From Ma'an: From Al-Arabiya:Abbas to Lebanese PalArabs: "Screw you"
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon will not be offered Lebanese passports, President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday following his meeting with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman at the Republican Palace.
Generations have grown up in Lebanon, raised families, and died, but their supposed "leader" is more interested in them keeping their stateless status rather than giving them the simple choice of allowing them to be more integrated into the land of their birth.
Abbas’ remark quashed recent rumors concerning the issuing of Lebanese passports to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, adding that the refugees’ presence in the country is temporary, particularly as Lebanon’s membership in the UN Security Council next year will help the Palestinian cause.
Mahmoud Abbas, that supposedly moderate leader of the PA, the PLO and Fatah, who claims to represent millions of people of Palestinian Arab descent, has once again told his people to go screw themselves rather than give them the option of happiness as full citizens of other Arab lands. He arrogantly claims to know what is best for his people, and is dead-set against giving them the option of making their own decisions.
Because he knows that the majority them would not choose to put their families through the hell that they have gone through thanks to the decisions of Arab leaders over the past six decades.
Palestinian Arabs who choose to become citizens of Arab countries will, by and large, never choose to move to an eventual "Palestine." They will identify only peripherally as "Palestinian." They will lose their value as pawns to corrupt, arrogant "leaders" who pretend to know what is best for them, and whose power derives from their very misery.
Moreover, if Arab countries would give PalArabs full citizenship, a significant number of Palestinian Arabs in the territories - hundreds of thousands, if not over a million - would happily move to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Dubai. (Ironically, they would also have a positive influence on most of their host Arab countries, as they tend to be better educated and harder working, and Gulf countries import many workers from Indonesia and Africa, causing many problems that could be avoided if Palestinian Arab workers replaced them.)
The operative word here is "choice." Palestinian Arabs are not given the power to choose where to live, and Arab nations specifically deny them the ability to become citizens that they give all other Arabs.
Yet there are no "pro-Palestinian" organizations tha lobby on behalf of real Palestinian Arabs. They all repeat the lie that they can best help them by fighting Israel, militarily or politically. It is a myth, and one that is easily disproven - it has not helped them one bit in 61 years. "Human rights" organizations may mention some of these problems in isolation but they do not push for the simplest, fairest and cheapest solution to the problem of millions of stateless people.
Abbas, the one person who pretends to represent his people the best, tells his suffering would-be constituents that their six-decade old problem is "temporary."
This is a travesty of human rights.
The way to tell if someone is truly pro-Palestinian Arab or is simply using the Palestinian Arabs as pawns to help destroy Israel is to ask him one simple question:
Do you support giving all Palestinian Arabs the choice to become full citizens of any Arab country that they desire, according to the existing naturalization rules that they have for other Arabs?
This is the question that needs to be asked of every Arab leader, every Palestinian Arab leader, every NGO, every human rights organization. It should be hammered in during every interview. They must be forced to answer the question clearly and forcefully.
Unless they can answer that question in the affirmative, the inescapable conclusion is that most people who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" are nothing more than liars and hypocrites who support discrimination against the very people they claim they want to help.Saeed Mohamed Hammo technically does not exist as far as the world is concerned. But as he recounts his life as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, his story is very much real.
Even though regular Palestinian Arab descendants of 1948 refugees have limited rights in Lebanon, the ones who were driven out of Jordan - the PLO heroes - are in even worse shape. This is an entirely Arab-created problem, of "Palestinians" who have never been in Palestine and whose troubles have been exclusively the result of Arab decisions.
Hammo, 61, is among an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 so-called "non-ID Palestinians" in Lebanon who are considered illegal aliens and who have lived in legal limbo, many of them for decades.
They have no freedom of movement, no right to work and no access to medical services or education.
Lebanon recognizes as refugees only Palestinians who fled here following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
The majority of the non-ID Palestinians came to Lebanon in the 1970s following the events known as Black September, when Jordan kicked out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and thousands of Palestinian fighters.
As such, they are not considered refugees by Lebanese authorities and have no official status.
"Non-ID Palestinians live in harsh conditions and are deprived of some of the most important and basic human rights," Mireille Chiha, of the Danish Refugee Council office in Beirut, told AFP.
"They have no freedom of movement, can't purchase a car or motorbike and they don't benefit from the services of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees," she added. "Even within the refugee camps, they are referred to as the 'ghareeb' or foreigner.
Jamileh Mohammed Salloum, 40, is Lebanese and married a non-ID Palestinian at the age of 18 without realizing the hardships that awaited her and the three children she would bear.
A Lebanese woman is legally not entitled to pass on her citizenship to her children or spouse.
"I never in my wildest dreams imagined that my children would have no rights and that my country would treat me like this," she said angrily. "Where are the human rights that everyone likes to talk about?
"My children don't even know Palestine, they are Lebanese."
Notice also that it appears likely that UNRWA's bizarre definition of "refugee" that inflates the number of real refugees from 1948 by a factor of 10 or so is now being used by Lebanon against the children of Jordanian "Palestinian" refugees from the 1970s. These children born in Lebanon should be Lebanese citizens by any definition - even UNRWA's - but the notion of descendants of Palestinian Arabs being "refugees" is so ingrained by the UN that thousands of people are suffering because of it.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
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