RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many years ago, when I graduated from college, a friend and classmate got her first job in the visitor’s service of the United Nations. There were two perks. One was a free parking space and the other privileges to the debates in the General Assembly. Thanks to this I attended many sessions in the gallery as her guest. The “distinguished” members most often started their disquisitions by telling a humorous anecdote from their respective nations. They suffered greatly in translation but I can offer the punch line to a real UN joke–namely The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, UNRWA was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949 to carry out relief and works programs for Palestine refugees. The Agency began operations on 1 May 1950. In June 2017, its mandate and funding come up for review. It deserves to be shut down.

First of all, it is a numbers racket. According to its own statement: “When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”

Even if we accept the questionable number of 750,000 Arabs who left Israel, how is it that sixty-seven years later–again from the home page, we read: “UNRWA is unique in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees. It has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as ‘persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.’ The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.“

Again, in its words: “UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty.”

Since World War Two, hundreds of millions of displaced persons from every continent have been relocated. They have had to learn new languages, new alphabets and adapt to new cultural mores. They have become participants in the politics of their adopted countries. How is it then that only Palestinian Arabs merit assistance? Furthermore, why has the status of “refugee” become a heritable entitlement, bequeathed from generation to generation?

When members of the media traipse through the camps, they are seldom shown nearby housing with facilities and running water. Instead local Arabs stage themselves near running sewers, cynically using children as props. As soon as the journalists move on to the next stop in their bash-Israel “fact finding” tour, the cast moves back to their updated lodgings.

Today the world is confronted and affronted by a tsunami of refugees from the Middle East. They flee jihad and tribal and civil warfare. The demand for haven and social services is enormous and yet UNRWA services only Palestinian Arabs in camps in Gaza (why Gaza, which is now ruled by Arabs?), Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

In the midst of the mayhem in Syria, on Feb. 1, 2017 Mohammed Abdi Adar, a Somali national, assumed his duties as Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Syrian Arab Republic. He describes his mandate thus: “It is an important opportunity to serve Palestine refugees in Syria,” said Mr. Abdi Adar. “I look forward to working with the Syrian Government and other partners to help alleviate the suffering of Palestine refugees, who like the Syrians have experienced the dire consequences of the crisis over the last six years.” Why only the “Palestinians?” This is a form of “profiling” that raises no hackles among Western hypocrites.

And UNWRA’s so called relief is a canard since in its own words, conditions have worsened: “Over the years, these camps have transformed from temporary ‘tent cities’ into hyper-congested masses of multi-story buildings with narrow alleys, characterized by high concentrations of poverty and extreme overcrowding. The camps are considered to be among the densest urban environments in the world, but because camp structures were built for temporary use, over the decades the buildings have become overcrowded, critically substandard and in many cases life-threatening.”

Why after 67 years are Palestinian Arabs a priority when hundreds of thousands are facing death and violence perpetrated by Arabs on other Arabs?

Deuteronomy, if taken literally, would seem to prescribe execution as the solution to delinquent children. Ah, but then there are those informed commentaries and qualifications, which say the opposite. The problem with Islam is that none can nor dare filter Koranic literalism.
I switch on TV. Experienced interviewer Andrew Knut is posing this loaded question to a representative of a rabbinic council. Should you have your rebellious son stoned to death, he asks?

As you can imagine, this startles the rabbi. What the heck do you mean?

Well here it is, says Knut. I am reading from a Jewish Bible; in particular from Deuteronomy chapter 21 verses 18 to 21. He duly reads the passage.

“If a man will have a wayward and rebellious son, who does not hearken to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother, and they discipline him, but he does not hearken to them; then his father and his mother shall grasp him and take him out to the elders of the city, ‘This son of ours is wayward and rebellious; he does not hearken to our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard’. All the men of his city shall pelt him with stones and he shall die…”

Ah, now, yes, you have to understand the whole process, the rabbi protests. Stoning is very much a last resort. A last resort indeed, he emphasises. First, you must as parents hug you son and buy him presents to convince him to give up his rebellious ways. If this fails then you must give him a good talking to and warn him of the consequences of his bad behaviour. Make him sleep in the shed. Only when all of this fails do you hand him over to be stoned to death. So you see there is nothing at all to see here.

Knut is not mollified. Well, it still seems a tad extreme to me, he says. Surely you must disavow this passage in your Bible? It is the only civilised thing to do. Don’t you think?

OK, you got me! None of the above actually happened. But I guess you guessed that. What is true, however, is my citation of the passage in Deuteronomy. In my Jewish Bible there is an accompanying annotation. It explains that the Sages (great Jewish scholars of old) constrain the applicability of the passage to someone who will “degenerate into a monstrous human being” and moreover “state that there never was and never will be a capital case involving such a son.”

Here is my non-scholarly take. The Jewish religion and, by extension, the Christian religion (as it, too, encompasses the Old Testament) are willing to deviate from taking God at His literal Word, as it is recorded in the Bible. Literalists, they are not. As a Christian, I am personally happy with this. There is a fair amount in the Bible that it’s best not to take too literally. Inspired and guided by God though it is; we should be cognisant that flawed men of their time wrote it; and others, also flawed, selected, translated and compiled its various parts.

Therefore, for example, I remain open to the possibility that a man lying with a man might not be regarded by God as an abomination (Leviticus, 18:22). And, to move to the New Testament and St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (5:22), I seriously doubt that wives “should submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” According to David Horrell (An Introduction to the Study of Paul), this letter might not have been written by Paul at all but by a later disciple of his, concerned about the prominence of women in the early Christian church. Who knows? In any event, in all things, we should not forsake our wits. God gave them to us.

And now to something completely different; to something that actually happened. The path-breaking Andrew Bolt asked Keysar Trad, representing the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, what he thought of Koranic verse IV: 34. Why do I say ‘path-breaking’? Because this is only the second time I have witnessed a commentator quote the Koran to an Islamic representative as a way to put him or her on the spot and forestall the usual distractive spin — that ‘religion of peace’ sophistry. And the first time? That was Bolt too.

The verse is clear enough, though it varies in detail depending on the version of the Koran. Mine is the Pickthall version. “Men are in charge of women,” it says. There is nothing much different here from the passage in Ephesians that I referred to above. However, the Koranic passage goes on to say, “As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, and banish them to beds apart and scourge them.” Often scourge is written as “beat”, which sounds a bit less barbarous. But, whichever word is used, this is not a good look.