Survivor claims: 'father of dead toddler Alan Kurdi is a ‘people smuggler’.

Survivor claims: 'father of dead toddler Alan Kurdi is a ‘people smuggler’. (TheAustralian).

A woman on the same boat as Alan Kurdi says the boy’s father is a people smuggler who begged her not to dob him in.

Zainab Abbas said Abdullah Kurdi had lied to the world after the image of his dead three-year-old son on a Turkish beach sparked a global outpouring of support for Syrian refugees.

“Yes, it was Abdullah Kurdi driving the boat,” Ms Abbas told Network Ten through her cousin Lara Tahseen today.

Ms Abbas also lost two children when the boat capsized shortly after leaving Bodrum for the Greek islands.

After the tragedy, Mr Kurdi told the media he took over steering the boat after the captain panicked and jumped ship.

But Ms Abbas said Mr Kurdi was the driver of the boat, and the man she paid to book her passage told her it would be safe because the driver was taking his wife and two children.

“When I lost my kids, I lost my life, how can he lie to the media?” her cousin Ms Tahseen said, translating for Ms Abbas.

“He said, ‘Please don’t dob me in.’ That was in the water.”

Ms Abbas said Mr Kurdi was speeding in the overcrowded boat, which did not have enough life jackets.

She said her husband told him to be careful just before the boat capsized, reportedly killing at least 12 people.

Ms Abbas is now in Iraq and her family has called on the federal government to include them in the 12,000 refugees Australia has pledged to take in.Read the full story here. More here from the National Post.

Alan Kurdi the drowned Kurdish child's body used for Photoshoot Staging?

Alan Kurdi the drowned Kurdish child's body used for Photoshoot Staging?

The photos were taken by Turkish State Run media agency Anadolu Agency.

With all respect for the family and the deceased boy i fear the question must be asked.

Update! Carl in Jerusalem has more on this Question.

Really? #AylanKurdi's limp little body was moved for a manipulated photo op? The retrieval was staged? Good Lord.. pic.twitter.com/RH181NT0un

— Archbishop Cranmer (@His_Grace) September 7, 2015

@His_Grace This analysis has been doing the rounds, while a convincing analysis, I wasn't sure. Until now. pic.twitter.com/XSXyhT97ds

— countryboylife (@countryboylife) September 7, 2015

@MFS001 @WTEpaminondas @IsraelMatzav And only one of them made it into the papers. Yes it seems extremely odd.

— Britain Loves Israel (@BritsForIsrael) September 8, 2015

@IsraelMatzav Same design of shoe and cop i would say,as @BritsForIsrael pointed out why not both kids in the news? pic.twitter.com/OIg4INyVAM

— MFS - The Other News (@MFS001) September 8, 2015

UN calls on EU to admit up to 200,000 refugees.

UN calls on EU to Flood admit up to 200,000 refugees.(DW).

The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Refugees has called for up to 200,000 refugees to be shared across the European Union. Various meetings are due to be held across the EU to discuss the crisis.

Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said on Friday that EU member states would be bound to the "mass relocation program." "People who are found to have a valid protection claim ... must then benefit from a mass relocation program, with the mandatory participation of all EU member states," Guterres said in a statement.

"No country can do it alone, and no country can refuse to do its part," he declared.

A European source told AFP news agency that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker would next week unveil a plan for the relocation of at least 120,000 more refugees. Push for EU solidarity

Guterres' call on Friday followed similar demands from Germany and France for a binding EU quota on the number of refugees taken in by each member state.

"So many refugees are arriving at our external borders that we can't leave Italy or Greece alone to deal with the task," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "Neither can it be that three countries, like Sweden, Austria and Germany, are left alone with the lion's share of the task," she added.

Poland warned on Friday that the EU must tackle the causes behind the huge migrant influx or risk being inundated with millions of refugees. "The scale of the migration is enormous, so we can't focus - I'm talking about the whole of Europe - on allocating illegal migrants without fighting the causes [of their arrival]," Schetyna told private Radio Zet.

"We have to think of how to stop the illegal migration. Otherwise [we may have] soon have 3-4 million economic refugees," he added. Hmmmm.....If or when the UN Food program starts cutting aid to the refugees the real 'Reconquista' of Europe will begin in earnest.Read the full story here.

Video - Tima Kurdi speaks about the drowning death of her sister-in-law and two nephews off the coast of Turkey.

'The Naked Truth' Why little Alan Kurdi and his family never really had a chance of reaching Canada.

Why little Alan Kurdi and his family never really had a chance of reaching Canada. HT: NationalPost.

It’s the most heartbreaking thing about the story of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee child lying dead on a Turkish beach in his tiny shoes, his blue shorts and his perfect little red shirt. It is also the most overlooked and least-understood part of the story of that photograph that has driven people all around the world half-mad with rage.

The little angel never had a hope in hell.

It had all seemed so hopeful, at least for a fleeting few weeks. Alan and his five-year-old brother Ghalib and their mother Rehenna and their father Abdullah were going to get out. They were going to make it. Uncle Mohammad and Auntie Ghuson and his four cousins were going to make it, too. They were all going to join Auntie Tima in Canada, and everything was going to be all right.

But they never had a chance, and the plan was dead in the water long before it even appeared as part of a meticulously developed plan contained in a carefully constructed, elaborate submission, with appendices, drafted by the smart young Coquitlam-Port Moody New Democratic Party MP Fin Donnelly and submitted directly to Citizenship & Immigration Minister Chris Alexander.

They were all going to make it to Canada by way of a G5 private-sponsorship application for refugee resettlement in Canada.

