U.N. promotion of 'Palestine' may cost U.S. contributions
Senators tell Kerry to 'ensure no disbursements made' to international group or 'related entities'
Published: 8 hours ago
A United Nations maneuver to give international recognition to the Palestinian Authority as a nation may have backfired, with a coalition of 28 U.S. senators insisting pressing to cut off funding to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and its affiliate, the Green Climate Fund, to which President Obama has pledged $3 billion.
U.S. law prohibits the distribution of tax money to organizations that recognize “Palestine” as a state.
The senators have dispatched a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, insisting that he make sure no more U.S. taxpayer money is handed over to the UNFCCC, or its related GCF, to further its global warming agenda.
CNS News reported the same problem arose in 2011 whenthe U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognized the PA as a member.
“The administration has been trying since then to obtain congressional waiver authority to enable it to restore funding to ENESCO, without success,” the report said.
Joel Richardson’s “When a Jew Rules the World: What the Bible Says About Israel in the Plan of God” is available at the WND Superstore!
Federal law prohibits taxpayer money from being given to U.N. operations that recognize organizations or groups that lack “the internationally recognized attributes of statehood,” warns a letter to Kerry from a team of senators that include John Barrasso, Shelley Moore, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton.
The move, although it apparently would involve a sum estimated at only about $13 million for the 2017 fiscal year for the UNFCCC alone, would be a harsh reproof to Obama’s efforts to vastly expand U.S. taxpayer spending for anti-global warming political efforts and hit at the heart of his promise to give the GCF $3 billion over four years.
Some $500 million already has been delivered.
The letter explained that the “State of Palestine” was allowed in March “to become a full member of the UNFCCC.”
“That action triggered a statutory restriction under current law that now prohibits the U.S. government from providing U.S. taxpayer funds to the UNFCCC and its related entities, such as the UNFCCC Secretariat, the Green Climate Fund, the Conference of the Parties (COP), and the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol,” it said.
To Kerry, the senators wrote: “We request that you ensure that no disbursements of U.S. funds are made to the UNFCCC and its related entities after March 17, 2016. We believe that your failure to do so will constitute a violation of current law.”
The senators explain the 1994 law prohibits sending taxpayer money to “any affiliated organization of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”
The UNFCCC is linked to the U.N. in a variety of ways, but the U.S. government “does not recognize the ‘State of Palestine,’ which is not a sovereign state and does not possess the ‘internationally recognized attributes of statehood.'”
The senators address the political machinations inside the U.N. that are pushing for recognition of “Palestine” as a state.
“The only realistic and sustainable path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The unilateral actions of the Palestinians to seek statehood recognition through UN affiliated organizations, treaties, conventions, and agreements serve only to circumvent direct negotiations. … The accession of the Palestinians to the UNFCCC and its efforts to secure full membership in other UN affiliated organizations undermine those negotiations and make achieving a comprehensive peace agreement more difficult.”
They continued: “The inability of the U.S. government to block the Palestinians from being admitted for membership as a state by the UNFCCC and other U.N. affiliated organizations is extremely troublesome. We urge the administration to clarify, both publicly and privately, that the United States does not consider the ‘State of Palestine’ to be a sovereign state, and to work diligently to prevent the Palestinians from being recognized as a sovereign state for purposes of joining U.N. affiliated organizations, treaties, conventions, and agreements.
“We implore the administration to hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions in circumventing the peace process, and to abide by current law prohibiting U.S. taxpayer funds for the UNFCCC and its related entities and other UN affiliated organizations that recognize the ‘State of Palestine.'”
Analyst Eugene Kontorovich, a Northwestern University professor, wrote at the Volokh Conspiracy blog: “The little-noticed development raises larger questions about executive nonenforcement of federal law and the collateral damage to international institutions caused by the Palestinian issue.”
He explained the U.N. move “is part of the Palestinian effort to be declared a state outside of negotiations with Israel. U.S. policy opposes such moves, and thus requires the defunding of any U.N. organization that grants the Palestinian Authority such status.”
