Middle East Distortions
January 2009
Gaza - The Proxy Suicide Bomb
Bin laden calls for holy war in support of the Gaza palestinians as he hides in his cave.
Unlike our brave UK army commanders who lead & die from the front this man is a coward.
As are his jihadists who not only destroy their own people but hide among women and
children to increase the publicity for their cause, and even use retard recruits for their suicide bombs.
The Iranian backed Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal held his press conference from the safety of Syria as he proclaimed his ideology, sentencing the Palestinian people to more suffering & possible death.
He very uncourageously, volunteered them as suicide victims as the Hamas terrorists he controls hide amongst the population as they fire rockets at Israel in a media war configured to weaken Israel...
Just as in 2006 the Iranian backed Hezbollah proclaimed victory over Israel in southern Lebanon from the rubble of its former cities. The bodies of the local population, a tool used for political media publicity aired daily by the inglorious BBC.
Ahmadinajab, the Iranian mastermind of self destruction who hides from his friends as well as his enemies. The ultimate destroyer of the Muslim world, whose life ambition is to plunge the middle east into world war three.
And his main allies, the western media who publicise and support his warped anti-Israel ideology.
The Palestinian people of Gaza are just pawns in a game, a game of blackmail, news and horror.
A game where all the main players are noticeably absent.
A proxy war of media manipulation operated by a near nuclear suicide cult.
This is the scenario for the next world war when the pseudo intellectual proxy media war turns into a real nuclear confrontation.
Dissociate belief will be the new psyche word as the western media attempts to explain its failings.
This is not a film or reality TV, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
This is the countdown to when the middle east implodes
And Europe finds out how many Muslim sleepers have been let through its borders.
Israel Stands Alone
This is like watching World War III unfold before our eyes.
Why did no-one stop Iran as it smuggled arms into Gaza for Hamas.
Why did the UN allow Hezbollah to rearm in southern Lebanon.
Why did the western media destroy international support for Israel.
Why did the western allies do nothing to head off the coming confrontation.
Why did the Russians and the Chinese refuse to condemn Iran's nuclear weapons project.
Why did Israel attack Iran.
BBC News Declares war on Israel.
In what can only be described as a media blitz, BBC news unleashed a tirade of abuse against Israel as it reported on events in Gaza.Giving open air time to Palestinian sympathisers who ranted at length against the Israeli offensive.
Coupled with video of war damage and uncorroborated reports of child deaths the BBC continued with its emotional manipulation & its own personal agenda.
The BBC failed to mention that the Iranian backed terrorist group Hamas had provoked the conflict by launching 60 rockets into Israeli towns & cities.
Or that Hamas used the Gaza population as a shield in what could turn into the ultimate sacrifice for the Palestinian people.
Do the people of Gaza realise that they are being used as a suicide weapon by the Iranians who have no respect for their lives? Not if they watch the BBC.
The BBC continues to give maximum airtime to the terrorist group Hamas who are dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and ultimately Europe and the US.
Lets just hope the maniacal Ahmadinajab hasn't smuggled the ultimate suicide bomb into Gaza.
October 2008 - Financial Meltdown
Hammas & Hezbollah
The BBC has a history of supporting the proscribed terrorist organisations Hezbollah, Hammas and the previously the PLO.The growth of terrorism in the middle east is a direct result of media publicity for their aims.
While Hammas and Hezbollah would say that terrorism is a legitimate form of warfare against a vastly superior technologically sophisticated US/UK/Israeli army.
The fact that they assassinate and impoverish their own people to achieve their aims has been overlooked.
Terrorism and suicide bombing may be a legitimate form of warfare if you are; Muslim, black, & an impoverished terrorist.
It is not a legitimate form of warfare if you are part of the West London elite upper middle classes.
Supporting Hammas & Hezbollah is a crass pseudo intellectual exercise in pacifism.
Misguided, twisted & possibly even delusional self denial.
The Interview: News - Opinion or Fact
(continues)June 2002
Conspiracy or Stupidity
The press has taken us down a very liberal path when assessing the Palestinians.
