Indian-born British Jewish artist Anish Kapoor announced earlier this month that he would be donating the $1 million Genesis Prize he was awarded last year to five nongovernmental organizations that help refugees.
Let's hope his donation will help hundreds or thousands of people forced to flee from civil wars and mass killings, as has been the case in many third-world countries.
Kapoor is famous for his large sculptures that both reflect reality but also distort it through fascinating arrangements of mirrors.
Some 40 to 50 million people worldwide have had to flee their homelands because of mortal danger. They are real refugees, who had to leave their homes not in search of better living conditions but because their affiliations with certain ethnic groups or religions turned them into walking targets by other ethnic or religious groups.
Millions of Kurds fled Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Other ethno-religious groups had to flee parts of Iraq when the Islamic State thugs took over a few years ago. The civil war in Syria has led millions to leave, knowing that staying there under the rule of a hostile ethnic group would have meant certain death. There are no good guys and bad guys there – the Sunnis and the Shiites have shown the same ability to be evil and slaughter civilians.
Such cruelty has been widespread in various places in Africa as well. Although most refugees in Asia and Africa are fleeing persecution by radical Islamists, there are also those who have fled from other kinds of religious wars or from political or other types of persecution.
Despite all this, the international NGOs, which have an abundance of resources and generous support from governments, have not been able to help the real refugees. What's worse, they are not even trying. Instead, a great number of resources have been dedicated to helping "Palestinian refugees," even though many of them are clearly not refugees.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the main U.N. refugee agency, is tasked with alleviating the plight of all non-Palestinian refugees around the world. But while that agency is cash-strapped, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was created only to help Palestinians, has been flush with cash. It is outrageous that UNRWA has three times as many people on the payroll as UNHCR. And this is even though there are millions of new refugees each year around the world.
The fake data presented by UNRWA over the number of Palestinian refugees generates a lot of money. The billions that have been thrown at solving "the plight of the Palestinian refugees" have fueled a systematic hatred of Israel in UNRWA's schools and padded the bank accounts of Palestinian officials. The squandered resources could have been used to relieve the real hardships suffered by refugees from Rwanda, Bangladesh and Iraq, among others.
Those who have been shouting non-stop over the need to help the fake refugees and focusing international attention on them have been drowning out the voices of the real refugees. Don't fall for this.
Listen to Anish Kapoor and help those who are in need of real help.
