Who Is UNRWA?

On December 27th, Zero Hedge posted an article about The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) .

The article reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was originally a small agency mandated to provide basic humanitarian relief for Palestinians, including a vote for renewal every three years. Seventy-three years and four generations later, and with more than 30,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $1 billion, it has astonishingly become one of the largest UN agencies.

The article notes:

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, UNRWA has, in fact, long been operating as the de facto government. By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons. If UNRWA were not there, Hamas would have been forced to fill the vacuum and, for example, build hospitals and schools and find solutions to economic hardship, including unemployment and poverty.

As senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said, in explaining why no cement could be spared from terror tunnels to build bomb shelters for Gazan citizens:

“The tunnels were built to protect the fighters of Hamas from [Israeli] airstrikes. As you know, 75% of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees. It is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect the refugees.”

Hamas was effectively saying: We are responsible for what happens underground, while UNRWA is responsible for what happens above ground.

In addition to evolving into a monster-sized agency, UNRWA has also morphed into a very costly incubator for terror. UNRWA-run schools emphasize and promote the “right of return,” a euphemism for flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians and turning it into a Muslim-majority Islamist state backed by Iran.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Is there any doubt that we need to stop supporting the United Nations? American taxpayer dollars are funding terrorism.

A Representative Introduces Common Sense

Yesterday The Daily Signal reported that North Carolina Congressman Ted Budd has introduced an amendment to remove all earmarks from a transportation spending bill slated for a House vote this week.

The article reports:

“Taxpayers across the country are getting their first look at what Washington is like in the new earmark era,” Rep. Ted Budd, R-N.C., said in a statement to The Daily Signal.

“It’s not a pretty sight,” Budd said. “This transportation spending bill includes 1,474 examples of the Washington swamp saying they know best when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars. If an earmarked project is truly worthy of taxpayer funding, then it should be proposed individually on the House floor or as a competitive grant.”

The House is voting on the Invest in America Act, which Budd’s office says includes 1,473 earmarks. Together, those earmarks total $5.66 billion.

I wonder if Washington spending would be so out of control if Congressmen were forced to spend their own money.

The article concludes:

According to Budd’s office, “dozens of these earmarks have to do with Green New Deal priorities like greenways, electric vehicles, etc.”

Conservatives long have opposed earmarks, which direct taxpayer money to lawmakers’ special interests and projects through the budget. Lawmakers banned earmarks under House rules in 2010, but House Democrats voted to bring earmarks back in February.

Earlier this year, Budd and Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., introduced the Earmark Elimination Act, which would permanently ban congressional earmarks.

In March, the North Carolina congressman led a coalition of 10 senators and 25 House members to send a letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committee chairs voicing their “strong opposition to the formal return of pork-barrel earmarks.”

“Every taxpayer dollar is sacred and should be treated that way,” Budd said. “If this Congress really believed that, then we should remove this pork-barrel spending.”

If you haven’t investigated the Cloward-Piven strategy, now is a really good time to do that.