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

01-Mar-17: Washington may be launching a long-overdue assault on Abbas' lethal Rewards for Terror scheme

Abbas' Rewards for Terror scheme, chiefly and lavishly funded by the United States and the European Union, is said to hold a "sacred" position in today's Palestinian Arab public opinion. Time that changed. [Image Source: AP]

Money has always played an under-appreciated enabling role in the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, even as those doing the actual channeling to the terrorists have doggedly denied the connection.

Channeled is the right word because the actual money for this sort of funding is never coming from the facilitators' pockets. It always originates with ordinary, unwitting taxpayers. Those doing the allocating and delivering are invariably paid functionaries in a publicly-funded European, Australian or North American government office.

This is infuriating. We have been writing about it since before we started our blog. See for instance this June 2004 contribution by Arnold Roth to the website of EU Funding (mission: "An Independent Look at the Role of European Funding in the Middle East") in which he addresses the British political figure who headed the EU's foreign ministry at the time, Christopher Patten [for background, see our post "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"].

A news article had appeared earlier that day, providing what Roth called:

the clearest possible indication that Arafat and his regime have at all relevant times funded the Palestinian Arab militants. Not to mince words about it, this - for those who actually need such things - is "the smoking gun". It connects the PA to terrorism, and by extension, implicates the European Commission which has continued to shovel vast amounts of money into the very same PA pipeline against reams of evidence that to do so is to fund murder. Depending on how one looks at it, today's story is either a revelation, or a very, very good reason for you and your staff to pick up the phone and make some urgent calls.

Brussels, May 2001: Patten in the company of Yasser Arafat, 
Romano Prodi and Nabil Shaath [Image Source]

Naturally Christopher Patten (honored these days to be called Baron Patten of Barnes) never made that call.

Nor was he moved by an op-ed in Wall Street Journal that had appeared in September 2003 under the title "Blood, Money and Education", also written by Arnold Roth. (It's behind a WSJ paywall. Another version is archived here.) Or by an open letter delivered to Patten that same month and published here.

We began blogging here in 2006. About a hundred of our posts in the years since then are key-worded "Funding". It's continued to be one of major preoccupations.

Having lost a dearly-loved child to the satanic work of Hamas, and then watching in horror as the mastermind of the plot that took her life and the lives of fifteen other innocents walked free with a phenomenally fat pension made possible by US and European funding of the unspeakable Palestinian Authority, we more than most understand the extent of the evil that aggressively imbecilic management of so-called foreign aid funds can wreak on the lives of innocent people.

So no one should be surprised that we are delighting to learn today of new developments in the US government that, if carried through, will significantly reduce the evil, the imbecility and the lethal amorality exemplified by the Christopher Pattens of international relations and governance.

An Adam Kredo report in Washington Free Beacon yesterday says legislators in the House and Senate of the US Congress met yesterday (Tuesday) to introduce legislation

that would cut all U.S. funding to the Palestinian government, which has been criticized for providing financial incentives to terrorists who kill American and Israeli civilians. The White House signaled its support for the legislation in a vast departure from the Obama administration, which worked against similar efforts when in power... "The Palestinian Authority's use of its resources to provide material support for terrorism—indiscriminately targeted at American and Israeli civilians—is a grotesque example of how well-intentioned U.S. generosity can be turned against us," a senior White House official told the Free Beacon... "This legislation highlights practical steps the PA can take to demonstrate a real commitment to ending the vicious cycle of hatred and violence that has prevented the Palestinian people from the prosperity and security they could otherwise be enjoying," the official said... [WFB, February 28, 2017]

The effort is entirely led by Republicans: Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton in the Senate; Doug Lamborn and Lee Zeldin in the House of Representatives. A , R-N.Y., are carrying the companion legislation in the House. A CBS News report added that it is cosponsored in the Senate by Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, John Boozman, Ted Cruz, Richard Burr and John Thune: again all republicans.

Strikingly (at least to us), the Washington Examiner said yesterday that

only Republican lawmakers attended the press conference...

Kredo, quoting that unnamed White House official, writes that the new law seeks

to tighten the financial noose on the Palestinian government and force it to abandon its practice of paying terrorists, is a first step to reforming the notoriously corrupt government, the official said. "The new legislative effort... cuts off all U.S. aid to the Palestinians as a direct response to its longstanding policy of paying salaries to terrorists and supporting those imprisoned for terrorist attacks" "...We shouldn't allow killers and ruthless attackers to become recognized as martyrs in a system that we're part of," Blunt added... "Most Americans have no idea this is a problem," Graham said. "Not only are Israelis victims of this practice, Americans are victims of this practice. We're going to change this. We're going to get the Palestinian Authority's attention by withholding their money."

Did we mention that not a single Democrat attended the Congressional
press conference yesterday? [Image Source]

It's a scheme we have for years termed "Rewards for Terror".