When the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post published some of the photographs from that Turkish beach and reported that the Kurdis had been hoping to make their way to Canada, there was another wave of rage. We all wanted a villain to blame, and Chris Alexander leapt into the role by having come off like a thoroughly insensitive jackass, that same day, on the very subject of the Syrian refugee crisis, on CBC’s Power and Politics.

But simple stories like these almost always prove to be complicated. There is nothing quite so complicated, and at the same time straightforward, as the reasons why a fair assessment would find that there was probably little if anything Alexander could have done for the Kurdi families. The villainy, if that is what it is, is to be found mostly in Turkey’s exemption from certain provisions of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees does not register asylum seekers in Turkey. Turkey does not issue exit visas to refugees who do not possess referrals from the UNHCR.

In Turkey, there are no “refugee camps.” There are Turkish “temporary protection shelters.” The Kurdis had no papers, no UNHCR refugee designations, and no passports, and therefore did not qualify for exit visas.

That is why their plans to obtain G5 refugee-resettlement approvals from Citizenship and Immigration Canada were doomed from the start, and it is why Alan and Ghalib and their parents ended up boarding that boat. Hmmmm.......As i said right away PM Harper is NOT to blame, #Turkey is.Read the full story here.

Video - UN’s Schabas digs deeper hole, won’t say if he’ll investigate Hamas or if it’s a terror group.

Video - UN’s Schabas digs deeper hole, won’t say if he’ll investigate Hamas or if it’s a terror group. HT: UNWatch. IsraelMatzav.

This may go down as one of the all-time worst TV interviews by a UN figure.

Asked by Israeli TV’s Channel 2 why he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his “favorite” to indict in the International Criminal Court — instead of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Hamas leader Khaled Mashal — Schabas explained that he merely “echoed” the Goldstone Report. Except that Netanyahu wasn’t in power then — and, in fact, isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Goldstone Report. Schabas fumbled for a defense, and miserably failed.

There are other doozies:

- Schabas refused to say if his commission of inquiry would examine crimes by Hamas. He said he needs to check with the other commissioners. (Actually, there’s only one other commissioner, Doudou Diene; the third one, Clooney fiancee Amal Alamuddin, pulled out on the same day the UN announced her appointment.)

- Schabas refused to call Hamas a terrorist group, even though it is legally defined as such by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Jordan, Egypt, Australia, Japan and Israel.

- Schabas said Israel “gets off light at the Security Council,” a myth he often repeats but which has no basis whatsoever. In fact, most countries, including many of the world’s worst abusers, never get criticized at all in the UNSC, whereas Israel has been criticized in numerous UNSC resolutions, debates and presidential statements. That the US has vetoed most of the virulent and one-sided attacks against Israel launched by the Arab states is a good and right thing. The problem is that Schabas supports these biased campaigns.

Once again, UN Watch demands that William Schabas recuse himself from the UN inquiry on Gaza due to his manifest bias, or appearance thereof. Click here for more.

In a 2009 blog post, Schabas wrote that the world should not just ignore” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements, but to stop "exaggerating" them. "Those who deserve the blame are “Israel and its friends, who have manipulated the truth about the nature of the work of the United Nations by gross exaggeration of the role and intervention of certain fanatics," Schabas said .

In 2011, Schabas went to Iran, to co-sponsor conferences with the Tehran-based Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, where he was keynote speaker. The center has close ties with former Iranian president President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.[14]

How UNRWA Steals Money from Those Who Need It Most.

How UNRWA Steals Money from Those Who Need It Most.HT:TundraTabloids.By Evelyn Gordon.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is threatening to end relief operations for Syrian refugees, who currently number 1.3 million and counting, if it doesn’t receive the necessary funds soon. 

The agency says it has received only a third of the $1 billion it needs through June, and only $400 million of the $1.5 billion donors pledged earlier this year.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned explicitly that absent more funds, UNHCR will have to stop distributing food to refugees in Lebanon next month. And Jordan, which has the largest population of Syrian refugees, is threatening to close its borders to new entrants unless more aid is forthcoming urgently.

Meanwhile, another UN agency enjoys comfortable funding of about $1 billion a year to help a very different group of refugees–refugees who generally live in permanent homes rather than flimsy tents in makeshift camps; who have never faced the trauma of flight and dislocation, having lived all their lives in the place where they were born; who often have jobs that provide an income on top of their refugee benefits; and who enjoy regular access to schooling, healthcare and all the other benefits of non-refugee life. In short, these “refugees” are infinitely better off than their Syrian brethren–yet their generous funding continues undisturbed even as Syrian refugees are facing the imminent loss of such basics as food and fresh water. I am talking, of course, about UNRWA.

It has long been clear that UNRWA–which deals solely with Palestinian refugees, while UNHCR bears responsibility for all other refugees on the planet–is a major obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Since, unlike UNHCR, it grants refugee status to the original refugees’ descendants in perpetuity, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from under 700,000 in 1949 to over five million today, even as the world’s non-Palestinian refugee population has shrunk from over 100 million to under 30 million. Moreover, while UNHCR’s primary goal is to resettle refugees, UNRWA hasn’t resettled a single refugee in its history: By its definition, refugees remain refugees even after acquiring citizenship in another country. It has thereby perpetuated and exacerbated the Palestinian refugee problem to the point where it has become the single greatest obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement: Israel cannot absorb five million Palestinian refugees (though it could easily absorb the fewer than 50,000 original refugees who still remain alive), yet under UNRWA’s rules, refugee status can’t be ended except by resettlement in Israel.Hmmmm......The 'Palestinian refugee perpetuum mobile'.Read the full story here.