08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys

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]

Edwin Black, the noted investigative author/reporter ("IBM and the Holocaust", "Financing the Flames") published an expose this week ["PA studies details of each terrorist act before issuing salaries | Newly obtained documents show meticulous process by which martyrdom status, payment levels, honorary ranks are determined", Times of Israel, February 6, 2015] in which he details how Palestinian Arab government officials systematically compute and arrange payment of financial rewards for terrorists captured or killed by Israel.

[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

From our personal knowledge on the European aspect of this sordid tale, there has been an inside understanding among the EC's civil servants and their political masters [read our blog post "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"] since at least 2003 to do whatever it takes to hide the hideous things that everyone knows are done with those European funds that go to Ramallah.

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.

01-Jan-15: What lies behind the West "halting" Iran's nuclear program

The background to this news image is in a post of ours from
six weeks ago here

The days remaining until the Islamic Republic of Iran announces the materialization of a game-changing nuclear military threat are running out. When we look back at how this happened, special attention is going to be directed at the role played by the leadership of the United States. An explosive essay by Omri Ceren ("Enabling Iran’s Nukes") went up on the Commentary Magazine website in the past hour. Here is how it starts:

The lies began at the very beginning, with assurances that American diplomacy had secured a “halt” in the Iranian nuclear program.
Late on the night of November 23, 2013, President Barack Obama stood in the State Dining Room and announced that an interim agreement had been reached between Iran and the P5+1 global powers—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China—that “halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program.” The White House distributed a fact sheet emphasizing that Iran had promised to “halt progress on the growth” of its low-enriched uranium stockpile and to “halt progress on its plutonium track” to a nuclear weapon. Senior-administration officials held a late-night briefing to stress for reporters that the concessions added up to “a halt of activities across the Iranian program”—the word halt was used more than a dozen more times—and that the coming months would also see sustained progress in investigating Iranian research into nuclear detonations. Reporters would be told in subsequent weeks that the agreement even prohibited Iran from further testing on ballistic missiles.
Those statements were, on the whole, false. But on that night, the president and those around him badly needed them to be true. So they pretended they were.

He goes on to demonstrate how the Obama administration’s people - the Supreme Commander included - still cling to hopes about the ongoing negotiations with the Iranians

which they have every reason to know are, in truth, delusional.

It's a lengthy and very well-reasoned, fact-rich piece of deeply disturbing analysis - one of the most unsettling we have seen in a long time. Here is how the article ends:

The administration is back on Capitol Hill assuring lawmakers that progress is being made, that they need just a little more time. And then what? In six months’ time, the West will be in a worse position to extract concessions from Iran. The Iranians will be in a better position to walk away. The spectacle will provide an interesting test case for scholars who evaluate the relative sway of deliberation versus raw political power. Everybody else will be watching to see how many senators and representatives are willing to get played for chumps again, as the most immediate danger to global stability and peace in the 21st century comes closer and closer to reality.

How do we persuade more people to read this from start to finish?

3-Apr-12: After Toulouse

Huguette Chomski Magnis is the Secretary General of Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme, and spokesperson of the International Alliance Against Terrorism. Her guest blog appears here at our request, with gratitude for her tireless activism in the struggle against terror and its proponents.

Thoughts from France: Terrorism and resistance                

Huguette Chomski Magnis

Toulouse, March 2012

On the morning of Monday, March 19, 2012, a man called Mohamed Merah grabbed a child, Myriam Monsonego, by the hair. The seconds that followed were an eternity of suffering for the terrified little girl whom he dragged along the ground and then murdered by means of a gunshot to the head.

In doing this, Merah carried out an act of resistance.

We are shocked by such a statement? We cough, we hesitate, we find this a bit exaggerated. 

We find it scandalous that a certain French schoolteacher asked her students to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the child-killer, Merah.   

We stress that almost everyone who matters in France unreservedly condemned his horrifying actions. And this, of course, is true and as it should be.   

But does this mean civil society has satisfied its obligations, and is thereby relieved of further self-examination?   

Is it so extraordinary that one of the lost children of our republic murdered three unarmed French soldiers? All three were of North African origin. Were their deaths an accident? Or did Merah and his accomplices target them as ‘traitors’ on the assumption that they had fought the Taliban?   

Is it so extraordinary that – unable to find a soldier to murder on that Monday – he turned his attentions to the natural alternative: Jewish children, a Jewish school? Have not Jewish children been considered a legitimate target by many whom «those who matter in the world» judge as respectable? 

The call to murder Jews – with no minimum age – is a recurring theme in the broadcasts and sermons of the Tunisian Salafists. The Tunisian authorities remain silent in the face of this murderous hatred.   

A similar message, only slightly more disguised, also exists in the ranks of Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood with which France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States administration are approving of «dialogue», regarding it as interesting and promising.   

It also exists in the Charter of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, and the party that claims responsibility for countless massacres of Israeli children – they praise such massacres as glorious acts of resistance.

They are hardly alone. The Popular Resistance Committees and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a unit of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, among others, do the same.   

Appallingly, even the official television station of the Palestinian Authority recently broadcast a sermon by the PA-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, calling for more killing of Jews. [Source]   

Is the slaughter at the Jewish school in Toulouse worse than the horrifying May 2004 massacre of the Hatuel family: a pregnant mother and her four daughters aged from 9 years old to two?  The mis-named Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees claimed this as one of its heroic military achievements!

Is Toulouse worse than the massacre in Itamar a year ago in which the Fogel family was decimated: both parents and three of their five children, the youngest of whom was three months old?   

No, it is not worse. The reality is that Itamar is Toulouse.   

But we shall be told that what happens in France, by comparison with events far away, affects us to a much larger extent – and this is a thousand times right. The massacre in Toulouse has stunned us. We are still struggling to recover.   

But there is a problem here that cannot be swept under the rug.

There are very «proper» people, not in the least of immigrant background, who found that we made too much of these Jewish children who, although French, were also Israeli and buried in Israel, while the children of Gaza… suggestive suspension dots.

Little wonder that Baroness Catherine Ashton, a luminary among luminaries, found it necessary to associate the memory of the murdered children of Toulouse with the children of Gaza whose blood Mohamed Merah claimed to be avenging.

The children of Gaza have been turned into archetypical victims.   

Let us then talk of the children of Gaza – with a sad and loving thought for the unhappy children killed in the war of 2009.   

I do not know how many they were. Nor does anybody in France know. The figures of Hamas – a thoroughly unreliable source of information – have systematically been accepted.   

But to allow people to believe that Israeli army soldiers deliberately targeted those children, as did Mohamed Merah and his countless terrorist predecessors, is dishonest. Those poor children were civilian victims of war, not the targets of that war.

Dare one ask how many Libyan children were unintentionally killed by NATO bombs during their intervention? Do we even know? Were we given civilian casualty figures for that war?   

The blood-drenched dictator Gaddafi caused a great many casualties in the course of his regime’s collapse.   

Propaganda was the answer and that was correct. It was explained that he used his civilians as human shields. Again, that was correct.
  

But then, what has Hamas done but use its civilian population, children first, as human shields? The difference is that the Hamas has achieved an extraordinary resonance in our media.   

To oversimplify an extremely complex conflict led to mythology replacing reality; assumptions instead of analyses; propaganda instead of objective information.
  

The devastating result is total confusion.   

If the French icon Stephane Hessel supports Hamas and gives it the title of resistance fighters, then is it not feasible to implement Hamas methods into France?
  

This is something that humanists should question. 

So now what? 

Jihadism has landed in France. Merah’s death is in no sense its epilogue. 

For us simple citizens, our concern is neither the jihadists, nor the instrumentalities of State intelligence nor security. Our concern is with the reaction of civil society. Is civil society up to this challenge? 

Why are we not able to do what the Moroccans did after the attacks? Articulate with a clear voice: NO TO TERRORISM. 

The will to defend French republican society should not lead us to self-censorship. On the contrary.   

During the march that took place on the evening of the massacre on Monday, March 19, everyone around me, my comrades in the struggle against racism as well as a prominent lawyer, were categorical: the murderer was a neo-Nazi. The notion that he might be an Islamist was im-po-ssible.  Responsibility might lie with the foul ideas of the National front, or even of the government.  

Why is our reaction not just as clear when the alternative view, the “impossible” theory, is confirmed?   

Why are we asked to avoid speaking of Islamic extremism,  so as not to stigmatize Islam?

This is not what democrats in North Africa and the Middle East expect from us, especially those in Tunisia courageously fighting the rise of the salafists tolerated by the Ennahda regime. 

Pointing to the responsibility of Islamism - political Islam - that oppresses and kills Muslims first of all, enables one to distinguish it from spiritual Islam and the right of worship guaranteed to all citizens.   

There is a dangerous confusion. To illustrate: We know that Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was invited to address a rally of the UOIF on April 6. Responding to the voices of protest after the Toulouse horror, Nicolas Sarkozy said Qaradawi was not welcome in France.   

The edifying reaction of a certain researcher associate of Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales was that he could not understand the ban. For him, Qaradawi is simply a moderate supporter of the Palestinian cause and of its right to resist, not in solidarity with jihadist movements. [Source]

The researcher should have investigated more carefully. Qaradawi, the so-called moderate, is the author of the hallmark treatise on Islamic law, “The licit and the illicit in Islam”, and a man who prominently glorified the assassins of Sadat.    

Yes, he condemned the London tube bombings; a necessity in order to acquire a position of authority in Europe!   

But he published a justification for suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians of all ages. He issued a fatwa allowing to "kill Jewish embryos in the womb of their mothers because once born and grown up, they become soldiers of the IDF". [Source]   

So are we really a «republic united against terrorism»?   

Far from it, unfortunately.

Either condemnation of terrorism is universal or it does not exist.  

Paris - March 27, 2012 (Translation: Bernice Dubois)

7-Jan-11: Defeating terror: they have their ways, we have ours

Two dimensions of the world's struggle with the terrorists in today's news. And a reminder of the side to which the "moderate" PA regime under Mahmoud Abbas belongs in the war.

Story #1

PA Releases Prisoners Involved in Terror Attacks on Israelis

Khaled Abu Toameh - Jerusalem Post 6th January 2011 (19:48 Israel time): PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday ordered the release of six Hamas detainees who were on a hunger strike in a PA prison in Hebron. Israel Radio reported that one of the prisoners, Waed al-Bitar, was involved in a terror attack near Kiryat Arba in which 4 Israelis were killed, and another prisoner was involved in a Dimona area terror attack. More

Story #2

IDF Re-arrests Hamas Members Freed by PA

Haaretz Service, Reuters and DPA - 7th January 2011 (08:18 Israel time): The IDF raided Hebron Friday to re-arrest six Hamas members that the Palestinian Authority had released the day before. The PA had taken the six into custody in September after four Israelis were killed and two injured in two separate shooting attacks in the West Bank. Hamas' military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, took responsibility for both shootings, one of which occurred on the eve of the start of direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Washington. The six Hamas members, all Hebron residents, were first held in a PA prison in Bethlehem, south of Hebron, but went on hunger strike, demanding to be moved to Hebron so that their families could visit them. The PA moved only five to Hebron after about 40 days of the hunger strike and following coordination with Israel. The sixth remained in Bethlehem. PA officials said Thursday that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered their release after direct appeal from the emir of Qatar.

Two reports separated by half a day - and a difference of 180 degrees in attitude.

In case you have forgotten, the convicted, freed and now re-incarcerated murderer, Waed al-Bitar, named in the Jerusalem Post article, is one of the Hamas thugs who gunned down four unarmed Israeli civilians, two of them women, in September 2010. We reported it ("1-Sep-10: Real people, real terror") at the time.

Our September 2010 report of the murders executed by the thugs released this week,
and then recaptured by Israeli forces

Here's a reminder of what we said four months ago, in the wake of these especially cold-blooded killings:

"For those of us who can still summon up a sense of outrage after so much terror, so much hatred, so much hypocrisy, there's the matter of the so-called moderate Palestinian Arabs and their response. In today's New York Times, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, expresses his condemnation of the murders. These were offenses against the noble Islamic religion. No, sorry, that's not what he said. The perpetrators betrayed the noble and moral aspirations of the Palestinian people. No, sorry, that's not what he said either. Acts of terrorism and jihadist murder like these undermine the Arab right to a two-state solution. No, sorry again, that's not what he said. What Salam Fayyad, a man who knows his people very well, said is:  “We condemn this operation, which contradicts Palestinian interests and the efforts of the Palestinian leadership to garner international support for the national rights of our people.”  As so often in the past, the "condemnation" (which is really not condemnation but tactical criticism) is entirely focused on the effect it might have on other people's support. Where you stand on terror, terrorism and terrorists says everything about your morality, decency and values. The Palestinian Arab position, in its moderate and other forms, is out there for all to see."

Small wonder the PA had so few qualms about freeing the Jew-killers barely four months later.

We don't know where the organs of the European Union stand on the morality of the murders, the release of the killers, or their recapture and reimprisonment. We do know that at about the same time Abbas, president of one of the two Palestinian Arab regimes, was signing the order yesterday for the release of the terrorists from a PA jail to appease the leaders of the other Palestinian Arab regime, he was spending happy-face time with the EU's foreign minister, Catherine Ashton.

The image of arch-terrorist Arafat beaming down at the two of them seems quite apt in the circumstances.

4-Jun-10: Beating up on Israel means we have a problem [Daniel Henninger, WSJ]

This op-ed article by Daniel Henninger is reproduced in full from the Wall Street Journal of Thursday June 3, 2010.

Beating Up on Israel

The world's powers find it easier to denounce small nations like Israel than take on large and difficult problems like Iran or North Korea.

Wall Street Journal | June 3, 2010

The ease with which the world's governments condemned Israel over the flotilla incident has been something to behold. The Jerusalem-based correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail could not help but notice: "The speed and intensity with which governments around the world condemned the Israeli behavior appear unprecedented." Why?

For starters, denouncing Israel for something like this is convenient for leaders who have failed repeatedly to do anything about more important and difficult problems such as Iran, North Korea or sovereign debt. Also, lesser nations learn by example: The Obama administration's unrestrained criticism of the Israeli government in March over East Jerusalem settlements lowered the threshold for teeing off on Israel.

Still, I can't think of any other nation, no matter how scummy and uncivilized its practices, that produces this response. Or any other event, such as testing a nuclear bomb.

Fast out of the gate was France's nimble President Nicolas Sarkozy, who criticized the "disproportionate use of force." But somehow it is only Israel that seems to elicit the disproportionate use of language.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called the incident "state terrorism." His foreign minister described it as "piracy," "banditry" and "barbarism." Also invoking "barbarism" were Saudi Arabia ("inhuman"), Syria ("blatant defiance of . . . civilized values") and Morocco.

Italy's foreign undersecretary, Stefania Craxi: "the massacre of Gaza." Russia, always light on irony, condemned "the use of force against civilians." The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists: "an open attack on civil society" and the "true face of barbarism." U.N . Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was "shocked."

Denmark, Spain, Greece and Sweden summoned their Israeli ambassadors for an explanation. British Foreign Secretary William Hague extended his sympathy to the families of the victims. The Vatican voiced concern. The president of Bosnia likened the Gaza blockade to the 1992-96 siege of Sarajevo (at least 10,000 dead). The president of the European Parliament drew attention to a breach of the "fourth Geneva Convention." All of this on Monday.

Turning on the evening news in New York City, one saw that a pro-Palestinian demonstration of a 1,000 or so had materialized in Times Square. Identical demonstrations mushroomed on the Champs Élysées, and in the streets of Washington, London, Rome, Cyprus, Oslo, Stockholm and Athens.

Catherine Ashton, the EU's "high representative" for foreign affairs, demanded "an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening" of the Gaza blockade. This is especially noteworthy. Until High Representative Ashton's demand to end the blockade, the EU had been party to a clear, explicit policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Since 2002, a group known as the Quartet—consisting of the EU, Russia, the U.S. and the U.N., with Tony Blair as its current special envoy—has said that no one could deal with Hamas, the occupier of Gaza, until Hamas fulfilled three conditions: Recognize Israel's right to exist. Renounce violence. Accept agreements already made by previous Palestinian negotiators.

Hamas hasn't met any of those conditions. After Ms. Ashton's outburst, it knows it doesn't have to.

The world's peoples may pay soon for their leaders' display of such a disproportionate double standard. Recall that the other, recent instance when the world's governments deployed their collective authority and wrath was last June, against Lilliputian Honduras. The conclusion is inescapable: The smaller the problem, the larger the world powers' output of hot air. But if a problem is large or difficult—especially if the problem is nuclear—they blink and deflate, and will do so repeatedly.

Example: It emerged this week that the International Atomic Energy Agency believes Iran is pursuing higher-enriched uranium and "the development of a nuclear payload for a missile." The world yawns. Or hides.

In any of the places where men discuss truly monstrous and dangerous plans, in Kim Jong Il's Pyongyang or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Tehran, watching this hyperventilated criticism of Israel for a shoot-out on a boat must strike them as laughable. If one's opponents save their collective status and authority for something like this, then the world is ultimately not serious about who must comply with its rules of behavior. With this unbalanced double standard, the world increases the odds that a truly irresponsible regime will miscalculate.

To its credit, the U.S. delegation on duty at the U.N. Monday managed to dilute the language that a somewhat unhinged Turkey demanded from the Security Council. (Amusingly, what the Turks called the U.S.'s "delays" caused the negotiations to slip past midnight into Tuesday morning when, like Cinderella's pumpkin, Lebanon's presidency of the Security Council expired and passed to less invested Mexico.) Germany's Angela Merkel was also circumspect in her remarks. An adult or two is still on duty.

Set aside the troubling fact that the Jewish state alone gets this routine treatment. Israel should not be immune from criticism. But if the world's powers unload like this only on relatively small, isolated nations like Israel, then clearly the keepers of the world order find it easier to be blowhards than statesmen. And that means we have a problem.

18-Mar-10: How to celebrate an official EU delegation visit to Hamastan

Gaza rocket kills man in southern Israel

Last update - 12:19 18/03/2010  A rocket fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday killed a migrant worker at a kibbutz in the northern Negev. Paramedics brought the man to the infirmary at Kibbutz Nativ Ha'asara, but declared him dead shortly after. This was the third rocket fired from the Gaza Strip in less than 24 hours, according to the Israel Defense Forces. One rocket hit an open area in the south Wednesday night. There were no casualties in the incident, but two women were treated for shock after hearing the Color Red rocket alert. Two more rockets were fired on Tuesday at the western Negev, causing no casualties or damages. Residents of nearby communities said they did not hear the rocket alert before the explosion. More than 100 rockets have been fired from Gaza at Israel since Operation Cast Lead ended in January 2009, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Meanwhile the EU's newly appointed head of foreign policy Catherine Baroness Ashton (today's New York Times calls her "Europe's top diplomat"), arrived in the Gaza Strip this morning. As the BBC points out, she is one of the most senior Western political figures to visit Gaza since Hamas took power. But somehow the BBC fails to mention that the EU formally (i.e. for show purposes, but not really) considers Hamas, which rules Gaza with a jihadist viciousness, a terrorist organization.

If you click the BBC link, you can see for yourself that the BBC manages to convey its report without once mentioning rockets, terrorism or Israeli victims. Do you think they, or she, have even the smallest sense of embarrassment?

Postscript: We now know that the victim of the Gazan terrorists is Manee Singmueangphon, a 34-year-old Thai laborer working under contract in a greenhouse on Kibbutz Netiv Ha'asara.