Juno News - February 26, 2021


Is Canada funding terrorism and extremism?


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

196.33826

Word count

1,294

Sentence count

1

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The United Nations Relief Agency for Palestine (UNRA) is the United Nations relief agency for Palestine and the Near East and it is responsible for providing care for Palestinian refugees. In this episode, we discuss the problems that UNRA is facing and why it is a problem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 so if you're like me you like to keep track as best as you can of where your money is going and
00:00:11.040 it's the same whether it's my personal finances or government finances i want to make sure that
00:00:15.680 the money is well spent and it's actually going to the things that i would like it to go to so
00:00:20.160 you know i don't want to have a 200 budget for groceries and find out that only 30 actually
00:00:25.360 went to groceries or that all the 200 went to buying snacks now this is something that is very
00:00:31.280 important and two mps took up the task with regards to some foreign aid that canada is making donations
00:00:36.720 to now the two mps are peter kent and marty morance who asked minister karina gould about canada's
00:00:42.960 funding to unra now unra is the united nations relief works agency for palestine and the near east
00:00:50.000 and it is responsible for providing care for palestinian refugees now we'll get into palestinian
00:00:54.880 refugees in just a minute but let's talk about the aid for a second now there's a background here
00:00:59.200 that canada basically pledged 90 million dollars over the next three years for unra so for the
00:01:04.960 relief works agency for palestine and that is supposed to provide basic education help social
00:01:09.600 services to palestinian refugees that's you know 75 million over three years and then the rest is for
00:01:15.200 additional refugees created by the syrian war now this is going to operate in places like the west bank
00:01:21.840 gaza syria lebanon and jordan so a couple of problems with this entire thing first of all
00:01:28.880 unra has been repeatedly found to promote anti-semitic material in its educational materials so for
00:01:35.840 example this latest report shows that the children are being given exercises math exercises and writing
00:01:40.800 exercises about pieces of corpses being strewn throughout the streets and that's you know a
00:01:45.920 spelling test or an english test or you know some kind of test they also strictly refer to israel as
00:01:51.280 the enemy or the occupation the occupier and it's pretty much removed from all maps so there is and
00:01:57.200 never was in israel it's strictly palestine now not only does this type of education make it more
00:02:03.040 difficult for there to be peace in the region since you have an entire generation or possibly generations
00:02:07.360 by now of kids growing up to believe that there never was in israel that israel has absolutely
00:02:11.840 no legitimacy in the region that every single person there is an occupier which is you know it's
00:02:17.120 untrue my family for example is from the middle east so you know this is something that canada is
00:02:23.200 funding and we should be concerned but what is it about unrest something i think slipped by a lot of
00:02:28.160 people when i read this uh the first time and this is where this money is going to be used and it is
00:02:33.360 places like the west bank gaza syria lebanon and jordan so go through them one by one the west bank
00:02:40.400 now most of that where palestinian lives most of that areas where palestinians live that is
00:02:46.160 actually under the governance of the palestinian authority so that's the palestinian government
00:02:50.880 and one might wonder why they need a un agency if they have their own government now fine they might
00:02:55.920 be providing aid or something but all right it's still a question you know something to look deeper
00:02:59.600 into same thing with gaza now gaza is run by hamas which is considered a terrorist organization in
00:03:05.840 canada and so all right you might say the people there uh you know they have serious problems uh
00:03:11.200 maybe they you know are lacking some basic services but you may recall from a previous video where the
00:03:17.840 issue of gaza came up and there's an ongoing hashtag you can look it up on twitter called the gaza you
00:03:23.440 don't see and it shows all of the expensive things being brought into gaza and so obviously there's an
00:03:29.520 issue but there's also a large disparity between the haves and have nots in gaza so again it's not as
00:03:34.960 simple as just the un is providing money and every single person there is a refugee 1.00
00:03:38.320 but the other big ones that should be really confusing to a lot of people are syria lebanon
00:03:43.520 and jordan and so you might ask why are there palestinian refugees from the original 1948 war
00:03:49.120 even the 67 war which is you know slightly more recent why are there palestinian refugees in syria
00:03:54.080 lebanon and jordan that would be like you know someone who was a refugee from that war moving to canada
00:03:59.520 and remaining a palestinian refugee never getting citizenship never you know never becoming
00:04:04.880 uh you know syrian jordanian or lebanese that's because of a couple things number one it's
00:04:11.200 because of how anra defines its refugees it defines refugees as anyone who is a descendant
00:04:16.640 of the people who were forced to vacate their homes if they lived in that area in the 1948 war or also
00:04:22.320 in the 67 war so you could be a descendant your grandfather could have been there and you still
00:04:26.320 count as a refugee that's very very different from the un hcr the un high commissioner for refugees
00:04:32.560 where you would lose your refugee status in many cases if you became a citizen or you lived in
00:04:37.120 another country and you know you're permanent resident now you don't you're not a stateless
00:04:40.400 person you're not you know you're not a refugee you have been set up in some fashion so for the
00:04:45.360 palestinian agency you don't really ever lose your refugee status where the normal refugee agency for
00:04:51.360 all other refugees in the world except for palestinians you would lose your refugee status somehow so 0.99
00:04:56.560 this is sort of one uh problem but the other problem is the fact that those three countries
00:05:01.760 syria lebanon and jordan basically have kept those people as refugees because they know that it will 0.99
00:05:06.960 prolong the conflict and it's a way to sort of punish israel or to just use it as a political
00:05:12.640 bargaining chip in international affairs so they actually in many countries for example in lebanon
00:05:17.600 there's actually laws against what you can become as a profession if you are a palestinian so
00:05:23.200 they have their own issues and for canada to be funding the uh unra the palestinian um united
00:05:29.760 nations relief works agency for uh palestine and the near east for us to be funding that money and
00:05:35.520 not making sure that a they're not using this money to promote hate and do things that will harm
00:05:41.520 any chance of peace in the future because what what they're doing is definitely harming any chance
00:05:45.040 of peace in the future and that the money is appropriately spent so i think you know as canadians
00:05:50.720 it's one thing if you want to have a discussion about foreign aid or international aid we you know
00:05:54.160 we want to help out people who are in trouble and i think there's a really good discussion for us to
00:05:58.400 have about that but if we do decide to send aid abroad i think we all owe it to all other taxpayers
00:06:06.000 and everyone else in canada to have that discussion to make sure that our money is going to be used
00:06:10.640 appropriately so that's pretty much up for this issue and i think we we can all agree especially with the
00:06:15.840 government spending a lot of money these days we want to make sure it is being used appropriately
00:06:19.520 so uh you know for true north i am sam ashkenazi thank you so much for watching this video