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who has long backed similar efforts, told the Free Beacon it is long past due for Congress to take the lead on this effort now that Obama administration officials can no longer lead efforts to block it. "After eight years of the Obama administration, the U.S. must take long overdue action to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for incentivizing and rewarding acts of terrorism," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "Roughly $300 million annually is provided in monthly salaries and benefits to terrorists jailed in Israel, their families, and the families of those who died committing such horrific atrocities against Israeli and American citizens, including Taylor Force [we wrote about what was done to him here.] Enough is enough. We must stand up for victims of Palestinian terrorism. No more U.S. taxpayer dollars should be provided until the Palestinian leadership stops engaging in this heinous practice. The incitement and glorification of terrorism must end." ["Trump Admin, Congress Behind Effort to Cut U.S. Aid to Palestinians", Washington Free Beacon, February 28, 2017]

No one working the halls of power in Washington can honestly claim to be unaware. David Feith one of the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers [quoted in our post], wrote last year ["Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror", August 11, 2016] that none of this could happen but for the willful blindness of governments, foremost among them the United States. What's needed, he wrote, is

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... [since] the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016]

A fine op ed in the Wall Street Journal five weeks ago [and quoted in our post "29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?"] stated bluntly how US funding is central to the PA's loathsome scheming which an Arab source quoted in the same post called "sacred in Palestinian politics":

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Efforts are underway in Europe - including the UK, Norway and possibly via the EC's own auditors - to curb the European Commission's ongoing funding of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme. But in terms of lives blighted and destroyed, such efforts and those of the Americans will be meaningless if they fail to block the blood lust of the Palestinian Authority's inner circle of enthusiastic murderers. Only stemming the flow of tax-payers' funds into their malevolent clutches can do that.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Waszyngton może rozpocząć atak na zabójczy system “Nagród za Terror” Abbasa – co należało dawno zrobić") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?

A couple of years back, we wrote ["9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"] that there has been an active EU cover-up since 2003 to conceal the hideous things done with European foreign aid funds delivered to the Arafat- and Abbas-controlled PLO/PA regimes in Ramallah.

During the years since then, torrents of European funding, billions of Euros, were channeled to the terrorism-addicted Palestinian Authority. Throughout that time, the Eurocrats managed to avoid carrying out even a single financial audit until the one whose results were published in December 2013 [full text here]. 

The astounding policy of hands-off "see no evil", mismanagement happened while the EU "provides 20% of the direct financial support for the PA", making it "the biggest multilateral donor to the Occupied Palestinian Territories".

So what did that audit find?

1. 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]
2. "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.
3. "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]

But there's more. 

In the wake of the audit, the chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control - a man who, given his official role, probably thinks about things like financial controls and honesty and checks and balances more than most of us and certainly has more information than we do - wrote that the EU's auditors found "major dysfunctions" in the way the Palestinian Authority were getting and spending their foreign aid Euros. 

In that important, but little noticed, article in the Wall Street Journal, he urged the EC to impose benchmarks and conditions on the Palestinian Authority as a condition for getting more EU gift money:

These should include improving the state of human rights in the West Bank, cracking down on corruption and cutting off subsidies to convicted Palestinian terrorists. In these hard times, Brussels shouldn't tolerate blatant misuse of EU taxpayers' money. [WSJ, April 9, 2014]

We will also mention that a Times of London journalist who saw the pre-publication version of the audit report wrote in an October 2013 article ["£1.95bn EU aid lost in Palestine", Sunday Times, October 13, 2013] that went further. Having seen the pre-publication version of the report, he concluded that "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 uncorroborated sense is that the report went through a sanitization process after his article appeared and before the public saw it.

[Image Source]

Can anyone hear even a faint echo of any of this in today's defensive arguments put up by the UKaid/DfID people in the wake of the Mail on Sunday revelations this past weekend? [Refer to "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in" and "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UKaid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad".] 

For a taste of those UK official denials, see "Government denies foreign aid 'paid to Palestinian terrorists'" [AOL UK News, March 27, 2016]

Whatever the 2013 EU audit report says (and it strikingly side-steps any attempt to tackle the profoundly embarrassing matter of PA financial rewards for convicted terrorists), and taking into account what the UKaid people are now saying, two major points at least should be clear: 

1. It's outrageous 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.
2. The Europeans and the Brits can say what they like about everything being checked and no possible room for malfeasance. But that's not what the PA says to its own people. The message from the Abbas insiders for internal consumption is that, as bankrupt as their regime is, there will always be money for those "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”; and “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”.

The mandarins of Whitehall will get away with murder again (we're not being metaphorical) only if we - which really means British taxpayers and the British media - let them. Perhaps now is the time to stop the lethal foolishness. 

