27-Dec-18: What's changed these past 15 years with the maleducation in Palestinian Arabs schools?

One of the most distressing and depressing aspects of how the Abbas and Hamas regimes weaponize their Palestinian Arab society's children is in how they educate them.

The evidence for the open and callous manipulation of their children's minds and futures has been out there for anyone concerned with the truth to absorb. Yet its corrosiveness goes on. And no less disturbing, it continues in large measure to be funded by non-Arab states in the name of "helping".

We're reposting here an article written by Arnold Roth for the Wall Street Journal back in September 2003 - more than a decade and a half ago.

Readers paying attention will see that, while some things have changed somewhat, others remain just as rotten as they were back then.

Blood, Money and Education
Arnold Roth / The Wall Street Journal Europe
September 26, 2003

JERUSALEM -- The European Commission is abuzz with financial scandals involving significant sums and the EU's statistical agency. They pale, however, compared with the consequences and scale of EU mismanagement in an area that affects my family and me.

Last December, I traveled to Brussels as a member of a small contingent of Israelis. Each of us had experienced the loss of a family member by terrorism in the past two years. My daughter, Malka Chana, 15, was killed by a Hamas terrorist cell. She was a high school student, a talented musician, a volunteer passionately dedicated to the care of disabled children. When her murderer exploded himself in a Jerusalem restaurant in August 2001, he massacred 15 innocent civilians, mainly children and teenagers. Hundreds were injured.

Chris Patten, the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, plays a central role in the provision of EU financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. I intended to ask him in that visit whether he was aware of evidence that EU money, channeled through his office to the PA and so necessary to improving Palestinian lives, was being diverted to fund terrorism. Did he believe a just peace could be achieved when teachers paid from EU grants to UNRWA (U.N. Relief and Works Agency) teach Palestinian children that Israel has no right to exist and that their martyrdom is a glorious part of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East?

Unlike the other senior EU figures we approached, Mr. Patten declined to meet us. We met his deputy instead.

I referred him to evidence uncovered by Israeli forces in 2002 showing that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are a routine part of corruption in the PA. My concerns were misplaced, he said, since all payments made via Mr. Patten's office to the PA are closely supervised by the International Monetary Fund. Immediately after our meeting, I checked the record and learned that some months before, the IMF had published a report denying this. The IMF report confirmed budgetary abuse by the PA.

Earlier this month, my family and I again lost friends to terrorism. One of the victims of another massacre in a Jerusalem cafe was an emergency room doctor, David Appelbaum, who had dedicated his life to caring for terror victims -- Jews and Arabs alike. His daughter, killed with him, was to be married the next evening.

Their tragic murders led me to reflect again on what it would take to stop the hate-filled education of Palestinian children that turns them into walking grenades.

Checking the EU's Web site, I found a Dutch MEP had just asked some questions to Mr. Patten on this theme. Mr. Patten's written answer said that the Commission "has no evidence of Community funding to the Palestinian Authority being misused for anything other than its agreed purpose. Should such evidence come to light, immediate action would be taken."

This was strikingly similar to his response to charges about the misuse of EU money by the PA. The refrain was repeated after Human Rights Watch's report into Palestinian terrorism noted that "The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades appear to have benefited from the routine misuse of PA funds."

Some 55% of all Palestinian Arabs are under the age of 20. Addressing their needs is critical to the building of bridges of peace between our two peoples. Around 3.5 billion euros in the form of EU aid reached the Palestinian leadership between 1994 and 2001. Wherever it went, it has failed to benefit their education or bring peace. The hateful messages that permeate their education, including EU-funded textbooks, guarantee another generation incapable of reconciling itself to peace with Israelis. In fact, there is internal Palestinian correspondence verifying that Hamas has taken control of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, ensuring the children continue to be taught to admire and emulate suicide bombers.

Mr. Patten promised immediate action when concrete evidence comes to light. I have now written to him, pointing to two specific sources.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview last week with Mahmoud Abbas, the PA prime minister who just resigned, quotes him as confirming what Israeli documents proved 18 months ago: that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are routine.

The story quoted Mr. Abbas as saying that Arafat blocked financial reforms because they threatened illegal slush funds Arafat was using to pay for the intifada. PA officials' salaries are paid by the EU, "but Arafat or his cronies were skimming off up to 15% in income taxes and using it for their own causes," said the story.

It then quoted Mr. Abbas as saying "Personally, I don't know where those funds go. When we wanted to cancel them, they said: `You're harming the intifada'."

A second source is a report on the Palestinian economy released last week by the IMF. This reveals that $900 million was "diverted" by Arafat from tax receipts alone over the past several years. Most of it possibly ended up in Palestinian public assets. But the IMF adds that not all the missing money can be accounted for and points to additional specific problems in internal PA budget control practices. Published Israeli military intelligence reports said exactly this last year. Mr. Patten dismissed them.

The Commission has stubbornly denied the existence of such corruption even while serving as one of its principal feeders. Innocents like my daughter die because money is available to lubricate the wheels of evil and corruption and for hate-filled education.

My letter reminds Mr. Patten that the EU-sponsored road map demands an immediate end to Palestinian terrorism. He can choose to exercise the funding power already in his control, and condition future PA grants on unambiguous prior evidence that Palestinian education has become peace-directed and positive. Or he can continue denying the price of EU blood money.

