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Thursday, July 25, 2013

Oops - al-Guardian forgets a few refugees

On Thursday, al-Guardian's data blog did a story called "What happened to the world's refugees?" It seems that they forgot a few.
Regarding the “Nakba”, here’s their remarkably skewed narrative:
Nowhere are numbers on refugees more contentious than the 1948 Palestinian exodus. An attack by a Zionist military group on an Arab village realised the Palestinians’ worst fears and combined with Zionist expulsion orders, military advances, virtually non-existent Palestinian leadership and unwillingness to live under Jewish control on their homeland. The result was a mass exodus of around 80% of Arabs on the land that was to become Israel. Later absentees property law in Israel would prevent the return of those Arabs. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” is commemorated on 15 May each year. The UN set up a special agency, UNRWA, to deal with the enormous numbers of refugees requiring assistance that now number around 5 million.
There are so many omissions, misleading and flatly untrue claims about their tale of the flight of Palestinians, but, suffice to say that, in reading the summary, you could be forgiven for not knowing that there was an even an Arab-Israel War in the first place – a war of aggression against the nascent Jewish state without which there wouldn’t have been a refugee problem.  However, this isn’t at all the most egregious historical error in the piece.
The Guardian then proceeds, from the “Nakba”, to the next refugee crisis: Idi Amin’s Order (Uganda 1972).
Gee. What do you think they missed?

Read the whole thing

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