15-Oct-13: Which one factor, central to the conflict and the hatred, is almost never reported in the news media?

Scene at yet another donor conferences seeking a European solution and
Western money for a certain 'desperate plight' [Image Source]

Here's a reality check reminder for readers who wonder (and from the mails we get we know that this is vexing quite a number of people out there) why the Palestinian Arabs and their many supporters get such an easy deal from the global media, despite the constant very negative evidence of what they do to themselves, to their children and to our side.

We wrote here on Sunday ["13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!" ] about new evidence, revealed publicly by an impeccable, objective agency and pointing to economic malfeasance by a succession of Palestinian Arab insiders at the expense of the Palestinian Arab masses and the society they say they are struggling to create.

Here again is the essence of it, as reported by the Sunday Times in London:

Billions of euros in European aid to the Palestinians may have been misspent, squandered or lost to corruption, according to a damning report by the European Court of Auditors, the Luxembourg-based watchdog. Brussels transferred more than £1.95bn to the occupied territories between 2008 and 2012 but had little control over how it was spent...

In truth, for people who have been paying attention to how the money given to the Palestinian Arab governments have been mismanaged since the establishment in the early nineties of the first Arafat regime, there are no surprises here. Google the terms "financial scandal" and "Palestine" and be prepared to spend hours trawling through the results, or start here with this 2002 news piece.

Now note that the Palestinian Authority has once again declared a financial emergency:

Abbas: PA struggling to pay salaries  Maan News Agency (Palestinian Arab) | Updated) 14/10/2013 10:51 | RAMALLAH (Ma’an) -- President Mahmoud Abbas expressed concern Friday that the Palestinian Authority would not be able to pay salaries for its employees in November due to the difficult economic situation.  In an interview with official PA television, he said that his minister of finance, Shukri Bishara, had informed him that the government would not be able to pay salaries unless international aid arrives. "The economic situation is really difficult, and the main reason is the Israeli occupation," Abbas said. "Israel exploits our resources and lands which increased our economic deficit.
"We must take responsibility according to the law," Abbas said. "We are working on improving our abilities and lowering the unemployment rate by supporting small enterprises."
He added: "I call on all wealthy Palestinians everywhere to support small projects. If every wealthy Palestinian took care of a family or opened up a small project for them, this would help to mitigate the crisis." The PA's budget deficit is nearly $500 million for 2013.

So now we want to share some questions with readers - food for thought, really, since there's no one in the mainstream news media, in the European Union or in the PA who shows any sign of taking this scandal or its ramifications even half-way seriously.

• Why do the Palestinian Arabs not pay income tax to their own governments? There is considerable wealth among them, including many millionaires. Why are their two statelet run as a tax-haven like Monaco?
• Why has not a single serious non-Israeli news channel, with the exception of the London Times that first reported this weekend's latest scandalous exemplar of vast financial piggishness (and also excepting UPI whose syndicated report from yesterday appears to have been picked up for publication by none of its news channel clients), reported on the devastating criticism of the PA's management published by the European audit agency?
• If, as we know to be the case, the Palestinian Arabs constitute a bottomless pit of financial mismanagement, personal greed, incompetence, embezzlement, nepotism, theft on a monumental scale and the constant misappropriation of foreign aid for the purposes of advancing deadly terrorist activity, do we see this reported so rarely?
• What are donor countries to make of the fact that the single most important agency for providing badly-needed resources for Palestinian Arab children (UNRWA, as hateful, distorted and inefficient as it is) gets trivial-to-no funding from obscenely wealthy Arab sheikhdoms like Qatar, Dubai and Saudi Arabia? By far most of the money that funds schools and hospitals for the Palestinian Arabs comes from Europe, the United States, Australia and other non-Arab, non-Moslem sources. You can see the numbers here.

Money alone is not going to solve the challenges of the Middle East or of the woefully misnamed Arab Spring. But facing up to the monumental corruption that goes hand-in-hand with it would be a small step in the right direction. A pity it's not happening.