* * *

Click to go to "Snouts and troughs"

Chris Patten, better known today to those who respect and appreciate him as Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC, went on at the conclusion of his European Commission gig to to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford and then Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He resigned (on grounds of ill-health) in 2014. He never troubled himself to reply to our expose or to the letters mentioned in the WSJ article.

For a little additional colour and background, please take a look at some related past posts of ours:

• 6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen
• 9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

20-May-17: A child, a knife and another thwarted stabbing today on Jerusalem's northern edge

The Palestinian Arab girl, minus her weapon, is lead away
unharmed by a police officer [Image Source: Social media]

At Jerusalem's main northern security checkpoint, Qalandiya, police today (Saturday) intercepted a would-be stabbing attacker and restrained her without the need to shoot.

As Times of Israel reports:

The suspect — a 14-year-old Palestinian girl — was arrested by officers while carrying a knife in her hand after failing to obey their calls to halt, according to police. According to Hebrew media reports, officers used pepper spray in order to stop the girl. Officials added that the suspect was taken in for questioning after her arrest. No shots were reported fired in the incident.

Israel National News adds:

She was walking in a passage designated for vehicles only. When they noticed she was holding a knife, they carried out the procedure for stopping a suspect and overpowered her. There were no casualties reported, and a knife was indeed found in her possession.

The calmness of the response of the security personnel stationed at Qalandiya offers a stark contrast with the violent events at the same spot on Thursday evening involving scores of Arab rioters.

Parts of the Arab media, deeply invested in turning their communities' adolescents into killers to advance their version of terrorist warfare, are busy spinning Saturday afternoon's events tonight. Here's the Ma'an News Agency headline in their English-language edition:

Israeli forces detain 14-year-old Palestinian girl at Qalandiya checkpoint

Just like that: "detained" out of the blue. And a child yet. Will she be arrested? Or just stay detained?

Ma'an's report goes on to quote the spokesperson for Israel Police (who happens to be an Israeli Arab woman) about the knife and the attempted attack both of which are central to the report and the event, of course. But click on the Arabic version of the same story from the same despicable news source [here] and that version of the report of the child's arrest, for a very different readership, makes no mention at all of the knife, or the attempted stabbing or the restraint shown by the Israeli security personnel who were the target of the would-be killer's assault..

Then there's this notorious non-Arab propagandist for the Palestinian Arab campaign who tweeted this sadly characteristic message a few hours ago:

Cruel and heartless IOFers, pointing guns at 14 year olds for no reason at all other than the sheer thrill of it and from close range yet. And (gasp) kidnapping them. Where were the police?!

It's almost as if this Twitter person has no idea the Palestinian Arabs are cultivating a society and an education system which seeks to turn innocent and young Palestinian Arab children into martyrdom-seeking murderous bigots. Some achievement!

PA president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, speaking in the White House on May 3, 2017, addressed this in classic black-is-white manner without even once smirking:

Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace. And we are endeavoring to bring about security, freedom and peace for our children to live like the other children in the world, along with the Israeli children in peace, freedom and security. [From the White House Press Office transcript]

Abbas, naturally enough, said not one word about the dozens of children - yes, children, right down to Palestinian Arab would-be stabbers as young as eight! - who have taken knives and gone out seeking Jewish victims. As if it had never happened. As if schoolchildren educated in the PA's own institutions, and UNRWA's as well, don't appear daily on PA television proclaiming their deep devotion to killing "Zionists". As if Abbas himself has not praised the blood-lust, as he did on television [see it here with English-language subtitles] on September 18, 2016, explicitly praising and welcoming "every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem... blood on its way to Allah... they |Israel| have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet and we won't allow them to."

Every Palestinian Arab understands the president's barely-coded advice about what to do to the Israelis and their "filthy feet". Even fourteen year olds.

The reality is that the weaponizing of Palestinian Arab children - and the devastation this has brought to families in every part of their society - continues in full force alongside brazen Palestinian Arab efforts to claim precisely the opposite.

23-Apr-17: The disturbing affair of the senior Hamas figure who was also a senior UNRWA figure and now isn't

This is a follow-on to several posts we made over the last two months concerning Hamas influence at senior levels of UNRWA management. 

For background, see "26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future" and "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover..." and "06-Mar-17: What has UNRWA known all these years about its staff terrorists?"

Now this:

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees says a Gaza staffer suspected of being elected to the Islamic militant Hamas group's leadership no longer works for the agency. Agency spokesman Chris Gunness says Saturday Suhail al-Hindi is no longer employed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. He declined to say whether al-Hindi had quit or was fired, saying the agency doesn't "discuss the terms of departure of individual staff members." In February, UNRWA suspended al-Hindi — the chairman of the agency's Palestinian workers' union — pending the results of an internal investigation sparked by Israeli accusations that the school principal was a member of Hamas' new political leadership. Al-Hindi denied links to Gaza's rulers. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most of Europe. ["UN Gaza staffer out after allegations of Hamas ties", Associated Press, April 22, 2017]

Reassuring that the personal interests of UNRWA managers with ties to the Islamist terrorists of Hamas are in such safe, considerate and delicate hands.

