UN Fails Again

The New York Times runs an article about how jihadist groups are filling a power vacuum in the Palestinian refugee camps, causing strife and conflict within the camps and raising the spectre of violence against the Lebanese government and beyond.

A standoff between the Lebanese Army and Islamists at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has focused attention on a jihadist element taking root there as well as a radicalization in the Palestinian areas themselves.

With the fragmentation of authority in Gaza, and its isolation, said a Gazan analyst, Taysir Mhaisin, “there is an increase of fundamentalism and the birth of groups believing in violence and practicing violence as a model created by bin Ladenism.”

Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst of Palestinian politics for the International Crisis Group, said, “There is a security vacuum that creates space for all kinds of new grouplets and forces.”

Palestinian authority, both in the Palestinian areas and in refugee camps in Lebanon and beyond, used to lie in the hands of Fatah, the nationalist faction once led by Yasir Arafat. But after the entry of militant Hamas into politics, its 2006 electoral defeat of Fatah and the battles between them, jihadi freelancers with murky links are filling a vacuum in Gaza and in the camps in Lebanon.

Bush administration officials say they are increasingly concerned that Hamas and even more radical groups may be hijacking the Palestinian movement. The officials say they see no operational connection between what is happening in Palestinian camps in Lebanon and the deterioration in Gaza. But they say they do see an ideological link, with hopeless and marginalized young people turning to jihad because they believe that more secular or moderate options have failed them.

In the squalid streets of the Ain al Hilwe refugee camp outside the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, people like Abu Ahmed Taha are bracing for a fight they have long been dreading.

Militias in the camp of 47,000 roam the streets armed and ready; skirmishes break out sporadically and tensions have never been higher. For Mr. Taha, the real danger is that the fastest-growing militias are those of jihadis with wholly different aspirations from his.

Those camps are administered by the United Nations under a program began in the aftermath of the 1947-1948 Israeli War of Independence. The camps were established for refugees from the war, and have never been disbanded. Until recently, the leading thugs in these camps were members of the PLO - Fatah. Now that Fatah is no longer the only terrorist group with a say in what happens to the Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority, internecine conflict is likely to spread there. Jihadist groups like al Qaeda may also be exploiting the situation, which begs the question: How exactly are these terrorist groups and jihadis getting past the UN officials running the Palestinian refugee camps? They are supposed to be preventing such actions, and yet they turn a blind eye to the guys bringing in the guns and heavy weapons.

The UN once again has failed to do its intended job, and turns a blind eye to the terrorism brewing under its oversight of those displaced by conflicts.