Eliminating Wasteful Spending — Another Small Step In The Right Direction

If there's anything positive about the runaway deficits is that the government can no longer just give the money away blindly, agreeing to bankroll every malicious special interest group there is just to avoid another scandal in a minority Parliament. Finally, they're doing what should have been done years ago - revising the spending and cutting off funding to the most odious groups.

Since last fall, the federal Conservative government has been withdrawing taxpayer funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that use their grants to take sides against Israel in the Middle East conflict. Now comes word that last week, Ottawa told the United Nations it would no longer fund the world body's Palestinian refugee agency. From now on, Canadian aid to Palestinians will be directed to specific projects. We will no longer give lump-sum aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), since most of that money simply goes straight into the Palestinian Authority's (PA) general treasury, where it might be used for humanitarian projects or might be used to arm and train terrorists.

This is a bold move for Ottawa, which is the first Western government to cut off funding for UNWRA.

Although UNWRA has long been a biased player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is seldom criticized for its incitement of anti-Israeli hatred and violence by Palestinians. It has funded textbooks that deny the right of Israel to exist and paid teachers who call on Palestinian children to push the Jewish state into the sea. It harbours radical Islamists and anti-Semites on its payroll and was even caught in 2004 using its own ambulances to ferry terrorists away from Israeli sites they had just attacked.

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Not to mention that most of those "refugees" whom UNWRA is mandated to help, are in fact - second and third generation descendants of Arabs who left Israeli territory after the Jewish state had been proclaimed. If the actual goal had been to help them - they would have been long absorbed and assimilated into the neighboring Arab countries. After all, Israel too had to absorb nearly a million of Jewish refugees that had been forced out of Arab countries in late '40s and early '50s. But, "thanks" to the continuous efforts of all Arab governments and the unwillingness of the UN to even notice the true cause of the problem, the Arab emigres and their descendants have been artificially maintained as a separate landless nation.

Instead of demanding that these people be granted full civil rights and full citizenship of the countries where they've been living for decades and where their children and grandchildren were born, UNWRA's role has been nothing but perpetuating the problem by allowing anyone who had lived in British Palestine for more than 2 years to be counted as "Palestinian refugee". Yep, that's what their logic is like. It takes 2 years for one to become a citizen of the long-abolished British Palestine, but 60+ years in any other Arab country is not enough to stop being a stateless "refugee" to become a fellow national with equal rights and obligations. And, as we've seen, UNWRA's activities went way beyond inflating the number of "victims" and perpetuating their dependency status.

Now they've finally lost their funding from Canadian government - among with other groups that offer political and financial support to radical Islamists and other "motivated militants". Of course the radical lefties are furious - their precious myth is being broken. But we should only applaud this common sense move. It's a small step, but it's a step in the right direction.