After the latest Hamas violence, Kuwait took charge of agitating against Israel at the UN.
Kuwait convened the UN meeting that Ambassador Haley ably shut down. It was pushing a UN draft resolution and an investigation of the violence. The posturing by Kuwait’s U.N. Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi about “protecting civilians” is all the most absurd considering that he’s representing a country that ethnically cleansed 200,000 “Palestinians”.
As Daniel Pipes notes.
Kuwait. Palestinians collaborated with Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait in 1990, so when the country was liberated, they came in for some rough treatment. One Palestinian newspaper found that in Kuwait, “Palestinians are receiving treatment even worse than they have had at the hands of their enemies, the Israelis.“ After surviving the Kuwaiti experience, another Palestinian minced no words: “Now I feel Israel is paradise. I love the Israelis now. I know they treat us like humans. The West Bank [still then under Israeli control] is better [than Kuwait]. At least before the Israelis arrest you, they bring you a paper.“ With less exuberance, Arafat himself concurred: “What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”
So a country whose treatment of the “Palestinians” was described by no less an authority than Arafat as worse than Israel is now pretending to care about them at the United Nations.
A country that practiced actual ethnic cleansing is accusing Israel of its own crimes.
Sabah expressed bitterness at the behavior of Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, who embraced Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait last August, and at Palestinians generally who he said “helped destroy” Kuwait by collaborating with the Iraqis. Before the invasion, he said, there were 380,000 Palestinians in Kuwait … Now, he said, thousands who do not have jobs will be deported or their permits will not be renewed. … “And I think we have a perfect right to demand” it, he said. “It’s not just us in the government demanding it, it’s the people in the street who are demanding it.” … Having a large number of Palestinians in Kuwait would not be “helpful to our security,” he added.
In a February 21, 1991 interview with The Independent, Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah, Kuwait’s crown prince, still in exile, called for “cleansing” Kuwait of “fifth columnists.” By March 13, The Guardian cited government officials expressing the need to “clean out” the Palestinian neighborhoods, and in a speech on April 8, the emir himself urged Kuwaitis to continue the campaign of “cleansing” Kuwait of the alleged “fifth columnists.”
The deportations decimated the Palestinian population in Kuwait from 400,000-450,000 to 10,000-22,000. “The former Palestinian neighborhoods in Kuwait now lie empty of residents,” reported The Guardian.
And this is the regime lecturing Israel on its treatment of the “Palestinians”.
In March 1991, the Associated Press quoted a grave digger at the Riqqa Cemetery in Kuwait, talking about mass graves: “They were all Palestinians … One man had a severed head.”
According to the Palestinian group Badil, “About 4,000 people were killed, and 16,000 tortured in Kuwaiti detention and interrogation centers. Most of these were Palestinians.”
But the height of hypocrisy was achieved by Kuwait itself. On December 22, 1992, just a year after it had expelled 400,000 innocent Palestinians, it had the temerity to send a Kuwaiti Students Union delegation to Lebanon to visit and express Kuwait’s solidarity with the four Palestinians deported by Israel, boasting that Kuwait thus became the first Arab country to show its solidarity with the Palestinian refugees
If Kuwait wants to investigate atrocities and war crimes, it can start at home.
Meanwhile it’s time for the refugees to return back to Kuwait. All 400,000 of them.
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