Grievance Industry?

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) gained attention recently, due to some of its employees participating in the atrocities of October 7, including kidnappings and murders.

It was not the first time U.N. workers were accused of atrocities. U.N. workers caused a cholera outbreak in Haiti. They committed sexual abuses in Congo. I have written about the importance of international governance and these horrors don’t help.

But that is not the most interesting problem with UNRWA. UNRWA provides essential services for Palestinians: food, housing, education, health care. Isn’t that a good thing? Yes. For refugees. And in the war with Hamas, there really are a lot of Palestinian refugees. Now.

But why were there so many Palestinian refugees before October 7? The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) works to resettle about 108 million refugees in the world today. But only the Palestinians have their own branch of the U.N. In the words of a recent New York Times editorial:

“It’s that UNRWA may be the only agency in the U.N. system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished.” It goes on:

“The changing borders and independence movements of the post-war era produced millions of refugees: Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, Palestinians and Jews, including some 800,000 Jews who were kicked out of Arab countries that had been their homes for centuries. Nearly all found new lives in new countries – except for Palestinians.”

It concludes: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict […] can’t be solved so long as millions of Palestinians have been turned into the world’s only permanent refugees. By doing that, UNRWA makes itself an obstacle to peace – reason enough for it to finally go away.”

One of my former lady friends was from a Hindu family from the Sindh region of India; until it was given to Pakistan to become a Muslim state. They traveled from one country to another until they settled, ironically, in Muslim Indonesia. They never received compensation. The U.N. doesn’t have an agency promising that one day they will return to a re-unified India. They got on with their lives and some (who we visited) are now “crazy rich Asians” in Singapore.

The far right has their own grievance industry. “Jews/you will not replace us” were chants at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA. They keep waiting for an imagined future where all of the “non-whites” magically disappear from the U.S. and their grievances are resolved.

In case I haven’t angered everyone yet, I will add that there is a “woke” grievance industry as well. As I recently wrote, Black Americans don’t just live with a legacy of slavery. Slavery continues to this day for many, not just Blacks.

But I also wrote about “woke cancel culture” being in direct opposition to the traditional goals of the Left: Universality, equality, free speech, and justice. Educational organization “Embrace Race” says, “We are racial beings.” Really? I thought we are human beings. They recommend children notice racial differences as if they are very important. They even dare to claim support from “science” despite all evidence to the contrary. Should we now accentuate hair or eye color differences? Freud called this “The Narcissism of Minor Differences.”

The DEI industry is $8 billion/year in the U.S. They create “educational” materials on race, bullying, sexual harassment, and anger management. I recently did one of these “trainings” for my own education for this article. I learned that if a co-worker calls you “honey” or asks for a date, it is not enough for them to accept your “no” for an answer. You are mandated to report the “incident.” Even certain consensual activities outside the office must be reported. Job security for the grievance industry.

They are literally asking people to become thought police. In the words of linguist John McWhorter in his book Woke Racism, this policing “infantilizes” people who used to be able to express their concerns to each other as adults.

What started with the best of intentions is now an industry that profits from conflict and grievance. This must end. We need real justice, not manufactured conflict.