We noted a while back ["13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!"] that there was one aspect of the European/UK saga of PA-centred corruption and dishonesty that was truly beyond our comprehension. It still is, and it's this: how can the members of the news media who cover the EU and the Middle East conflict have allowed this decade-plus financial scandal (one that everyone knows about and that few will discuss in public) to get so little media coverage? How much of the conspiracy of silence is based on intimidation?

Perhaps we're finally going to find. Or perhaps not.

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.

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.

30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?

Europe's parliamentarians: Are they part of the problem or
part of the solution? [Image Source]

An incisive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal places much-needed focus on the role played by Europe's national and multi-lateral institutions in enabling the capacity of Hamas' inner circle to keep doing the massive harm they do. Here's the full text:

How Europe's Good Intentions Harm Gaza
By GERALD M. STEINBERG

In response to the latest outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas, European leaders have issued the familiar calls for peace and made the usual four-hour pilgrimages to the region. Yet little has come out of this European engagement, with the Continent remaining "a payer, not a player" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If anything, the war between Hamas and the Jewish state can in part be blamed on the massive and unaccountable aid Europeans have poured into the Palestinian territories. The European Union and its 28 member states continue to channel millions of euros, pounds and kroner annually to both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the West Bank, without responsible supervision, transparency or oversight.

In Gaza, instead of building schools and developing a functioning economy, Hamas diverted resources into the two main local "industries": acquiring thousands of missiles and building a huge underground infrastructure designed to terrorize Israeli civilians. The miles of concrete-lined strategic tunneling under houses, schools and hospitals are estimated to have cost €1 billion, which wouldn't have been available without European aid.

The EU's Court of Auditors issued a detailed evaluation of aid to the Palestinians in December 2013. Yet the contributions to the war industry were noticeably missing. The report discussed the EU's project for private-sector reconstruction in Gaza, which pays for buildings "destroyed or damaged during the Israeli 'Operation Cast Lead' offensive of 2008." But there was no mention of the role of these structures as facades for the underground maze. Auditors visited Shifa hospital in Gaza City, but their report doesn't mention the concrete bunkers below the emergency room, which house a Hamas military command center, according to Israeli officials.

By contrast, the report repeated the standard EU slogans condemning Israel for trying to protect its citizens from Hamas attacks, writing that "restrictions on Gaza are particularly severe." Framing the conflict this way promotes the Palestinian-victimization narrative, which is then translated into intense pressure on the Jewish state to relax restrictions. When Israel accedes to such demands, Hamas accelerates its acquisition of thousands of missiles and the transformation of Gaza into an underground terror fortress.

Many of these policy blunders are closely linked to political nongovernmental organizations that Brussels funds and turns to for "expert" advice. Israeli "human-rights" groups, such as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and B'Tselem, are close EU partners. In public statements to international bodies and in their press releases, these groups frequently condemn Israeli policies but ignore the war crimes of Hamas.

Similarly, Europe has been a central source of funds to United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, which for six decades has helped to perpetuate the conflict by treating generations of Palestinians as "refugees." Unrwa facilities, like the rest of Gaza, are closely integrated into the Hamas war structure. On two occasions during the current conflict, deadly missiles have been found in Unrwa schools. Unrwa reported turning them over to "local authorities," which according to Israeli officials means Hamas.

Chris Gunness, UNRWA's spokesman, frequently echoes Hamas messaging in the mainstream media, and European officials then amplify his talking points in their capitals. His Twitter account and interviews are replete with indictments of Israeli actions in Gaza, but his condemnations of Hamas rocketing of Israeli civilians are muted, if they are issued at all.

Many individual Western European states have also inadvertently empowered extremism. The Dutch government, for example, has provided at least €300,000 to the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation. The Christian aid group is a major funder of Electronic Intifada, an anti-Israel website notorious for its rejectionist stance toward Israel's right to exist. Electronic Intifada's founder, Ali Abunimah, routinely uses inflammatory, ugly rhetoric against the Jewish state, labeling Gaza, among other things, a "ghetto for surplus non-Jews" in a 2010 tweet.

When Europeans finally find the courage to conduct full, independent and credible investigations of these policies, the reports will make tragic reading. This could take some time. The European Parliament in 2004 ordered the EU's Anti-Fraud Office to investigate previous funding for Yasser Arafat. A decade later, that report remains top secret—a blatant affront to democratic principles.

Before European statements can be taken seriously in this conflict, Brussels must become a more responsible player by keeping closer watch over whom and what it funds.

Mr. Steinberg is president of NGO Monitor and a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University.

9-Apr-14: Straight talk, crooked dealings: is the role of foreign aid in financing Palestinian Arab terror about to change?