They have led British readers to believe that the Palestinians have a valid case for statehood even though the facts prove otherwise.
They have failed to admit their gross exaggeration of the Jenin 'massacre'.
The final insult, that the PLO bombers were financed by gullible British taxpayers, has also been erased from their and our collective memory.
Some journalists possibly can't forgive Israel for fighting a terrorist war against British occupation some fifty years ago.
This hardly explains their inability to understand basic map reading and history.
Implicit in their support of Palestinian affairs is the endorsement of Muslim suicide bombers.
The failure to realise that terrorist factions within the Middle East are not after a Palestinian state but the destruction of Israel and latterly our western culture leaves us vulnerable and unprepared for the future
Israel
Sunday, 16 June 2002Israel became a nation/country in 1382BC some 2000 years before the rise of Islam.
Jerusalem was created by Jews under King David. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital.
Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital.
Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews and Christians were denied access to places of worship.
Synagogues and the Western Wall were defiled while Jewish tombstones were used to make roads, as the Nazi's had done.
The Israelis havepreserved all Muslim and Christian sites and made them accessible to people of all faiths. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000.
The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be above 630.000.
'Palestinians' were told to leave the land to let the Arab armies massacre the Jews in Israel/Palestine and in the words of the King of Jordan at the time, "finish Hitler's job".
Arab states did not absorb the 'Palestinians' instead they used them as political weapons.
Israel absorbed all Jewish refugees who were brutally kicked out of their homes from Arab land.
The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs - Of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.
The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed and during other desecrations by the Jordanians.
Israeli Arabs have more rights than any other Arabs in the whole of the Middle East.
While Arab leaders oppress their own people, and often massacre them as in Syria/Hama 1982.
All Israeli-Arab wars were initiated by Arab states.
When the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian rule between 1948-1967, the Egyptians never considered giving the land to the 'Palestinians' nor did the 'Palestinians' ever ask them to.
Judea and Samaria (renamed the West Bank) was annexed into the Kingdom of Jordan.
Once again the Jordanians did not consider giving the 'Palestinians' the West Bank nor did the 'Palestinians'ask for it.
The Palestinians did not identify themselves as a Palestinian people until 1967.
82% of Jordan is Palestine. the 1922 Sykes-Picot agreement divided Palestine, the smaller western part remained Palestine while the much larger eastern part became known as Transjordan, a state with a British placed monarch.
Winston Churchill created Jordan with "a stroke of a pen". 80% of Jordanians are actual Palestinians so they already have a state!
The second Intafada started when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount a sacred place in both Judaism and Islam.
Sharon was making a fair point that Jews should not be afraid to visit their holy sites, after all Muslims are not!
The Temple Mount is called the "Temple Mount" because it was the Mount of the holy Jewish Temple created some 2000 years before Islam came about.
Arafat has directed a lot of the Intafada including channelling money for terrorists.
In Arabic Arafat encourages terrorism against Israel including the call for a "million 'martyrs' to march on Jerusalem".
Arafat has large Swiss bank accounts. He has stolen the Palestinian's money for his own personal benefit and for terrorism.
Most Arabs living in Palestine today are not indigenous to the region.
It was not until after the Jews had changed the deserts and swamps into a productive and thriving land that the Arabs started migrating there.
Arafat himself was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt.
The very anti-Israel world media talks about occupation. Though there was no land stolen from a Palestinian state.
Why was there no talk about occupation during Egypt's and Jordan's control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank?
There was a peace process where Israel was giving land to the Palestinians.
In 1999 then Prime Minsiter of Israel Ehud Barak offered Arafat an unbelievable peace treaty, which would give the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza, East Jerusalem and parts of Israel proper.
Also the international community would give billions of Dollars to the Palestinians.
One Palestinian negotiator said before the final decision of Arafat "we should be shot if we don't accept this, but its up to the boss".
Arafat said no and started the Intafada instead.
There was no war crime in Jenin. The camp was a terrorist factory where the terrorists hid behind women and children.
All under the nose of the UN who were in charge of the camp.
Mohammed El Dura the 12 year old boy shot in his fathers arms was killed by Palestinian police gun fire.