On the other hand, given how every penny of the billions spent annually by UNRWA are fund-raised from donor countries and organizations, isn't the public owed more than the spit-in-your-eye explanation offered by Mr Chris Gunness? As its official spokesperson, is "declined to say" a legitimate part of his job description?

The unwillingness of UNRWA management in general, and particularly Gunness, to own up to the malign influence of terrorists on Hamas' operations and on its outcomes (especially on children educated in the UNRWA schools) over a period of generations is something that in a fair-minded and ethical world would be addressed by the people to whom UNRWA owes an accounting.

How many other senior Hamas terrorists hold down jobs in UNRWA, Mr Gunness? Does it not matter?

06-Mar-17: Does UNRWA know yet that another of its key people is a Hamas insider?

A Hebrew report posted last night (Sunday) on the Ynet website - we haven't seen this confirmed anywhere else yet - says a senior person in UNRWA's engineering department was elected to a senior position in the Hamas leadership in last month's elections.

Ynet says Muhammad Al-Jamassi was voted into a position on the Hamas Gaza polit-bureau. His access to funds and to building materials is thought to be of special advantage to the Islamist terrorist regime.

We expect there will quickly be some confirmation or denials. Meanwhile we offer some background and context via two of our recent blog posts:

• 27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover...
• 26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future"

How shocked should UNRWA's leadership be? For years (as we wrote here last week) they have been swimming in a cess-pool of radical Islamic, Hamas and extremist Arab ideology and activity. They see and know what they want to. Not more and surely not less. 

At every level of its operations in Gaza and Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria, UNRWA plays a knowing, indispensable role in enabling some of the most hideous hate-based education to be found anywhere in the Middle East. 

The phenomenon of Palestinian Arab children with knives in their hands and a passion for Jewish blood in their hearts - the weaponizing of children - is the return on decades of UNRWA investment, almost entirely funded over sevenn decades by Western countries, and almost not at all from Arab sources. 

The whole shabby undertaking long ago needed to be shut down.

[UPDATE: We posted further information here: "06-Mar-17: How could UNRWA possibly have known all these years that this Hamas figure had anything to do with Hamas?"]

01-Mar-17: Washington may be launching a long-overdue assault on Abbas' lethal Rewards for Terror scheme

Abbas' Rewards for Terror scheme, chiefly and lavishly funded by the United States and the European Union, is said to hold a "sacred" position in today's Palestinian Arab public opinion. Time that changed. [Image Source: AP]

Money has always played an under-appreciated enabling role in the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, even as those doing the actual channeling to the terrorists have doggedly denied the connection.

Channeled is the right word because the actual money for this sort of funding is never coming from the facilitators' pockets. It always originates with ordinary, unwitting taxpayers. Those doing the allocating and delivering are invariably paid functionaries in a publicly-funded European, Australian or North American government office.

This is infuriating. We have been writing about it since before we started our blog. See for instance this June 2004 contribution by Arnold Roth to the website of EU Funding (mission: "An Independent Look at the Role of European Funding in the Middle East") in which he addresses the British political figure who headed the EU's foreign ministry at the time, Christopher Patten [for background, see our post "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"].

A news article had appeared earlier that day, providing what Roth called:

the clearest possible indication that Arafat and his regime have at all relevant times funded the Palestinian Arab militants. Not to mince words about it, this - for those who actually need such things - is "the smoking gun". It connects the PA to terrorism, and by extension, implicates the European Commission which has continued to shovel vast amounts of money into the very same PA pipeline against reams of evidence that to do so is to fund murder. Depending on how one looks at it, today's story is either a revelation, or a very, very good reason for you and your staff to pick up the phone and make some urgent calls.

Brussels, May 2001: Patten in the company of Yasser Arafat, 
Romano Prodi and Nabil Shaath [Image Source]

Naturally Christopher Patten (honored these days to be called Baron Patten of Barnes) never made that call.

Nor was he moved by an op-ed in Wall Street Journal that had appeared in September 2003 under the title "Blood, Money and Education", also written by Arnold Roth. (It's behind a WSJ paywall. Another version is archived here.) Or by an open letter delivered to Patten that same month and published here.

We began blogging here in 2006. About a hundred of our posts in the years since then are key-worded "Funding". It's continued to be one of major preoccupations.

Having lost a dearly-loved child to the satanic work of Hamas, and then watching in horror as the mastermind of the plot that took her life and the lives of fifteen other innocents walked free with a phenomenally fat pension made possible by US and European funding of the unspeakable Palestinian Authority, we more than most understand the extent of the evil that aggressively imbecilic management of so-called foreign aid funds can wreak on the lives of innocent people.

So no one should be surprised that we are delighting to learn today of new developments in the US government that, if carried through, will significantly reduce the evil, the imbecility and the lethal amorality exemplified by the Christopher Pattens of international relations and governance.