In the European Parliament [Image Source]

A document produced by the Israel Government Prime Minister's Office in January and publicized just today [according to the Jerusalem Post] reiterates the extent to which the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas finances terrorism, making monkeys out of the foreign governments whose aid money makes this possible. Some key points:

• In 2012, the PA's overall budget was $3.1 Billion of which $786 Million came from foreign aid.
• The impoverished (by its own description) PA channeled no less than $153.5 Million to terrorists imprisoned in Israel, to their families, and to the families of deceased terrorists including human bombs during that year. 
• That's 16% of the foreign aid received by the PA in that period.
• It's also 5% of the PA's annual total budget.

We have written often here about the appalling three-way deal Israel did with the US and the Palestinian Arabs last year as the price for the Abbas regime agreeing in principle to sit down at a negotiating table and talk "peace". None of that eventuated, but what did was that 78 convicted terrorists were released by Israel (of a proposed 104). Today, living in freedom, they get monthly payments from the PA "of up to $3,500, and grants of up to $25,000." 

In fact, some get much more. The obscenely flattering Jody Rudoren profile of a released Palestinian Arab killer in the New York Times [“Remaking a Life, After Years in an Israeli Prison” front page, March 30, 2014] demonstrated this last week, and quotes numbers. They're large: the Wall Street Journal says today the murderers get paid PA salaries that are "up to five times higher than the average salary in the West Bank."

The Israeli document, stating the obvious, points out that "the Palestinian Authority is highly dependent on foreign aid. This money, which supports the PA budget, is fungible to meet payments for imprisoned and released terrorists... Publicly rewarding convicted murderers gives an official stamp of approval to terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. It is a highly persuasive form of incitement to violence and terrorism."

(Fungible means "able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable"; "money is fungible—money that is raised for one purpose can easily be used for another")

Now to the development: Israel has been transferring certain tax revenues to the Abbas regime for a long time, and is now said to be giving consideration to holding back a sum equal to what the PA spends each month on grants, salaries etc to the terrorists and their families.

Why? Because giving financial support for terrorists "not only violates basic morality," the Israeli document says, but also "encourages further terrorist outrages"...

It's an analysis that might seem straight-forward to some of our readers. (And it is.) But European bureaucrats of a certain mind-set get to very different conclusions. 

We commented on this two weeks ago in "28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism". In it, we reproduced word for word the public statement of an official of the European Commission, a certain Štefan Füle who, for the past four years, has been the senior person in charge of EU enlargement and neighbourhood policies ("to consolidate peace, democracy and prosperity in Europe"). In the parliamentary chamber, Füle was asked by a Polish Member of the European Parliament to confirm or deny that EU funds are being used 

"to pay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons... As the last known case of paying money for killing Jews was in Nazi Germany, will the EU High Representative condemn this practice?". 

The answer, as one might immediately guess, was no. But the rationale is interesting. Füle says he and his colleagues are of course aware of the PA's program of paying "allowances" (his word) to prisoners, but the program is

not and has never been financed by the EU. All the funds the EU allocates to the Palestinian Authority for salaries, pensions and social allocations, are subject to rigorous ex ante and ex post verification procedures, notably including a specific check against a recognised data base of individuals listed as having a connection with terrorism of any sort. Any name which is signalled by the check is automatically deleted from the list of beneficiaries.

And so on. It's a very confident answer, smooth and free of doubt - even though it's composed of double-talk ("rigorous ex ante and ex post verification procedures" is just embarrassing nonsense) and is substantially undermined by things that the EC's own audit body has learned, and recently publicized, about what's wrong with European money flowing into the hands of the Abbas regime and its grabby insiders. 

On that matter, the Wall Street Journal carries an important article today by the chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control in which he calls the things the auditors found "major dysfunctions". He urges the EC to imposes benchmarks and conditions on the Palestinian Authority as a condition for getting more EU gift money:

These should include improving the state of human rights in the West Bank, cracking down on corruption and cutting off subsidies to convicted Palestinian terrorists. In these hard times, Brussels shouldn't tolerate blatant misuse of EU taxpayers' money. [WSJ, April 9, 2014]

In our March 28 blog post, we said:

Anyone who has reviewed the tragic history of EC double-talk around the subject of money -generously but ignorantly provided by unwitting European taxpayers via their representatives in Brussels - handed over to the Palestinian Arabs, knows that it is rich in language like what's on display here. Don't blame us; we didn't do anything wrong; we have rigorous ex ante and ex post verification procedures, and so on. This sand-in-your-eyes resort to self-parodying language is calculated to do precisely what it achieves: to conceal far more than it reveals. 

We're not optimistic that a turning point has been reached. Europe and to a great extent the US as well are deeply invested in the Palestinian Authority, and in the moralistic acrobatics that got them to become its financiers. Climbing down from the tree, if it ever happens, would mean many politicians and the bureaucrats who serve them having to own up to being duped again and again, year after year, by the Arafat regime and then the Abbas clicque that took over (or in some cases, to having been co-conspirators, and one prominent British figure knows we mean him).

The chances are slim.