27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in

Look closely at the backdrop. 
Issa Qaraqe/Karake was Palestinian Minister for Prisoners
until - poof - overnight, he turned into the head of an 
invented body with the same job. But now outside the PA government. 
Only someone forgot to tell the people who published 
this photo in May 2015 
[Source: archived here] 

We're in the midst of one of those rare, very brief moments when the massive flow of cash into the grubby hands of the terrorism-addicted Palestinian Arab leadership is getting a public airing. The reason why is in our post ["27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UKaid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad"] of earlier this morning.

At the heart of the revelations published in today's Mail on Sunday is the ongoing fraud perpetrated by the conniving Palestinian Authority to hide its Reward for Terror scheme, and the active involvement of hundreds (maybe more) of European politicians and bureaucrats - many of them British - in funneling the indispensable cash without which it could not happen.

Did we say active involvement? Yes, and about a year ago we outlined how it's done. (See "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"). To save readers from searching back in time, here's the bare-bones version:

• In essence, the Palestinian Authority, under its "moderate" front-man Mahmoud Abbas, has been engaging in a clever little trick since 2014 to hide the way it takes foreign aid from the West and uses it to fund that scheme. 
• From time, the scheme has been mildly criticized. (Our 2015 article provides links.) The clever Abbas and his fellow kleptocrats eventually understood that defensive measures were needed in order to protect the in-flow of Euros and pounds. What they did was startlingly brazen and simple.
• They tore down their Ministry of Prisoners Affairs one evening, and overnight (in August 2014) replaced it with a brand-spanking-new, purpose-built entity that they claim has nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinian Authority. The switcheroo is of course completely bogus and works only because public servants and their political masters in various European governments want oh-so-badly for there to be a fig leaf to cover their nakedness.'
• Here's how the Jerusalem Post described it a year ago:

• [T]he PA in August 2014 announced that it had closed its Ministry of Prisoners Affairs, which funneled monthly salaries to terrorists, because of pressure from Western donors. Rather than a PA ministry, a PLO Commission of Prisoners Affairs – purportedly independent of the PA and its funding – was set up to pay the salaries. The international community... largely accepted these changes as assurance the PA was no longer paying salaries to terrorists. "However," the [PMW] report read, "the PLO commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the former PA minister of prisoners affairs, Issa Karake, became the director of the new PLO commission and PA President Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of the PLO Commission"... [T]he perpetually financially strapped PA spent $144 million in 2014 paying salaries to incarcerated and release prisoners. ["Palestinians duping world by denying it pays salaries to prisoners in Israeli jails", Jerusalem Post, May 27, 2015]

• The trick was calculated solely to deceive. And it did and does. As one analyst put it: "[W]hat Abu Mazen [meaning Mahmoud Abbas] will not tell donors is that their money is being sent to the PLO, who does use the money to fund terrorism. Abu Mazen hopes by having the money used indirectly instead of directly to fund terrorism, the criticism will die down among donor nations to the Palestinian Authority." [Foreign Policy Association, September 8, 2014]
• Not enough people outside of Israel really care to know whether the Palestinian Arab political leadership is trustworthy, honest, credible - or the exact opposite. They want the problems to go away. That's why the money keeps flowing. That's why people on all sides keep being killed.

The Abbas regime, and the Arafat regime before it, keeps taking 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, thus perpetuating a culture of terrorism and the values of a death-cult that we see causing irreparable, irreversible damage to their society. 

It has been doing this for more than a decade [see "Money won't fix things here", published by David Frankfurter a decade ago, and nothing has gotten any better since then.] That's why we think it's accurate and reasonable to call it a Rewards for Terror scheme. 

So has everyone fallen for the Palestinian Arab deception? Mostly yes - but not the Palestinian Arabs who understand the game better than most people. Here's how the abhorrent Qaraqe/Karake, who is no longer a minister in the PA regime (wink wink) was described by Arab editors and reporters after his ministry was (ahem) shut down:

• "Issa Karake, the Palestinian minister for prisoners’ affairs, told Al-Monitor, “The situation is flaring up..." Source: "Palestinian prisoners resort to hunger strikes", Al-Monitor, June 2, 2015
• "The head of the PA's department of prisoner affairs Issa Qaraqe said al-Barghouthi's decision came...", Ma'an Palestinian News Agency, June 1, 2015 
• "An Israeli court on Thursday ruled... the head of the Palestinian Authority's Prisoners' Affairs Committee said. Issa Qaraqe told Ma'an that..." Source: Ma'an Palestinian News Agency, May 23, 2015 
• "Issa Karake, head of the Palestinian government’s Prisoner Affairs Department, said al-Khatib’s case is just another in a policy meant to break the spirits..." Source: "Associated Press, (via Washington Times), January 28, 2015
• "Issa Karake, head of the Palestinian government's prisoner affairs department, told the AP that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was..." Source: Mohammed Daraghmeh reporting for Associated Press (via Haaretz), November 2014.

Ian Birrell's expose in today's Mail on Sunday includes a snippet that we wish could be megaphoned directly into the ears of those European politicians sitting with arms folded while the scandal they facilitate continues to consume lives, cash and futures:

PA officials openly defend such stipends. Amr Nasser, adviser to the minister of social affairs, said: ‘It is not a crime to be fighting occupation. These people are heroes. We could be giving them much more money and it would not be enough.’ Nasser added that, if Palestine won independence, the government would seek reparations from Britain for its historic role in encouraging Zionism, saying ‘You should pay us more money.’ Tory MP Andrew Percy said last night: ‘How can we justify foreign aid as a noble endeavour when taxpayers money goes to pay terrorists? The government has got to get a grip.’ [Mail on Sunday UK, via the Daily Mail website, March 27, 2016]

Yes, they do. They need to understand that the terror-addicted PA, an entity with poor survival prospects and run by old men some of whom have gotten quite wealthy along the way, is ready to do anything it needs to do to keep that cash flowing into its coffers. The lies it tells are small, transparent and not that complicated. What makes them work is that the European insiders 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, dooming yet another generation of their children, embittering Israeli lives and increasing the world's stock of misery.