An Adam Kredo report in Washington Free Beacon yesterday says legislators in the House and Senate of the US Congress met yesterday (Tuesday) to introduce legislation

that would cut all U.S. funding to the Palestinian government, which has been criticized for providing financial incentives to terrorists who kill American and Israeli civilians. The White House signaled its support for the legislation in a vast departure from the Obama administration, which worked against similar efforts when in power... "The Palestinian Authority's use of its resources to provide material support for terrorism—indiscriminately targeted at American and Israeli civilians—is a grotesque example of how well-intentioned U.S. generosity can be turned against us," a senior White House official told the Free Beacon... "This legislation highlights practical steps the PA can take to demonstrate a real commitment to ending the vicious cycle of hatred and violence that has prevented the Palestinian people from the prosperity and security they could otherwise be enjoying," the official said... [WFB, February 28, 2017]

The effort is entirely led by Republicans: Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton in the Senate; Doug Lamborn and Lee Zeldin in the House of Representatives. A , R-N.Y., are carrying the companion legislation in the House. A CBS News report added that it is cosponsored in the Senate by Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, John Boozman, Ted Cruz, Richard Burr and John Thune: again all republicans.

Strikingly (at least to us), the Washington Examiner said yesterday that

only Republican lawmakers attended the press conference...

Kredo, quoting that unnamed White House official, writes that the new law seeks

to tighten the financial noose on the Palestinian government and force it to abandon its practice of paying terrorists, is a first step to reforming the notoriously corrupt government, the official said. "The new legislative effort... cuts off all U.S. aid to the Palestinians as a direct response to its longstanding policy of paying salaries to terrorists and supporting those imprisoned for terrorist attacks" "...We shouldn't allow killers and ruthless attackers to become recognized as martyrs in a system that we're part of," Blunt added... "Most Americans have no idea this is a problem," Graham said. "Not only are Israelis victims of this practice, Americans are victims of this practice. We're going to change this. We're going to get the Palestinian Authority's attention by withholding their money."

Did we mention that not a single Democrat attended the Congressional
press conference yesterday? [Image Source]

It's a scheme we have for years termed "Rewards for Terror".

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who has long backed similar efforts, told the Free Beacon it is long past due for Congress to take the lead on this effort now that Obama administration officials can no longer lead efforts to block it. "After eight years of the Obama administration, the U.S. must take long overdue action to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for incentivizing and rewarding acts of terrorism," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "Roughly $300 million annually is provided in monthly salaries and benefits to terrorists jailed in Israel, their families, and the families of those who died committing such horrific atrocities against Israeli and American citizens, including Taylor Force [we wrote about what was done to him here.] Enough is enough. We must stand up for victims of Palestinian terrorism. No more U.S. taxpayer dollars should be provided until the Palestinian leadership stops engaging in this heinous practice. The incitement and glorification of terrorism must end." ["Trump Admin, Congress Behind Effort to Cut U.S. Aid to Palestinians", Washington Free Beacon, February 28, 2017]

No one working the halls of power in Washington can honestly claim to be unaware. David Feith one of the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers [quoted in our post], wrote last year ["Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror", August 11, 2016] that none of this could happen but for the willful blindness of governments, foremost among them the United States. What's needed, he wrote, is

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... [since] the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016]

A fine op ed in the Wall Street Journal five weeks ago [and quoted in our post "29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?"] stated bluntly how US funding is central to the PA's loathsome scheming which an Arab source quoted in the same post called "sacred in Palestinian politics":

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Efforts are underway in Europe - including the UK, Norway and possibly via the EC's own auditors - to curb the European Commission's ongoing funding of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme. But in terms of lives blighted and destroyed, such efforts and those of the Americans will be meaningless if they fail to block the blood lust of the Palestinian Authority's inner circle of enthusiastic murderers. Only stemming the flow of tax-payers' funds into their malevolent clutches can do that.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Waszyngton może rozpocząć atak na zabójczy system “Nagród za Terror” Abbasa – co należało dawno zrobić") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?

Gazan Palestinian Arabs dance for joy as word gets out of a terrorist
massacre in a Jerusalem synagogue, November 18, 2014 [Image Source: AP]

Unless you make an effort to be informed on these matters, it can seem confusing to get a grasp on the views Palestinian Arabs hold. In reality it's not that hard to get it right. We do wish more people tried.

The perceived difficulty doesn't stem from a lack of credible, unbiased data. Plenty of it is out there, and has been for years based on polls conducted by professional Arab organizations using solid polling techniques and respectable science.

The problems - and there are plenty - start with the fact that analysts tend to attribute views to the Palestinian Arabs based on speeches of prominent figures, interviews with officials and (forgive us) a degree of wishful, or even malicious, thinking. They end up being certain of things that look suspiciously unsupported. And those packaged statements of sentiment tend to get adopted at large because so many want them to be true.

For us, examining the data is better. 

We have posted here several times about poll data in the past and despite all the political correctness in the air, we believe it's hard to avoid reaching concrete fact-based conclusions. See:

• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?"
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?

For those of us hoping for peaceful relations and better lives for everyone impacted by the conflict, what the data show is depressing, frustrating, even chilling. Perhaps that's why they are quoted so rarely and taken into account so little. But that's self-defeating.

Here's the latest installment.

The current views of Palestinian Arabs are captured in a study that was released just a few days ago by a respected source. It's Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 60, made public last week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), whose head is Dr. Khalil Shikaki. (PSR's previous findings take a central role in those earlier posts we listed above.) 

This latest poll was carried out between June 2 and June 4, 2016 via face-to-face (as distinct from phone) interviews among 1,270 adult Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 127 randomly selected locations. (The margin of error is 3%.)

Shikaki [Image Source]

Leaving aside the numbers, the findings are sometimes expressed in ways that obscure rather than clarify. For instance, when the summary at the top of the report says the poll data show "a continued and significant drop, particularly in the West Bank, in support for stabbing attacks...", many will feel a flutter of optimism in our breasts. But then you look at the numbers and reality smacks you over the head. The pollsters measure a thing they awkwardly term "Support for use of knives in the current confrontations with Israel". On that, indeed, there's been a drop in the past 90 days. It's come tumbling down from 44% to 36% among West Bank Arabs. And from 82% to 75% in the Gaza Strip. 

Yes, technically a fall. But a solid majority continues to rule. 56% of the Arabs on the other side of the fence favour stabbing Jews to death (a blunter term - but frankly a more accurate one). 

Underlining the seriousness of that Palestinian Arab devotion to murder, support for a specific terror assault - the cowardly bombing attack on a Jerusalem city bus ["21-Apr-16: The Hamas jihadists claim the Jerusalem bus bombing as one of their own"] in the Talpiot neighbourhood of the capital, injuring some 20 ordinary Israelis - got support from 65% of the Palestinian Arab respondents. 

Translated into the realities of our daily lives: two out of every three Arabs we meet in Israeli hospitals and on our light rail commute are with the bombers. 

Amazing. Also appalling. And whether you're sympathetic to those voices or hostile to them, you cannot ignore them - especially if they live in your cities and country, travel on the same roads you do, and frequent the same universities and hospitals and public transport and pizzerias.

If there's some logic to favoring bombings over knifings, the pollsters did not explore it or reveal what they learned. (We will get back to the distinction between general support and enthusiasm for a specific outrage in a few paras.)

Israelis frequently get told that Mahmoud Abbas, the extremely long-serving president of the Palestinian Authority. is a peace partner, the peace partner. This happens even though there has never been the smallest bit of actual evidence that he wants to reach a compromise settlement with the Israelis or capable of doing that given the belligerence among the people he rules. Israelis, acutely aware that Abbas is in the twelfth year of his four year elected term with no sign of anyone being able to get rid of him, see him as a man seriously lacking in support from his own ranks. 

Consistent with one after another past polls, the latest Palestinian Arab opinion poll numbers show

two thirds demand Abbas resignation, Fatah has not gained any additional support during the last three months, and a majority of Palestinians believes that the PA has become a burden on the Palestinian people... Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 34%...

Dissatisfaction is related to the sense that Palestinian Arabs live lives mired in official corruption: 80% of them say they believe the PA's institutions are corrupt. The signs are they are astute enough to understand that press freedom is not going to make things better. Only 17% say there is press freedom in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, belief in freedom of the local press stands at 16%.

Abbas: A steady two-thirds of his constituency want to see him quit
and go home and take the corruption with him [Image Source]

Who will replace Abbas when, as he must, he eventually goes? Here's the current field: 

1. Marwan Barghouti 30%
2. Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas) 22%
3. Rami al Hamdallah 6%
4. Khalid Mashaal 5%
5. Mustapha Barghouti 5%
6. Mohammad Dahlan 5%
7. Saeb Erekat 2%
8. Salam Fayyad 2%

Any Israeli government making concessions to a political figure as despised and disregarded as Abbas is would be accused - justifiably in our eyes - of reckless mismanagement of their electoral mandate. 

The pollsters examined how Palestinian Arabs view next steps, on the demonstrably safe assumption of an "absence of peace negotiations". "Return to an armed intifada" gets 54%, compared with 56% three months ago. Are we closer to, or further away from, things getting worse?

More than half (56%) want the Palestinian Authority to abandon the Oslo agreement today (63% held that view 90 days ago). Walking away from the Oslo agreement gets slightly more support among West Bank Arabs (57%) than among Gazans (55%).

(And this side-issue: Which US presidential candidate is seen as better for the Palestinian Arabs? 12% say Clinton. 7% go for Trump.)

We quoted Dr Daniel Polisar when we last wrote about PSR opinion poll data [see "03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?"]. We felt his views added a lot to our understanding, so we went looking again just now at his most recent analysis. 

Writing in the wake of last week's terror attack on the Sorona Market complex in central Tel Aviv ["Palestinian public opinion is behind Tel Aviv terror attack", Times of Israel, June 10, 2016], Dr Polisar makes some sharp observations about how Palestinian Arab public opinion has evolved in the past years. In our words, a summary of his views:

• There is a clear pattern of what he terms "sympathy and even adulation" among ordinary Palestinian Arabs for bloody attacks directed at Jews. How this works - at the "in principle" level and when actual terrorist outrages are done - is truly disturbing.
• In PSR’s September 2004 survey, in-principle support for armed attacks on Israeli civilians stood at 54%. When asked how they felt about a specific bombing attack carried out in Be'er Sheba a few weeks before the poll, an attack in which 16 Israelis were murdered, support for that specific outrage sky-rocketed to 77%. 
• PSR's June 2006 poll found about a slightly higher level of general support for terror attacks on Israeli civilians: 56%. Questioned again about one specific terror bombing in Tel Aviv two months before, with a death toll of 11 Israelis, support zoomed to 69%.
• PSR's March 2008 poll found general support for terror attacks on civilians reached an all-time high of 67%. There had been two Arab-on-Israel terror attacks just before the polling interviews. One was a bombing on Israelis in Dimona during February: 78% said they were in favor of that. Then there was a much more lethal terror attack on a high school for religious boys in Jerusalem [see "9-Mar-08: Terrorism. Their world. Our world."]: eight Israeli children were murdered. Support for that specific atrocity (unarmed children! in their school!) was measured at the stratospheric level of 84%. 
• PSR stopped asking about specific terror attacks after that. (Perhaps they were embarrassed. Perhaps the results generated negative feedback.) 
• Since August 2014, PSR has done eight more polls, each one including a question about Palestinian Arab attitudes to “attacks against Israeli civilians within Israel”. Each time, the majority expressed support.

In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks. Dr Polisar notes, and most of us would probably agree, that there are

good reasons to expect, or at least to hope, that support for a concrete case of violence would be lower than for attacks against civilians in general. After all, it is one thing to favor in principle the use of bombs or guns against Israeli civilians and something else, after seeing coverage of the grisly results of a particular suicide-bombing, to declare one’s support. But in practice, the opposite effect can be observed...  Disturbingly, this pattern has been consistent during the past decade and a half, with only a brief exception, as high percentages of Palestinians have supported terror attacks on Israeli civilians in general, while even higher percentages have backed specific bombings and shootings that killed and wounded Israelis.

Here's what we said when we last looked at the poll numbers. We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. 

Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. 

That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. (And no, we have not given up hope of something better ahead, but specific things must happen first, all of them connected to how Palestinian Arab children are educated.)

05-Jun-16: Where does the money for the ongoing decades-long UNRWA fiasco come from? Updated data

A pre-teen boy at an UNRWA school in Jerusalem and the 
guidance he received thanks to a billion dollar budget 
funded by Western countries [Click to view the video source]

UNRWA was created almost seventy years ago and has evolved into the UN's single largest arm, employing more than 30,000 staffers. 

Fully 99% of that hugely blown-up total workforce is made up of locally recruited Palestinian Arabs, says Wikipedia. 

So long as the mind-numbing, ongoing flow of cash and diplomatic coddling keeps on, UNRWA will not slow down - or achieve any of the goals which it was created to pursue.

Its purpose in life, as expressed in UN Resolution A/RES/302 (IV) from December 8, 1949, is

relief of the Palestine refugees... to prevent conditions of starvation and distress among them and to further conditions of peace and stability, and that constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief...

But in reality, those goals, essentially short-term and temporary, were abandoned decades ago. Temporary fixes are often the most permanent of structures. 

People new to the amazing Palestinian Arab refugee tale might find it hard to believe what a person needs to do in order to qualify as a Palestinian Arab refugee:

Palestine refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” [UNRWA's website]

Yes. If you had lived there for 23 months, you were entitled to UNRWA support (pensions, allowances, food, clothing, basic household items, schooling, psycho-social activities, health services, shelter, welfare services) for life, and so are your children, and their great-great-great-great grandchildren until forever. 

A little girl tells the interviewer in her UNRWA school in Jerusalem what
she has been taught about why her people have to make war [Source: Video]

The UN incredibly defined Palestinian Arab refugee status as something you inherited... in perpetuity. 

So then how surprising is it to know the number of Palestinian Arab "refugees" has been exploding for decades? How could it not? And why would a Palestinian Arab family ever admit to a family member having died or succeeding in life?

According to UNRWA's published data:

In May 1951, UNRWA inherited a list of 950,000 persons from its predecessor agencies. In the first four months of operations, UNRWA reduced this list to 860,000 persons, based on painstaking census efforts and identification of fraudulent claims. The 1948 registered refugees and their descendants now number five million,

Having multiplied itself by a factor of nearly six in these 6+ decades of furthering "conditions of peace and stability" and of funding by others, does anyone imagine this number of beneficiaries is going to get smaller? Ever? There is no doubt at all that it is going to keep ballooning and unless UNRWA is forcibly stopped so will the problems it has created.

Yet on one perfectly reasonable view, UNRWA has succeeded. A large majority of those Palestinian Arab refugees live today in homes unconnected to refugee camps, reside in one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - the one based in Ramallah, the other in Gaza - under Palestinian Arab control, or hold citizenship in various countries. 

Needless to say, if you have been following the scandal down through the years, UNRWA and its fans don't see this as success. Or as reality. They invest serious energy in endlessly reframing the catastrophe so that it's about homeless, hopeless refugees, totally dependent on charity, driven by endless yearning for a lost homeland (the one that served many of them for 20 months), and always, but always, needing more cash. 

