06-Jul-15: The blood-soaked outcomes that British (and other European) taxes have wrought

Image Source

Brits of every political stripe are asking today how Hani Mohammed Yusuf al-Siba'i, a notorious Islamist rabble-rouser, connected to the terrorists (note: that's plural) who carried out the cowardly religion-inspired massacre of tourists holidaying on a Tunisian beach last week can have been living in the UK for years, collecting munificent social benefits and living in a house worth roughly five times the average price of a UK dwelling.

A leader of the terror group behind the Tunisian beach massacre is living off benefits in Britain, the Mail can reveal. Jihadi preacher Hani al-Sibai – who described the 7/7 terror attacks in London in 2005 as a ‘great victory’ – is one of the ‘key influencers’ of the Islamic fanatics believed to have recruited and trained gunman Seifeddine Rezgui. But he is living on £50,000 a year in handouts with his wife and five children in a £1 million house in West London, after using human rights laws to thwart attempts to deport him for more than 15 years.
Days after the atrocity in Tunisia, the Mail found al-Sibai, 54, strolling in the sunshine outside his home. Asked how he could justify milking the welfare state for so much, al-Sibai – who is under investigation suspected of benefit fraud – said: ‘Ask David Cameron, don’t ask me.’ Last night, there were furious calls to deport al-Sibai, who has also been linked to Islamic State executioner Mohammed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John. Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, is writing to Home Secretary Theresa May to demand an explanation as to why al-Sibai is still in the country. ‘It is extraordinary that successive governments have been trying but failing to remove someone who has these worrying links,’ he said. [Source: UK Daily Mail, July 6, 2015]

Good advice from a different arm
of the UK government

In March 2015, months before he was propelled to fame via his ties to the savage massacre in Tunisia, he appeared on millions of laptops and smartphones, via a viral video, advising a Lebanese journalist, Rima Karaki, who happens to be a female to “shut up... It’s beneath me to be interviewed by you. You are a woman who..." which was as far as he got before she cut him off. The interview, about ISIS and broadcast on the Al-Jadeed television network, has been viewed several million times, (The video clip is here.)

The astounding annual salary of this religious activist/militant [Wikipedia calls him a "Sunni scholar and lawyer who lives in London with the status of a political refugee"] is about the same of that of a UK police chief inspector [source]. (For the sterling-challenged among this blog's readers, an annual income of £50,000 translates to about US $78,000.)

Al-Sibai via Daily Mail UK: Lives in
a million pound home; is paid as much as
a police chief inspector

According to the most recent OECD figures, that means he earns substantially more than the average gross disposable income of residents of Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and, of course, the UK. Compared with life in his native Egypt, [Source: World Bank data for 2014], the preacher must be laughing all the way to the bank because British taxpayers are providing him with roughly seven times the average Egyptian income. And that's before the million pound home is factored in.

We think UK citizens are absolutely right to be furious. At the same time, it does appear that political leaders in the British government have made efforts to shift this hatred-spewing freeloader into someone else's backyard, without much success. However energetically or smartly, it appears they have been trying.

Sadly the same cannot be said, as far as we can tell (and we have pursued this issue for more than a decade), about British funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism. As we have pointed out here numerous times [check], most recently a month ago [see "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"] British money plays an indispensable role in the barely-concealed reward-for-terrorism scheme operated for years by the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and then his understudy, Mahmoud Abbas. And no one with eyes and a web screen in front of them should need to be reminded that along with this nauseating misappropriation of aid money comes a phenomenal degree of personal corruption.

In that June 2, 2015 piece, we distilled the years of articles and reports down to this:

The Mahmoud Abbas regime keeps using European money, tens of millions of Euros a year of tax-payer funds from Britain, Germany, Netherlands and other sophisticated and modern states, to keep up the spirits of its practitioners of terror and of those who depend on them. The PA, a terrorism-addicted entity with poor survival prospects, will do anything it needs to do to ensure the cash keeps flowing. The lies it tells are small, transparent, not complicated, nowhere near the grandeur of FIFA's cash-soaked fairy tales. But the Europeans want to be duped. They know they are being duped, and they play along. Win, win. Meanwhile the terror they fund keeps relentlessly grinding away, destroying what remains of their society's moral fibre and embittering Israeli lives.

The tourist hotel in Sousse, Tunisia, after the savage
Islamist rampage: the grief-stricken question is "Why?"
But an equally good question is "Who?" [Image Source]

We don't for a moment mean to urge British taxpayers to take their eyes off the sickening saga of the Reverend Mr Al-Siba'i and the lessons it is screaming out via the popular media today. Please pursue it - let your civil servants know how you feel. Douglas Murray, whom we quoted in that June post, puts it bluntly and well:

Paying people to hate you and carry out acts of terrorism is a strange use to which any individual might choose to put his money. But for a government to use taxpayers' money in such a way is criminal [source]

What we are saying is that the matter of the Egyptian hate preacher's lavish taxpayer-funded lifestyle is hardly a lone-wolf scandal. It belongs to a course of conduct that has gone on for years, and that has kept us passionately working the keyboard throughout that time.

And of course not only us: this PMW analysis ["Is the PA lying to Western donors? PA claims to have stopped paying salaries to prisoners; PMW’s evidence shows otherwise" May 2015] is especially useful in understanding the scale of the issue, and the brazenness of the Palestinian Arab insiders and their European aiders and abettors.)

One of the first pieces we wrote about European funding of Palestinian Arab extreme malevolence, predating this blog, appeared in the Wall Street Journal [here] twelve years ago, under the headline "Blood, Money and Education". Reading it through 2015 eyes, we think many will agree that its thesis is as relevant and accurate today as then. It refers to a certain British political figure who, from a powerful perch in Brussels, played a critical, enabling role in keeping prying eyes away from what the Arafat regime was doing with European money and connivance.

Interestingly, Abbas was one of those pointing an accusatory figure at Arafat back then, and yes, money - as always - was at the heart of the corruption. And no, that British figure never did pay a price in terms of his career, which instead went from strength to strength to strength to strength. Not for the first time, we were witness to how elusive justice can be.

To end on a fair disclosure note: the woman who murdered our fifteen year old daughter in 2001, and who walked free from her Israeli prison cell in 2011, is one of the many hundreds of recipients (we are reliably told by people who know have scrutinized the Fatah/PLO/Palestinian Authority payments scheme for terrorists) of a very substantial cash prize on getting out of prison, a whopping (by Palestinian Arab standards) monthly salary, and assorted other very valuable non-cash benefits.

It would be unfair to expect British citizens to share the depth of passion this arouses within us. But their recent national Tunisian trauma may sensitize some to the direction of that fury.