From the summary page of the annual UNHCR Global Trends report released for World Refugee Day this week:
Note how UNHCR must include UNRWA’s fake “refugees” among its statistics, inflating the number of refugees in the world from 17.2 million to 22.5 million – an inflation of 31% just to accommodate the bizarre UNRWA “working definition” of “refugee.
But this goes beyond that. UNHCR is careful to distinguish between refugees, internally displaced people and asylum seekers, all who have different legal statuses under international law.
UNRWA makes no such distinctions, and grotesquely goes beyond it.
Here is a graphic from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, also released on World Refugee Day:
They are claiming that 42% of the people who live in the “Palestine” are refugees from – Palestine. Under the normal definition of refugee, this is literally impossible – one cannot be a refugee while living in the country that you came from. At worst, you can be called “internally displaced.”
But UNRWA’s definition of refugee is even more fluid that UNHCR’s definition of “internally displaced people.” Because the vast majority of UNRWA’s “refugees” in the territories are third or fourth generation descendants of alleged “internally displaced people.”
Do people whose families have lived in their own country for decades – who are citizens of the “State of Palestine” – qualify to be called refugees? According to UNRWA, yes – and therefore the UNHCR, no doubt holding their noses, must put these completely bogus statistics on their own otherwise well-researched and important report.
If one would apply that logic to other peoples, the vast majority of Israelis would be considered “refugees” even more than Palestinians, because most Israelis are descended from either Holocaust survivors, people who fled persecution in Russia (both in the late 19th century and more recently), or those who were expelled from Arab countries. Those Israelis aren’t in their countries of origin, unlike Palestinian “refugees.”
The Palestinian fake refugees water down and ruin the vital work of UNHCR by inflating the numbers and inevitably making the world more cynical about the plight of real refugees and displaced persons.
And it will only get worse, because UNHCR tries to erase the refugee status of these people by finding places for them to live in either their original country or elsewhere. UNRWA does not have a way, except for death, to remove any Palestinian from “refugee” status. So in ten years UNHCR will be claiming that perhaps 35% of all “refugees” are Palestinian – even if they live in “Palestine,” even if they are citizens of Jordan, it doesn’t matter.
UNRWA is screwing up the entire UN system with its fake statistics and real refugees will suffer as a result as UNRWA continues to devour an outsized amount of refugee aid, providing services way beyond what UNHCR does for people who do not deserve it.
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