Now let's note that UNRWA is not the United Nations' only refugee agency. UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, deals with all the world's refugees except for those who come under the rubric of UNRWA. There are many times more refugees being helped by UNHCR than there are Palestinian Arabs being helped by UNRWA. Yet UNHCR, with by far the larger work load, has a staff that's only about one third the size of UNRWA's:

At the end of 2015, we employed over 9,700 people. Around 89 per cent of our staff are based in the field. We work in 126 countries, with staff based in a mixture of regional and branch offices and sub and field offices. Our staff work hard to help the displaced, specializing in a wide range of disciplines, including legal protection, administration, community services, public affairs and health.[UNHCR Figures at a Glance]

Qataris and their cash [Source: Arabian Business, March 2015] 

And note this statistic: "UNHCR has one staff member for every 5,500 refugees and other persons of concern. UNRWA has one staff person for every 182 people registered by UNRWA." [Source, March 2015]

So given that the UN operates two parallel but very separate refugee agencies with massively different per capita resource deployment (obviously favoring UNRWA), who pays for the Palestinian Arab one? The obscenely wealthy Arab oil potentates, perhaps? Or the Qataris who will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup and are spending, as The Guardian memorably reported half a year ago, $200,000,000,000 on soccer stadiums and other essentials? 

Not even close. 

We published a table of UNRWA's main donors based on 2013 donations [source] a while back ["04-Jun-15: Exploding for decades: UNRWA needs more, more, more"] while explaining that its funding is perpetually in crisis. It listed the Top 20 contributors to UNRWA for that year, and showed that the Arab donors in the Top 20 contributed 16.1% of what the entire Top 20 gave.

Earlier, the 2012 UNRWA donor table [here] showed Saudi Arabia on the list as the sole Arab donor. 

And earlier still, the 2010 numbers [here] showed not a single Arab donor in the Top 20 list, and this after more than sixty years of UNRWA activity.

Seeing a pattern?

We have just taken a close look at the 2015 donations to UNRWA via an official UNRWA publication [online here]. The numbers are correct as of the last day of 2015. Some highlights:

• The overall sum pledged (not received - they don't yet know that number) is $1.2 billion. 
• Of this, all the Arab donors - countries, princes, sheikhs, oil potentates, banks - taken together provided 13.4% of the total. 
• It follows that non-Arab donors are providing 86.6% of the budget - and that's before we get into the sordid matter of countries who pledge but don't pay.
• By far the largest share of the overall burden is borne by the United States: 26.8% of UNRWA's Programme budget, and 37.0% of UNWRA's Non-Programme budget. (Non-Programme budget is the grab-bag title given to these components: Projects; Syria Appeal; Gaza Recovery & Reconstruction; Emergency Appeal (oPt); Nahr el-Bared Palestine Refugee Camp Relief and Reconstruction.)

Here is our list of UNRWA's major enablers based on those December 2015 statistics:

We prepared this table by transcribing UNRWA's published money data and then doing some basic
statistical interpretations

The Arab donors contributed about 13.5% both on a Top 20 basis and on a whole-donor-list basis. That's a significant decline, percentage-wise, over the 2013 numbers.

Another child explains what he learned in his Jerusalem-area UNRWA
school [Click to see the video]

We think the video clip we showcased in another post of ours ["30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]" produced by The Center for Near East Policy Research just a few days ago gives a good sense of what UNRWA donors are getting for their donations - in business terms, their return on investment, or ROI. (Check out the additional background on the YouTube page that hosts the clip). 

Though the video runs for less than ten minutes, it turns the turgid prose - and figures - above into very uncomfortable realities. 

It also puts faces and voices to the hundreds of thousands of child-victims of the appalling UNRWA, a self-praised United Nations agency with a track-record of destroying lives, as we explained just last week here: "30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers". This is a humanitarian disaster, one that far too many prominent politicians and diplomats prefer we don't comprehend or see. 

To review some more of the awful things for which UNRWA stands and that keep us concerned, see

• 30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers
• 30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]
• 15-May-16: Putting their "nakba" in perspective
• 04-May-16: Begging for spare Arab change at UNRWA
• 25-Jan-16: Felons, funding, fooling, failing
• 29-Dec-15: Gaza and what manipulative, highly-politicized foreign aid can buy
• 03-Sep-15: Decades of UNRWA malfeasance and now a chance to shine a little light and bring change
• 06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal
• 19-May-14: Will momentary focus on UNRWA throw any light on PA and Hamas abuse of their own people? 
• 20-Nov-13: It's Wednesday. Time for yet another UNRWA funding crisis
• 19-Jun-13: We actually do understand why Arab states put almost no money in the Palestinian Arab "refugee" fund pot. We just don't get why the US does.
• 19-Apr-13: Refugees, hypocrisy and unity: just follow the money
• 4-Jul-12: What is it about UNRWA?
• 5-Jun-12: If there's one single thing about UNRWA that we wish people understood, it's this

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Skąd pochodzą pieniądze na trwające dziesięciolecia nieszczęście pod nazwą UNRWA?") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her again, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

30-May-16: Barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust: What a UN-provided education delivers

Palestinian Arab girls being educated UN-style in an UNRWA school
in Jerusalem [Image Source]

If you have not already viewed the video clip we showcased in another post of ours ["30-May-16: Listen to the children to understand who is weaponizing them and how [Video]"] earlier today, doing that now may help you make sense of the report that now follows.

