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Democrats have never turned around any big American city. Why would we think that International Democrats will solve the problems in the middle east?

Boys in the Middle East Hood



In a very insightful article at Asia Times Online Dr. Reuven Brenner makes the case against a "two state solution" in Palestine, arguing that there really aren't just the two groups involved (Jews and Palestinians) but that there are actually four separate groups that can be categorized as Palestinians, and that there is no real "state" in the whole region. The Middle East has splintered into disparate groups of military organizations, each with their own leadership and agenda. Brenner's point is that a traditional solution involving partition cannot work, as we have no one group here to hand over the reins of power. Brenner is essentially arguing that, like Africa immediately after de-colonization, the Middle East has essentially become tribal.
I made a somewhat similar argument a while back at Canada Free Press. The Palestinians are not, have never been, a cohesive tribe or people, but rather are a group of immigrants, most of whom came to do stoop labor for the Turks or take advantage of the booming economy under the British. They are not Canaanites or Philistines, as many claim, but are merely Muslim immigrants from disparate parts of the Turkish Empire. And recent immigrants, too. Many were illegal. This makes one think of the Hispanic colonization efforts here in the U.S.; imagine if in half a century the Hispanics demand half of the United States as their birthright. The point is, there are no such things as "Hispanics" but rather Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Columbians, Panamanians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc. The Palestinians are much the same. Now add to that the splintering effects of foreign entanglements, of differences in religion, of divided loyalties to financiers and state sponsors. And to the U.N.

