 |
| The bottom line: A bankable message is delivered to PA's Abbas by the EU's then-foreign minister Baronness Catherine Ashton, October 3, 2011 [Source] |
[S]enior Palestinian Authority officials as high as President Mahmoud Abbas scrutinize the details of each case, the specific carnage caused, and the personal details of each terrorist act before approving salaries and awarding honorary ranks in either the PA government or the military. Ministry of Prisoners spokesman Amr Nasser has explained, “We are very proud of this program and we have nothing to hide.”We write here about terrorism, especially its Palestinian Arab flavour, because our family's life has been painfully affected by it to an unbearable degree. Perhaps people expect that our perspective, along with the sources of information into which we tap, comes with being privileged 'insiders'. But we're certainly not. Our information comes from sources that are publicly accessible, augmented with occasional personal meetings with public figures, almost always foreigners, rarely Israelis. In short, anyone who wants to can find it.
So when we see how Palestinian Arab terrorism and corruption are being funded (and they certainly are) by taxpayer money from countries whose citizens have no discernible interest in encouraging or supporting it, we feel like screaming. Or writing.
The key thought that comes with what we have learned over the years is this:
If ordinary people like us, doing this in our own time and equipped with nothing more than angry passion and a link to the Internet, can see this, why can't those highly-paid officials in so many Western countries? And if they do, why do they let it keep happening month after blood-soaked month?Everyone who has paid attention to the way the Palestinian Arab regime headed first, by the unlamented despot Yasser Arafat and currently by Mahmoud Abbas (now in the eleventh year of his 'democratically-elected' four-year term as president), knows that paying convicted terrorists out of the money available to the PA is a very big deal in their world. It's no secret. And it's well documented. The people who provide the money, mostly Western governments, know the details. Those payments lead directly - which is absolutely the intention of the Abbas cohort who praise their terrorists lavishly - to more and more deaths. Yet it's almost impossible to find any mainstream public figure willing to end them, though they say the opposite.
How can this be?
The questions are not new. Arnold Roth (one of this blog's two authors) wrote about them under the title "Blood, Money and Education" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2003 [reproduced here]. The process was not new or unknown then either. As we dryly noted three and a half years ago [see "28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea."]
The years go by. Some people get smarter, some get stupider and some just don't want to know... [and] Governments who take their citizens' tax money and send it to the Palestinian regimes - both of them - have steadfastly refused to answer for the evil that this funding enables.
What do we know about the donors? Here's a reminder of some salient facts we published here ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"] nearly four years ago, still entirely accurate, we believe. It's based on research published by Palestinian Media Watch - who do stellar work in this field - concerning a law [Source:
"PA to Pay
Salaries to All Terrorists in Israeli Prisons"] that was new at the time:
Who funds the PA? Who provides the PA's insiders with the means to channel money at the terrorists and their families? The colossally wealthy Arab oil states? No. Malaysia? No. "The majority of aid to the Palestinian Authority comes from the United States and European Union. According to figures released by the PA, only 22 percent of the $530,000,000 received since the beginning of 2010 came from Arab donors. The remainder came from Western donors and organizations. The total amount of foreign aid received directly by the PA was $1.4 billion in 2009 and $1.8 billion in 2008. [Source]"
There is something deeply disturbing in this. The PA is chronically short of funds, and perpetually requesting handouts. Yet it has control of sufficient disposable cash to channel funds to the terrorists sitting in Israeli
prisons or to the heirs. Someone provides those funds.
Personal note: the imprisoned terrorists who carried out the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in central Jerusalem on 9th August 2001, the massacre that cost the life of our daughter Malki, 15, and many other innocents, were included on the payroll [source: JPost] at that time. Several of them were freed from Israeli prison a few months after we first wrote about this, in the Gilad Shalit Transaction of October 2011.
No need for us to emphasize how humiliating (as we said in May 2011) this is for victims - like us - of these
convicted jihadist terrorists, parents of murdered children. We confess to wondering where the European, American and Australian
voices of outrage are in the face of what is being done with taxpayer funded aid money, and in
their names. Where's the sense of
shame on the part of those who sign the aid cheques to the Palestinian Arabs?
Where is the fury of those voters in Western, aid-giving countries whose
political representatives allow this to go on without so much as a whimper?
 |
| Click here for the full text of the December 2013 European audit report |
In all the years during which billions of Euros were channeled, first, to the blood-drenched Arafat regime, and then to the corrupt and insider-controlled regime of Mahmoud Abbas, those oh-so-careful Eureaucrats managed to avoid carrying out even a single financial audit, until the one published this past December [full text here].
And all of this while the EU "provides 20% of the direct financial support for the PA", making it "the biggest multilateral donor to the Occupied Palestinian Territories". What did that audit report find? Some direct quotes -
- EU aid to the Palestinian Authority worth billions of euros needs an "overhaul" and major changes in some areas, the bloc's Court of Auditors said... If the circumstances are difficult, there are still "a number of aspects of the current approach in need of an overhaul," said Hans Gustaf Wessberg, who wrote the report for the court. "There is a need for major revisions such as encouraging the PA to undertake more reforms" [EUbusiness, December 12, 2013]
- "The EU should stop paying the salaries of thousands of Palestinian civil servants in the Gaza Strip who are not going to work... They called for a major review, saying money spent on civil servants there should go to the West Bank instead." BBC, December 11, 2013
- "It is difficult to ensure that EU money is not misused or does not become a drip-feed, it said... The PA is not undertaking all the reforms that the EU would like. At every turn there are political causes and factors. The audit is therefore a political minefield." [European Voice, December 12, 2013]
- (It's worth noting that a Times of London journalist who saw the pre-publication version of the audit report in October 2014 wrote an article then that went further, summing up what the pre-publication version of the report he saw was going to say: "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..." Our sense is that the report went through a sanitization process after his article appeared and before the public saw it.)
It's
outrageous (and perhaps worse than that) that no professional effort had been made to check what was being
done by the Palestinians in the previous 13 years. The 2013 audit leaves no
doubt that money is misapplied, and it's far from under European control.
The Euros keep flowing into Ramallah. As bankrupt as their
regime is and probably always will be, the Abbas circle tell their people they will always find money for "heroic" Palestinian Arab convicted slaughterers of children and of
Holocaust survivors. Review some of the evidence here:
- 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?
- 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea
- 4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought
What has changed as a result of the 2013 audit? If anyone knows, no one is saying. Our guess: nothing has been done, and no-one has the political will or the courage to do anything to interfere with the way things have been done until now. As for the lives destroyed and extinguished, consider them collateral damage.
It's not only Europe, of course. The US government has little about which to be proud when it
comes to bowing low to the Palestinian Arab passion for lionizing convicted
murderers of Jews and placing them on pedestals. Anyone in doubt about what we mean ought to take a moment to review the quotes we brought in this post: "14-Aug-13: Are
the Palestinian Arab murderers who are being released at this moment, freedom
fighters or terrorists? Let's check with the State Department".
We dream of the day when an indictment appears connecting the organizations and the people - their names, their shames - with the evil that makes the Palestinian Arab empire of terror possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment