27-Dec-18: What's changed these past 15 years with the maleducation in Palestinian Arabs schools?

One of the most distressing and depressing aspects of how the Abbas and Hamas regimes weaponize their Palestinian Arab society's children is in how they educate them.

The evidence for the open and callous manipulation of their children's minds and futures has been out there for anyone concerned with the truth to absorb. Yet its corrosiveness goes on. And no less disturbing, it continues in large measure to be funded by non-Arab states in the name of "helping".

We're reposting here an article written by Arnold Roth for the Wall Street Journal back in September 2003 - more than a decade and a half ago.

Readers paying attention will see that, while some things have changed somewhat, others remain just as rotten as they were back then.

Blood, Money and Education
Arnold Roth / The Wall Street Journal Europe
September 26, 2003

JERUSALEM -- The European Commission is abuzz with financial scandals involving significant sums and the EU's statistical agency. They pale, however, compared with the consequences and scale of EU mismanagement in an area that affects my family and me.

Last December, I traveled to Brussels as a member of a small contingent of Israelis. Each of us had experienced the loss of a family member by terrorism in the past two years. My daughter, Malka Chana, 15, was killed by a Hamas terrorist cell. She was a high school student, a talented musician, a volunteer passionately dedicated to the care of disabled children. When her murderer exploded himself in a Jerusalem restaurant in August 2001, he massacred 15 innocent civilians, mainly children and teenagers. Hundreds were injured.

Chris Patten, the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, plays a central role in the provision of EU financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. I intended to ask him in that visit whether he was aware of evidence that EU money, channeled through his office to the PA and so necessary to improving Palestinian lives, was being diverted to fund terrorism. Did he believe a just peace could be achieved when teachers paid from EU grants to UNRWA (U.N. Relief and Works Agency) teach Palestinian children that Israel has no right to exist and that their martyrdom is a glorious part of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East?

Unlike the other senior EU figures we approached, Mr. Patten declined to meet us. We met his deputy instead.

I referred him to evidence uncovered by Israeli forces in 2002 showing that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are a routine part of corruption in the PA. My concerns were misplaced, he said, since all payments made via Mr. Patten's office to the PA are closely supervised by the International Monetary Fund. Immediately after our meeting, I checked the record and learned that some months before, the IMF had published a report denying this. The IMF report confirmed budgetary abuse by the PA.

Earlier this month, my family and I again lost friends to terrorism. One of the victims of another massacre in a Jerusalem cafe was an emergency room doctor, David Appelbaum, who had dedicated his life to caring for terror victims -- Jews and Arabs alike. His daughter, killed with him, was to be married the next evening.

Their tragic murders led me to reflect again on what it would take to stop the hate-filled education of Palestinian children that turns them into walking grenades.

Checking the EU's Web site, I found a Dutch MEP had just asked some questions to Mr. Patten on this theme. Mr. Patten's written answer said that the Commission "has no evidence of Community funding to the Palestinian Authority being misused for anything other than its agreed purpose. Should such evidence come to light, immediate action would be taken."

This was strikingly similar to his response to charges about the misuse of EU money by the PA. The refrain was repeated after Human Rights Watch's report into Palestinian terrorism noted that "The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades appear to have benefited from the routine misuse of PA funds."

Some 55% of all Palestinian Arabs are under the age of 20. Addressing their needs is critical to the building of bridges of peace between our two peoples. Around 3.5 billion euros in the form of EU aid reached the Palestinian leadership between 1994 and 2001. Wherever it went, it has failed to benefit their education or bring peace. The hateful messages that permeate their education, including EU-funded textbooks, guarantee another generation incapable of reconciling itself to peace with Israelis. In fact, there is internal Palestinian correspondence verifying that Hamas has taken control of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, ensuring the children continue to be taught to admire and emulate suicide bombers.

Mr. Patten promised immediate action when concrete evidence comes to light. I have now written to him, pointing to two specific sources.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview last week with Mahmoud Abbas, the PA prime minister who just resigned, quotes him as confirming what Israeli documents proved 18 months ago: that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are routine.

The story quoted Mr. Abbas as saying that Arafat blocked financial reforms because they threatened illegal slush funds Arafat was using to pay for the intifada. PA officials' salaries are paid by the EU, "but Arafat or his cronies were skimming off up to 15% in income taxes and using it for their own causes," said the story.

It then quoted Mr. Abbas as saying "Personally, I don't know where those funds go. When we wanted to cancel them, they said: `You're harming the intifada'."

A second source is a report on the Palestinian economy released last week by the IMF. This reveals that $900 million was "diverted" by Arafat from tax receipts alone over the past several years. Most of it possibly ended up in Palestinian public assets. But the IMF adds that not all the missing money can be accounted for and points to additional specific problems in internal PA budget control practices. Published Israeli military intelligence reports said exactly this last year. Mr. Patten dismissed them.

The Commission has stubbornly denied the existence of such corruption even while serving as one of its principal feeders. Innocents like my daughter die because money is available to lubricate the wheels of evil and corruption and for hate-filled education.

My letter reminds Mr. Patten that the EU-sponsored road map demands an immediate end to Palestinian terrorism. He can choose to exercise the funding power already in his control, and condition future PA grants on unambiguous prior evidence that Palestinian education has become peace-directed and positive. Or he can continue denying the price of EU blood money.

* * *

Click to go to "Snouts and troughs"

Chris Patten, better known today to those who respect and appreciate him as Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC, went on at the conclusion of his European Commission gig to to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford and then Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He resigned (on grounds of ill-health) in 2014. He never troubled himself to reply to our expose or to the letters mentioned in the WSJ article.

For a little additional colour and background, please take a look at some related past posts of ours:

• 6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen
• 9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen

Don't be offended. But if you're a European who cares about what's being done with the taxes you pay to your government, the Palestinians are playing you for a fool. Not just you alone, but also your government, your politicians and your public-sector watchdogs.

Four years ago, when a hot terror war here in Israel was at its peak with innocent civilians being killed and maimed daily, the European Parliament started an investigation into whether European money was funding the actions of the murderers and savages on our streets. 

We ourselves are parents of a child who was murdered in a 2001 terrorist outrage, one of the hundreds of Palestinian Arab and jihadist bombings that have afflicted Israeli society. So we personally paid close attention when the Europarliamentarians began looking into their own civil service and its actions.

The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU government. During that period (2002 and 2003), Christopher Patten, a smooth, slick and utterly arrogant professional politician presided over an official European Commission program of sending huge sums of money into the maw of the Arafat kleptocracy, while denying eloquently out of both sides of his mouth that anything, Heaven forfend, might be wrong with any of this.

We never for a moment expected the European civil service to police itself in a legitimate way. And in this, we were not disappointed. We also never fell for Patten's manouveurings and chicanery, though most politicians and commentators clearly did. 

For a contrary viewpoint, and some precious insights into how Europeans have had their goodwill and good sense hijacked by the naked ambitions of their own ill-informed politicians, we suggest you pay an occasional visit to the website of the Funding for Peace Coalition. It's one of the very few sources of analysis of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme and information that manages to see European venality and corruption for what it is.

The culmination of that carefully stage-managed Euro self-examination was that a secret investigation by its internal watchdog, OLAF, ended with a strange sort of whitewash to the Patten-managed terror funding of the Palestinian administration. Strange, because while the headlines of the OLAF audit said "we found no problem", OLAF's report itself - for the handful of people who bothered to read it - said there was no reason to think that everything was kosher, and in fact there were serious problems with the way European money was finding its way from Brussels into the hands of the murderers of Jewish babies and the killers of teenagers like our daughter.

At about the same time, the International Monetary Fund carried out its own audit. Its specialists found poor control mechanisms inside Palestinian government, huge sums 'diverted', rampant corruption and vast numbers of salaried jobs for people who did absolutely nothing (especially in the so-called 'security' arms of the PA.) How surprised, truly, are you to know that in the 2½ years since that IMF report, the payroll of PA employees has grown by a further 35,000?

In 2005, matters got expensively worse when Mahmoud Abbas, who had stepped into Arafat's greasy sandals, quietly incorporated the gunmen of the Fatah-controlled Al-Aksa Brigades into the PA, and assured them a monthly salary from the PA's payroll. 

Thousands more "security" individuals were added to the bloated payroll earlier this year just before the Palestinian Legislative Council elections which were won by Hamas. At about the same time, Abbas pushed through a wage increase (between 13% and 20%) for his "civil service" - essentially a majority of the Palestinian households, since many of the jobs are bogus.

The IMF criticized the move as a "substantial breach of the wage bill containment plan". The World Bank said: "The PA has created a serious fiscal crisis for itself with salary expenditure essentially out of control". [Source: Nigel Roberts, the World Bank's Country Director for the West Bank and Gaza]

The polite, formal objections by international bodies go on. But the money has kept pouring into Palestinian Arab hands since then. Arafat's beaming widow ended up with the mother of all nest-eggs after collecting a million euros a month while her husband was still in charge. And the luxurious villas of Fatah chieftains continue to be erected on the fringes of Ramallah and Gaza City for the insiders.

But for the ordinary man, woman and child on the littered streets of Palestinian Arab settlements, life remains a bitch. Despite the largest, most sustained program of foreign aid in the history of mankind, Palestinian Arab life, for far too many, continues to be lived inside garbage cans and slums. The money, most of it European, did not disappear, as people frequently erroneously say. It simply reached the hands of the Palestinian Arab insiders who - for generations - have built personal fortunes by controlling its kleptocracy. And there it stays, as it traditionally has. (See "Arafat's Swiss Bank Account", a personal memoir by Issam Abu Issa, former chairman of the Palestine International Bank.)

In a September 2006 analysis called "EU plans restarting PA aid: Risk of funding terrorism unresolved" published on the euFunding website, Brad Nielson writes about the publication by Die Zeit, a serious German news magazine, of an investigative report in 2002, detailing EU support of corruption and violence against innocent civilians. The response of the European Commission was derisory, but as Neilson points out, the EC made a commitment that: 

If any evidence comes to light that the PA is knowingly employing members of terrorist organisations, the PA will need to act immediately to take these people off the payroll and bring them to justice.

The evidence was available then. New evidence keeps emerging. 

So the Eurocrats leaned on the Palestinian Arabs to "act immediately", right? Of course not right. (Are you dreaming?) Then, as now, the bureaucrats of the European Commission chose to ignore the information in front of their eyes, pushing ahead with spending more and more and more European taxpayers money on failed Palestinian systems, on catastrophic Palestinian leadership, on known Palestinian terror channels. All this in direct contradiction of its own EU laws and its own statements to the public and to the media. And though almost none of it improves Pal-Arab lives. it keeps going on and on.

And not only by the EU. Keep your mind focused on the hopeless, dire poverty that characterizes daily life on the Palestinian Arab street as you read the following news reports from yesterday:

U.S. Urging Bigger Force for Abbas | Steven Erlanger in the New York Times | The U.S. is proposing to expand the presidential guard of PA Chairman Abbas to 6,000 men from the current 3,500, as part of a $26 million plan to shore up Abbas' position, according to donors who have been briefed by Washington's security coordinator for the Palestinians... The estimate is that $20 million will go to equip the presidential guard and $2 million to expand it, with $4 million going to build a training facility in Gaza and to complete one that is being built in Jericho. [Erlanger's October 4, 2006 NYT article goes on]

The American funding mentioned here is for set-up costs. The source is private donors so that the US government can evade its own restrictive laws on funding terror. And once the deal is done, the monthly salaries for these new "presidential guards" will come from... where?

Just to be clear that Abbas is not the only Pal-Arab insider who knows how to sort out his guns-versus-medicine priorities, here's what his political rivals are doing:

Tunnels feed new Hamas army | Intelligence officials express worry over expanding Hamas forces, say confrontation with IDF soon to come | Alex Fishman (Yedioth Aharonot) Published: 10.05.06, 10:39 | The Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip has assembled an armed and trained force of about 7,500 fighters. A senior military official emphasized that it was not just a large guerrilla force, but an organized military force. This new Hamas army consists of several specialized units, including a short-range missile unit, a long-range missile unit, an anti-tank unit, and a sniper unit, among others. Intelligence sources estimated the army would reach operational capacity, and be capable of confronting the IDF as soon as the coming summer, if the flow of arms, military experts, and money into the Gaza Strip was not stopped. The army did not only have defensive capabilities against the IDF, but offensive capabilities that would allow it to launch long-range missiles towards settlements within the Green Line, and to infiltrate Israel through hidden tunnels. According to military sources, the strengthening of Hamas’ army was a calculated aspect of a long-term plan that began with the rise of the Hamas government, and did not cease for a single day since then. Even recent internal struggles and IDF operations did not hinder the moving forward of the plan... In September alone, 12 tunnels were discovered in a single kilometer near the Gaza Strip town of Dahaniya... It was difficult for Israel to make an exact estimate as to the number of working tunnels there were on the Philidelphi route, but a rough estimate showed several dozen tunnels which were sophisticated, professionally quarried, and fully equipped with tracks and wheeled carts.

For the dwindling ranks of hopelessly-pollyannish individuals who still think of Hamas as somehow less corrupt, more true to their people's interests and so on, than Arafat's and Abbas' Fatah, consider:

• In 2006, the number of government employees has steadily increased since Hamas took control of Gaza.
• This includes Hamas' new so-called "special operational force" of 3,000 gunmen, its members drawn from the Hamas-controlled Iz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades and from the Hamas-loyal Popular Resistance Committees (PRC). This new militia was originally headed by Jamal Abu Samhadana, a notorious terrorist who masterminded the 2003 bombing of several US diplomatic vehicles in Gaza, killing three Americans. Samhadana's brilliant career came to an abrupt end in June, but the armed militia continues on its way and continues to draw monthly salaries.
• President Abbas increased his own Presidential guard from 1,500 gunmen to 10,000 (no misprint - that's ten thousand).
• Despite the vast fortunes accumulated by individual Pal-Arab insiders over the past forty years, the current average personal income tax rate for Palestinians is - as it always has been - zero. Surprised? You ought to be. Despite the quiet desperation of the Palestinian Arab economy, no Palestinian Arabs currently pay income tax: not the billionaires, not the tycoons, not the monopolists. Zero.

So in light of all the mismanagement and absence of accountability and of transparency, European government money is going to be withheld from these kleptocrats and terrorists, right? 

Not right. As the invaluable Funding for Peace Coalition again points out, in a September 2006 article called "EU hints to PA: Accountability no longer required":

Europe has effectively signaled a readiness to hand over more money to the PA. And Europe has shown that it is not interested in receiving a commitment to previously agreed-upon financial reforms called for by the World Bank. Without proper controls, the European taxpayer will yet again lose his investment, with the average Palestinian's money being directed towards corruption and the war industry. [Funding for Peace Coalition]

At a time when the PA claims to be chronically unable to meet its payroll, are we allowed to ask about the prioritization process that allows failed politicians in Europe and in the Palestinian regime to push ahead with their lethal incompetence on the backs of Israeli and Palestinian victims?