In an article written by Zionist Federation of Australian President Jeremy Leibler for The Australian in September Mr Leibler put out a strong plea that our government stop fostering hatred by continuing to provide unconditional foreign aid to UNRWA.
Director of the Centre for Near East Policy Research David Bedein has devoted more than two decades to exposing the malfeasances of UNRWA and his passionate message is that it is up to us to be putting pressure on our Department of Foreign Affairs to see that appropriate conditions are imposed on the significant amount of aid that Australia provides to UNRWA; Australia is one of the top ten countries in the world funding UNRWA.
On Friday Dec 13th, a black day indeed, the vote on the continuation of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) mandate for the next 3 years took place in the United Nations General Assembly. Here is the result with Australia toeing the line with 161 other nations giving UNRWA a free ticket.
We as a community should be doing as much as we can right now to address this vital issue and that is why I am calling for support from members of our community for a widespread grassroots advocacy initiative.
David Bedein has expressed clearly what we can do and I exhort everyone to get behind this important initiative that gives each and everyone of us the opportunity to have a say and hopefully exert some influence on our nation’s foreign aid policy.
Yours,
David Schulberg
P.S. Go to the page for ‘The Israel Connexion‘ to listen to my interview with David Bedein there in program 201.