Oversize Racket

Over the past decade or so Guatemalan society has been serially defiled by a a number of rather epic corruption rackets, but even so, nothing even remotely on the scale of the one that UNRWA has been abetting in Gaza. 

The unique degeneracy of this scam has been the manner in which hatred and an explicit set of financial incentives (derived from monies contributed by both the ingenuous and the disingenuous) for pumping more violence into the cycle have been so deeply ingrained within it from the start. 

And just as the fraud based on poisonous ideological trickery is finally about to unravel — thanks to the exposure of a small group on its outer fringe found guilty of abominations which cannot be overlooked — up pop the usual suspects to demand its immediate, unconditional reinstatement. Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, referred yesterday to the “moral depravity” of the decision to withhold further funding from UNRWA. 

Yet at the very least, some sort of open international enquiry and audit needs to be put in the diary by Guterres before the gravy train can start rolling again. 

This is, and has long been a CON, just like the zany narrative of historical resentment and de-legitimisation of Israel it has been blithely developing and broadcasting for decades. (In 1905, under Ottoman rule, two thirds of the population of Jerusalem was Jewish, yet the pro-Hamas propaganda line is that the Jews somehow ‘colonised’ their ancient capital and homeland.) 

In 2022 the US alone contributed $320m to this bloated scheme. UNRWA employs 13,000 staff in Gaza, one for every 114 ‘refugees’. That compares all too favourably with the 1550 serving 1.24m actual refugees in Cox Bazar, the world’s biggest facility. 

UNRWA employs more than the World Bank, and seriously outnumbers the UN staff in both Geneva (8500) or New York (6400). 

Today the WSJ reported that 1200 of these staffers are active Hamas operatives while 23% overall have participated in the Iran-backed terrorists’ military framework. 49% have been found to possess close personal or family ties with Hamas. This is more like a coffee plantation undone by leaf rust than a pristine orchard with a few bad apples in it. 

And during an extended period of alleged ‘genocide’ the number of individuals supposedly covered by the system of perpetual refugee status which underpins all this free money for the venal and hateful has risen to 5.9m from around 600,000, even though more Jews than so-called Palestinians were originally displaced in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. 

And look who might just be able to step in and assist with any temporary shortfall...