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One must ask why there is so much violence in the region, and why have these groups become so splintered. What has radicalized the Palestinians? It is axiomatic that if you want to reduce a given behavior you boycott funding, and if you want to increase it you subsidize it. Human behavior can be manipulated by governments or other entities via funding or threats to dry up funding. Take Climatology, which was a sleepy backwater discipline, a branch of meteorology; governments and environmental groups began funding it heavily, and now it is a major branch of science, and one that is quick to produce mountains of dubious research that buttresses the case for human-caused global warming - a case that, not surprisingly, is in the interest of governments because it helps them expand their power and squeeze more money out of the citizenry. That is, after all, the whole point of political boycotts - dry up funding for a given group. It is the point of labor union picket lines. It is why governments have a legal recognition of marriage. It is why charitable organizations are tax-exempt. The list goes on. Taking this economic argument farther, one must ask a simple question; are we somehow subsidizing many of the ills of our modern society? The answer is obviously yes. Something that should be obvious to those who look is that there is a striking similarity between the violence on America's streets and the violence in the Middle East, and one must ask if there is perhaps some link, some similarity that defines both problems. There is; both are heavily subsidized. First, let us look at urban violence in the United States. Crime is especially endemic among African-American city dwellers, but it is also endemic among other, poorer groups as well. This was not always the case; crime rates skyrocketed after the "War on Poverty" escalated funding to these "deprived" communities. Walter E. Williams Economist at George Mason University makes it obvious that something is wrong in the modern African-American community:
"Only 40 percent of black children live in two-parent households. The illegitimacy rate among blacks stands close to 70 percent. The "legacy of slavery" explanation for today's weak black family structure loses all manner of credibility when one examines evidence from the past. Even during slavery, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of nineteenth century slave families (Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925) found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were double-headed. In fact, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a black teenage girl raising a child without a man was rare among blacks. Historian Herbert Gutman, also found in analyzing data on black families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925, that only 3 percent of all families "were headed by a woman under thirty." Thomas Sowell found, "Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940." In absolute numbers, blacks commit most of the crime in the U.S. Blacks account for half of all the arrests for assault and rape and two-thirds of arrests for robbery"
What happened in 1940? The New Deal began to kick in, subsidizing out-of-wedlock births and making it easier for black males to sire children they would not have to support. This is not intended to pick on African-Americans, but they were the community hardest hit by the subsidies. The fact is, money flowed from the pockets of taxpayers through Washington to subsidize the "War on Poverty", a war that seemed intent on making more poverty. They have given us AFDC, SSI, WIC, Section 8 housing, the marriage penalty, Obama phones, aid for utility bills, etc. All of these things have been, by accident or design, instrumental in destroying the black family, the black community, and the poorer white, Hispanic, and Asian communities as well. But it is especially detrimental to the black community. According toF.B.I. data, there were 288,460 violent crimes in the United States. By 1975 it had risen to 1,039,710 and it peaked in 1992 at 1,932,274. The fifteen years after 1960 saw an increase of over three hundred percent. And the crime rate remained over 1.7 million until 1996, the year Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act ("welfare reform"). Violent crime began to drop after that, hitting a nadir of 1,203,564 in 2011. While Barack Obama has been diligently trying to chip away at welfare reform, he has been unable to kill it until last year. Interestingly enough, violent crime increased 12% nationwide in 2012. There are other reasons for the drop in crime rates, but what should be apparent to even the casual observer is that America subsidized poverty, and crime rose at the same time. There appears to be a causal link between the culture of welfare and crime. It makes sense; more welfare means more people with time on their hands, more welfare means more children who have no one to provide for them and no real sense of family - making the street gangs appealing. More welfare means more money to spend on gangsta rap music and gangsta paraphernalia. More money for drugs and liquor. It also means more money to be used to ramp up anger in the black community as "community organizer" types are flush with cash from Uncle Sam, ostensibly to ease these very problems. Uncle Sam has replaced the father in the family. He has become a god to the poor, because without him they will surely die. What are the most dangerous cities in America? Between 2003 and 2009 they were 1.St. Louis, 2.Atlanta 3.a tie between Orlando and 4.Birmingham, Alabama 5.Detroit 6.Memphis 7.Miami 8.Baltimore 9.Kansas City and ten is a tie between Cleveland and Minneapolis. Please note that these are almost all cities that have been controlled by Democrats for decades and have very generous welfare programs. I think there is little doubt that welfare is one of the causes of crime in America. Which brings us to the point of this essay. Reuven Brenner, in the article I cited at the beginning, had this to say;
"Last but not least, there is "refugee/welfare tribe" - the fourth group - created and sustained inadvertently by the continued existence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) - dispersed in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. This refugee group has different features from the other three, and is probably the toughest to find solutions for. Whereas some 50 million European refugees after World War II have long been absorbed in various destinations, it is reasonable to ask why is it that the only refugee problem dating from the 1940s has not been, and what can be the subject of negotiation with representatives of this group? The answer to the first part of the question is that when the United Nations voted for Israel, they also voted setting up a welfare plan for the roughly 400,000 Palestinians who left in 1948 what became then Israel's territory. The UNRWA was the institution involved and was supposed to last for two years. Yet it still exists - and it is a unique institution: there has never in the subsequent 65 years been another such institution created to deal exclusively with one particular refugee group, and defining descendants of the 1948 refugees as "refugees" too. Inadvertently this institution created over the seven decades a Palestinian welfare tribe, many of whom still live in camps, with few rights, and depending on the continued subsidies from "strangers''. This group does not have much in common with the other three - though it has some traits common with other welfare tribes created inadvertently around the world (aboriginals on Canada's reservations being one of them)."
In short, we are subsidizing the Palestinian Entifada. The UNRWA website boasts;
"UNRWA's Procurement and Logistics Division (PLD) is responsible for the procurement, distribution and provision of all food, goods and services required to support over four million Palestine refugees in all of UNRWA's areas of operation. UNRWA PLD is based at UNRWA's headquarters in Amman, Jordan and in each UNRWA field office in Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. PLD provides Palestine refugees with high-standard goods and services, while striving to achieve best value for the money UNRWA receives from its donors. In support of this aim, the UNRWA procurement process is transparent, fair and in line with general UN procurement practices."
And they define their social mission:
"The relief and social services (RSS) programme provides a range of direct and indirect social protection services in the Agency's five fields of operation.
Food distribution
The department focuses on three main goals: * Providing impoverished Palestine refugees with social safety net assistance on a quarterly basis. * Promoting the development and self-reliance of less-advantaged members of the refugee community, especially women, children, young people, people with disabilities and the elderly. * Maintaining, updating and preserving the records and documents of registered Palestine refugees, in order to determine eligibility for UNRWA services" [...] "UNRWA's social services programme addresses some of the most pressing socio-economic needs of the Palestine refugee community. It promotes community-based action that enables particularly vulnerable refugees to become more self-reliant. The programme is committed to developing the institutional capacity of more than 100 community-based organisations (CBOs) that organise a wide range of social, cultural and recreational activities, as well as skills training and rehabilitation services. To systematically fulfill this commitment, UNRWA developed the capacity assessment tool, which was piloted in one in five CBOs. The tool contributes to building the governance, management and leadership, programmes and services and financial management of the CBOs, as well as assessing they make each year. The programme particularly addresses the needs of women, refugees with disabilities, young people and the elderly. It also helps vulnerable refugees through its micro-credit programme, which is managed by community-based organisations."
And they boast of their educational prowess:
"The Agency operates one of the largest school systems in the Middle East, with nearly 700 schools, and has been the main provider of free-of-charge basic education to Palestine refugees for over sixty years."
So, the United Nations has been subsidizing the Palestinians, giving them food, money, shelter, and education. Is it any wonder they are radicalized? Their education seems to fall short where real peace is concerned. And that's a fact; UNRWA has been accused repeatedly of promoting and funding terrorism. They promote it in schools. In fact, Canada defunded this "charity" as a sponsor of terrorism back in 2010. It should also be pointed out that the Palestinians have a very high birth rate, which mirrors the problems in the African-American community. and elsewhere can be explained as much by these international subsidies as by the Islamic comfort with sexual excess (a man may have four wives and as many concubines - read hookups - as they wish.) What does this tell us? An agency of the U.N. has spent over sixty years building a welfare state and you have the same sort of grievance and violence that you see in America's inner cities - a culture at war with those who provide their subsistence. Bear in mind that the United States is the chief financier of the United Nations, and so it is the U.S. taxpayer who is funding terrorism against Israel. Granted, there are other causes of Mideast violence, especially since the U.S. and Soviet Union fought a proxy war in the region for about the same amount of time and because the control of oil has allowed the Arabs - particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran - rich enough to subsidize the military aspects of these disparate groups that Professor Brenner discusses. Dr. Brenner is correct; we now have a tribal situation, only the tribes are associations of individuals funded from outside. But the point I am making is that the ultimate responsibility can be laid at the feet of the United Nations, an organization that has spent decades promoting socialism and anti-Americanism worldwide. And we continue to fund it. The problems in the Mideast are the same as those of Detroit; Liberals in the U.N. or Democrats in the U.S. have promoted similar policies with very similar results. Israel is essentially trapped in a welfare-state Hood. But these problems will not be solved, because the Left controls the flow of money, subsidizing the turmoil. Democrats have never turned around any big American city. Why would we think that International Democrats will solve the problems in the middle east?


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Timothy Birdnow -- Bio and Archives

Timothy Birdnow is a conservative writer and blogger and lives in St. Louis Missouri. His work has appeared in many popular conservative publications including but not limited to The American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Intellectual Conservative and Orthodoxy Today. Tim is a featured contributor to American Daily Reviewand has appeared as a Guest Host on the Heading Right Radio Network. Tim’s website is tbirdnow.mee.nu.


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