It was released for publication this morning (Monday) that Israel Police have cracked the stabbing attack that took place in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighbourhood on the evening of Remembrance Day, May 10, 2016. Here's part of what we wrote about that notably savage (even by the standards that apply in our part of the world) and cowardly attack three weeks ago:

The victims, according to Haaretz, are a pair of "elderly women", reported to be "aged in their 70s"who "had gone for a walk in the neighborhood, also known as East Talpiot, on Tuesday morning when they were attacked by two masked individuals." Their injuries would be serious enough for younger, more robust people but they sound quite worrying, knowing what we know of their ages: "One of the women sustained stab wounds to her limbs and upper body, while the other sustained wounds to her upper body." Ynet reports that they described their attackers as two masked Palestinians wearing jeans and black shirts. The two women, described by hospital staff in the Ynet report as aged 86 and 80, were walking with three other friends when they were attacked from behind. This is frequently how "resistance" operations are done, reflecting on the inherent courage required by such acts. [From our blog post "10-May-16: Practitioners of "resistance" inflict serious stabbing injuries on two elderly Jerusalem women"]

Those earlier suspicions were well-founded: the attackers now under arrest all live in Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian Arab community with a well-deserved reputation for savagery, nestled in the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. All three of the arrestees are minors, aged 16-17. Children.

Ynet gives this background:

Jabel Mukaber as it appears in a Times of Israel article here

The three decided to meet at a small supermarket in Jabel Mukaber. Armed with knives and an ax which they took from their homes, the three proceeded in the direction of the promenade where they waited for their Jewish victims. A third suspect left the scene after becoming afraid that the attack would lead to the demolition of his parents’ home. As the women passed the two boys, they began stabbing them and striking them with the wooden handle of the ax. The two then fled the scene in the direction of their village while throwing and hiding their weapons on the way. One made it home and the other took refuge in his school...

Times of Israel adds:

After the attack,the suspects are believed to have stashed the weapons nearby before one went home and the second went to school. Later on, one of them returned to the scene, retrieved the knives and cudgel, and hid them in Jabel Mukaber... Throughout the day, the two suspects “spoke with one another through WhatsApp and Facebook messages and planned to carry out another stabbing attack in light of the ‘success’ of the Peace Forest attack,” the police said. However, the pair were arrested before they could carry out such an attack, a police spokesperson said.

And this small postscript:

During the investigation, it also emerged that the mother of one of the suspects was arrested one week ago [meaning after her son had been arrested for the Peace Forest attacks] for attempting to carry out a stabbing attack at the Zeitim Checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem... [Ynet]

What does it take to turn teenage Jerusalem Arabs into stabbers, plotters and would-be murderers? Of Jabel Mukaber and its predominantly-Jewish neighbours in Armon Hanatziv, an article a year and a half ago ("Arabs and Jews at odds in East Talpiot", Times of Israel, August 3, 2014) said this:

The main entrance to the neighborhood is adjacent to the Armon Hanatziv Promenade, the terraced park popular with locals and tourists for its views of the Old City, including Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Kidron Valley, the City of David and the Mount of Olives. Relations are generally good between the neighborhood residents and the villagers, say locals. The Arab residents are often visible in East Talpiot, shopping in the local Co-op supermarket, stopping in at the local bank branch and using the local medical clinics.

Since that time, a long list of terror attacks, including several mind-numbingly savage instances of extreme Arab-on-Israeli violence, have been executed by residents of Jabel Mukaber. They include the November 2014 attack on men at prayer in a Har Nof synagogue ["20-Nov-14: In the face of savagery, what do you do?"] in which four worshipers and a security guard were hacked to death. And, less than a year later ["13-Oct-15: A bloody day and the malevolence behind it"], the murders on a city bus of Haviv Haim, 78; Alon Govberg, 51; and Richard Lakin, 76. (Click here to view some other of our previous Jabel Mukaber terrorism posts.)

As the postscript above shows, another thing that can turn a teenager into a murderer is a mother who seeks to do the same herself.

But the major factor - the one that, year after year, delivers barbarism, bigotry and blood-lust directly into the veins of Arab children, the one that instills life-changing attitudes - is education.

Which is why we want to point out, in the wake of the Jabel Mukaber murder bust revealed this morning, that every single one of the sweet-faced Arab schoolchildren being educated in UNRWA schools and interviewed in the simply-shocking video we mentioned above, lives in Jerusalem where we do, and is educated here.

Mr Gunness, UNRWA spokesperson, on the right, from a YouTube posting
entitled "UNRWA's Chris Gunness Embarrasses
Himself on 'The Kelly File'", August 5, 2014

Not in Gaza. Not in Hebron or Jenin, but in the precincts of Israel's capital city, and by means of an annual budget provided by the United Nations and its UNRWA arm, of which a third is funded by taxpayers of the United States and most of the rest by Western, non-Arab countries.

Can nothing be done? Never say never.

We offered a practical suggestion not long ago, and urge our readers to look at it (again) now: "06-Aug-15: Educating their children: a modest, peace-focused proposal".

We sent it off last summer to UNRWA's official spokesperson and were pleased that he responded right away with what seemed like some politely mild, though appropriate, enthusiasm. Then, for reasons that are beyond us even now, he inexplicably went silent on us. If you're reading this, Chris Gunness, we hope you still plan to give us a call.

Holding our breaths, we're not.