CNS reported Barrasso already had challenged Obama’s transfer of half a billion dollars to the GCF, noting such a payment violates legislation that prevents federal agencies from spending money in advance or in excess of what Congress authorizes.
The Volokh commentary noted that there actually is another law impact the funding too.
“A 1990 measure … bars aid to United Nations ‘specialized agencies,'” the column said.
Kontorovich continued: “[The] UNFCCC organization is certainly a U.N. affiliate. While UNFCCC is a treaty, it is also a bewildering array of institutional bodies. It is administered by a secretariat that is ‘institutionally linked’ to the United Nations. It is ‘administered under U.N. rules and regulations,’ the head of the agency is appointed by the U.N. secretary general, and its staff sit in U.N. offices. It is listed in the United Nations’ directory of ‘United Nations System Organizations.’ Indeed, UNFCCC officials can give work assignments to U.N. bureaucrats.”
WND reported a year ago when the Vatican officially recognized the “state of Palestine.”
The Palestinians’ “state” comprises the territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern sections of Jerusalem, which encompass some of the most important churches and sites in Christianity.
The Vatican move at the time came despite the PA’s history of holy site desecration, the persecution of Christians and the Palestinians’ failure to ensure freedom of worship in territories under its control.
Joel Richardson’s “When a Jew Rules the World: What the Bible Says About Israel in the Plan of God” is available at the WND Superstore!
The issue of global warming has been a high priority throughout the Obama administration.
But WND has reported the uncertain footing on which the global warming campaigners base their arguments.
The issue came up when a prominent global-warming skeptic marveled at a NASA report that concluded the purported human-caused changes in the climate now, after years of being blamed for raising the sea level, is slowing down the rise.
“Is there anything global warming can’t do?” Marc Morano asked on his Climate Depot site in response to the NASA assessment.
“Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.”
He noted that 30 years ago, scientists blamed global warming for sea level decreases.
The new theory behind the slowdown is that as the Earth becomes more parched as a result of humans pumping more water out of the ground, water that otherwise would cause oceans to rise is “being absorbed” by lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, much as a sponge absorbs water.
The estimate is that 3.2 trillion gallons of water “has thus been soaked up and stored and is not pouring into the streets of coastal cities.”
“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
The London Daily Mail said it means islands and cities such as Venice and Miami might be spared from flooding in the near future
NASA looked at satellite measurements collected over recent years to estimate the rate of sea level rise has slowed by 22 percent.
The author of the study is JT Reager of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
“We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” he said.
“What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge – at least temporarily.”
At the Climate Depot, Morano pointed out the widely divergent predictions about the effect of global warming on sea level in the scientific community.
He noted that in 1987, Florida State University geology professor William Tanner said climate change would cause the sea level to fall. Tanner plotted 4,000 years of sea-level data on 5,000 years of climatological data, Morano said, and every time the climate cooled a couple of degrees, the sea level went up.
Even further back, the National Science Foundation estimated that a large part of the Antarctic ice mass appeared to be collapsing, which could cause oceans to rise by “almost 20 feet.”
“It has nothing to do with a warmer climate, just the dynamics of unstable ice,” said a scientist at the time.
Morano pointed out the sea level rise over the past 200 years or so “shows no evidence of acceleration, which is necessary to assume a man-made influence.”
WND has reported extensively on global warming, including a few months back when, despite no rise in average global temperature for nearly two decades, some two-dozen scientists with major U.S. universities urged President Obama to use RICO laws to prosecute opponents who deny mankind is causing catastrophic changes in the climate.
That’s the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which can put people in jail.
In a letter addressed to Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, the scientists said they “appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress.”
“One additional tool – recently proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change,” they wrote, according to Politico.
The scientists said their critics’ methods “are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry,” which was the target of a RICO investigation that “played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking.”
WND long has reported the predictions of an ice-free Arctic by scientists who believe mankind is causing global warming.
But in just last few winters, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. And Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw the coldest days ever recorded, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
London’s Independent newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium, “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.
Former vice president and current carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore told an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
See Gore:
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/u-n-promotion-of-palestine-may-cost-u-s-contributions/#mC6BM3EZmcTF1grm.99
