget and explains all the accounting tricks that make it so difficult to know what the UN actually spends. The headline says the budget is $13.9 billion, but the first paragraph says it is $4.9 billion. It takes most of the article to explain all the additions and tricks that get the total from the lower figure to the higher. Let’s just say that UN bureaucrats are experienced and skilled at presenting one thing to the public and another to each other.

Even the $13.9 figure is low:

“It’s easier to work your way through the U.S. budget — which is immensely bigger — than through the U.N. budget,” observes Brett Shaefer, a U.N. expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who has just edited a new book on U.N. reform entitled ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives. “What you see is the U.N. doing a bit of sleight of hand.”

Nor does the sleight of hand end there. Even the $13.9 billion number does not include the cost of some of the U.N.’s biggest and most sprawling organizations, which submit their own budgets to separate panels of U.N. member states, even as their programs increasingly intertwine and overlap.

Here’s the relevant section on refugees:

Among other things, a substantial portion of the extra-budgetary increase, Ban’s report notes, has gone to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — $282.2 million — and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) — $186.9 million.

(As it happens, Ban’s initial budget report for 2008-2009 said very similar things, noting that big increases from hikes in extra-budgetary resources went to UNHCR — $423.3 million — and UNWRA — 122.9 million.)

That is simply obscene. There are more than 12 million refugees worldwide. The number of so-called refugees in Gaza and the West Bank number well under 2 million. And the vast majority of these have nothing in common with real refugees. They live in houses in cities and towns in defined territories governed by their own elected governments. Yet the Palestinian’s refugee agency gets two-thirds of what the real refugee agency gets. And the Palestinians get lots and lots of aid from governments as well.

The United States gave $900 million for Palestinian aid in 2009. As far as I can tell (Ann will correct me if I’m wrong), our government spent about  ”$809 million for basic life-sustaining support and protection of refugees, conflict victims, and internally displaced persons overseas,” and about the same for refugee resettlement in the U.S.  These numbers are almost as slippery as the UN ones — you can’t really find all the spending, either abroad or at home, because it’s often split among different agencies and budget line items. The point is that the Palestinians receive enormous amounts of aid. And as we’ve reported, much of the aid goes right to Hamas, a terrorist group and America’s declared enemy. 

If the UN and the U.S. shifted their money from the Palestinians to real refugees, many more people would have better lives. See more about UNRWA here, and in other articles in our “Israel and refugees” category.

Addendum, September 19: I want to add a link to a great post by David Horowitz on his great new blog, Newsreal.  It’s called The UN Is a Morally Disgusting Institution and a Global Menace.

More on Iraqi Palestinians and how Arab countries don’t help them

I have so much backed up to write about, I’m just going to have to put up a few posts and not say much (maybe that is a good thing!).  Here is one from a blog called ‘Elder of Ziyon’ about how the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), the special agency set up just to oversee Palestinian refugees, isn’t doing its job.  This post is entitled, “UNHCR decreases real refugees, UNRWA increases fake ones.” 

Incidentally we might argue that UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) isn’t doing such a hot job either.

Here is an archive for all of our previous posts on UNRWA.

More information literally moments later!  I had just posted this when this appeared in my in-box, it’s an economic analysis of the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza showing that they are better off there than in most any other country in the Arab world!

Prominent Muslim journalist calls for Palestinian refugees to be resettled in Arab countries

This is a concept we have discussed on several previous occasions.   We believe that Arab countries have purposefully kept Palestinians from getting out of poverty by refusing to resettle them.   Such a move, as suggested by this journalist, would demonstrate true Muslim charity and go a long way to bringing peace to the Middle East.

Now a prominant member of the media has said just that.  From Memri:

Daoud Al-Shiryan, Al-Hayat columnist and deputy secretary-general of Al-Arabiya TV, recently published several articles criticizing how the Palestinian refugees have been treated by the Arab countries in which they live. He called on these countries to integrate the refugees into their societies and to resettle them before they are forced to do so by the international community.

I don’t know about that last phrase.  I can’t quite imagine Obama is going to tell his buddies in the Arab world to please take in the Palestinians.  But, that is what he should do!