Good Question.
Why is the “Palestinian cause the world’s number one cause?”
While interviewing a spokesman for the Free Palestinian-Syrian Assembly Muhammad Masharqa, Syrian TV host Dima Wannous poses a surprising challenge to the wildly disproportionate attention “Palestinian” Arabs receive over Syrian and Iraqi Arab refugees whose numbers are many times greater and whose circumstances are significantly more harrowing, desperate, and grave.
It’s fascinating to watch her probe the sacred cow of Muslim suffering, and expose the fraud when she asks:
“Why has the (Palestinian cause) become the world’s number one cause? I mean, the calamities of the other Arab nations over the years no less tragic than the tragedy of the Palestinian people?”
Could it be the Arab world is finally growing tired of these overindulged professional victims and their wholly self inflicted plight?
Wannous astutely takes aim at the popular myth of Arab “Palestinian” victimhood, with questions and observations that are thoughtful and discerning.
What is perhaps most surprising in this exchange is how artfully Wannous deconstucts the myth of the “Palestininan” Nakba , exposing some of the gross misrepresentations and exagerations upon which the “Palestinian” cause is premised.
While appearing to accept that the original number of alleged “Palestinian” Arabs “displaced” in 1948 is around 750,000 she notes that the vast majority of that number never actually left the area defined as “Palestine”.
“750,000 Palestinians were displaced, only 150,000 of whom expelled from Palestine. The others remained in their historical homeland, although in different places.”
The implication of this statement, undisputed by her “Palestinian” guest, is extraordinary. It shows that most of those Arabs claiming to have been “refugees” — some 600,000 of them — were never forced out of “Palestine” at all, which means they weren’t refugees.
Here’s why. According to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, the definition of a refugee is as follows:
“A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.”
Both Wannous and her “Palestinian” guest seem to agree, the vast majority were in fact allowed to stay in what is erroneously deemed “their historical homeland”. Why than are they called “refugees”?
Today Arab leaders and media assert there are several million “Palestinian” Arab refugees: The figure is obviously total fiction. Furthermore, the vast majority of this wildly inflated number were not even alive during the 1948 war. Many weren’t even born in the last century, as they are the children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of those original 600,000 Arabs who “remained in their historical homeland.”
As discussed in an earlier article here at Adara Press, for these Arabs alone, the international community–the U.N.– makes a special exception in the designation of refugee status, flouting their own UNHCR standard:
“The Arab refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war are the only refugees for whom the United Nations confers ‘refugee’ status to descendants; children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on are all considered refugees–a status they retain even if they have received citizenship from another country. In short, for this population of Arabs alone–persons who would otherwise not be deemed refugees–the U.N. has granted refugee status in perpetuity.”
That the United States government accepts and promotes this is direct violation of federal law.
U.S. law is clear, as Steven Rosen explains in his article, “Why State Dept. Defends UNRWA’s Artificial Refugee Designations”:
“…under U.S. law, a person who has citizenship in the country where he resides, and enjoys the protection of that state, cannot lawfully be eligible for refugee status.[3] …Under U.S. laws and regulations, only an individual who was personally displaced, or is a spouse or an underage dependent of such an individual, can be eligible for refugee status or derivative refugee status.[7] Grandchildren and great-grandchildren are specifically not entitled to inherit refugee status merely because their ancestor was a refugee.[8]“
Dima Wannous presses her point further with her “Palestinian” guest:
“…after five years, many Syrians are asking why their cause has already been forgotten by most people…With all the great crimes committed by the Israeli enemy – how many people were killed in the Palestinian ‘Land Day?‘
You know better than me. Six people were killed. That’s what I’ve read.”
Though she doesn’t articulate it, the comparison to the hundreds of thousands of Arab lives lost in Syria and Iraq is obvious.
Not surprisingly, Muhammad Masharqa is defensive:
“Look, it is important to seek answers in history. In what context was Israel established. Was the context Palestinian or did it pertain to the entire region? From this perspective…It constituted…It cooperated with the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and with other forms of colonization equipped with a myth. But it had clear political and economic goals right from the start. The centrality of the Palestinian cause stems from this. This is an objective thing. It is not because Palestinians are good a propaganda.”
Dima Wannous is quick to catch the point, the real reason the Palestinian cause matters more:
“In other words, you’ve benefitted from the enemy being Jewish and Israeli…”
Wannous is right. It pays to war on the Jewish people: Handsomely in fact.
It isn’t just the plight of the Syrians and Iraqis that is obscured by the outsized focus placed on the contrived trauma of the faux “refugees” living in ancient, sacred Jewish lands. It’s the enslaved people of Sudan, the Kurds, the Yazidis, the Bahai, the Libyans, the Assyrians, and so many, many others, worldwide and in far more desperate, urgent need.
Some, it seems, are beginning to catch on.
Adara Press 