A recent German documentary basically proved that.
The angle was too tight for Israeli troops to shoot him,the Palestinians never handed over the bullet that killed the young boy for an independent inquiry? Yet the press blamed Israel.
Israel never targets or means to kill innocent Palestinians.
Palestinian terrorists purposely try kill as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible.
`Jeningrad` - Blood Libels of the British Media
Tom Gross. Jewishpress.com Thursday May 30th
Israel's actions in Jenin were "every bit as repellent" as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11, wrote Britain's Guardian in its lead editorial of April 17.
"We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide," said a leading columnist for the Evening Standard, London's main evening newspaper, on April 15.
"Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life," reported Janine di Giovanni, the London Times's correspondent in Jenin, on April 16.
Now that even the Palestinian Authority has admitted that there was no massacre in Jenin, it is worth taking another look at how the international media covered the fighting there. The death count is still not completely agreed. The Palestinian Authority now claims that 56 Palestinians died in Jenin, the majority of whom were combatants according to the head of Yasir Arafat's Fatah organization in the town. Palestinian hospital sources in Jenin put the total number of dead at 52.
A Human Rights Watch report also said 52 Palestinians died. Israel says 46 Palestinians died, all but three of whom were combatants.
Palestinian medical sources have confirmed that at least one of these civilians died after Israel withdrew from Jenin on April 12, as a result of a booby-trapped bomb that Palestinian fighters had planted accidentally going off.
Yet one month ago, the media's favorite Palestinian spokespersons, such as Saeb Erekat - a practiced liar if ever there was one - spoke first of 3,000 Palestinian dead, then of 500.
Without bothering to check, the international media just lapped his figures up. The British media was particularly emotive in its reporting. They devoted page upon page, day after day, to tales of mass murders, common graves, summary executions, and war crimes.
Israel was invariably compared to the Nazis, to al Qaida, and to the Taliban. The possibility that Yasir Arafat's claim that the Palestinians had suffered "Jeningrad" might be - to put it mildly - somewhat exaggerated seems not to have been considered.
(800 thousand Russians died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad; 1.3 million died in Stalingrad.)
There were malicious and slanderous reports against Israel in the American media too - with Arafat's propagandists given hundreds of hours on television to air their incredible tales of Israeli atrocities - but at least some American journalists attempted to be fair.
On April 16, Newsday's reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote: "There is little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre of the dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials." Molly Moore of the Washington Post reported: "No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of largescale massacres or executions."
Compare this with some of the things which appeared in the British media on the very same day, April 16: Under the headline "Amid the ruins, the grisly evidence of a war crime," the Jerusalem correspondent for the London Independent, Phil Reeves, began his dispatch from Jenin: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed." He continued: "The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb.
The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust."
Reeves spoke of "killing fields," an image more usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Forgetting to tell his readers that Arafat's representatives, like those of the other totalitarian regimes that surround Israel, have a habit of lying a lot, he quoted Palestinians who spoke of "mass murder" and "executions." Reeves didn't bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story.
In another report Reeves didn't even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at all when he wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians."
Across-The-Board Israel Bashing
But it wasn't only journalists of the left who indulged in Israel baiting. The right-wing Daily Telegraph was hardly any less misleading in its news coverage, running headlines such as "Hundreds of victims 'were buried by bulldozer in mass grave."'
In a story on April 15 entitled "Horror stories from the siege of Jenin," the paper's correspondent, David Blair, took at face value what he called "detailed accounts" by Palestinians that "Israeli troops had executed nine men."
Blair quotes one woman telling him that Palestinians were "stripped to their underwear, they were searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head."
On the next day, April 16, Blair quoted a "family friend" of one supposedly executed man: "Israeli soldiers had stripped him to his underwear, pushed him against a wall and shot him." He also informed Telegraph readers that "two thirds of the camp had been destroyed." (In fact, as satellite photos show, the destruction took place in one small area of the camp.)
The "quality" British press spoke with almost wall-to-wall unanimity. The Evening Standard's Sam Kiley conjured up witnesses to speak of Israel's "staggering brutality and callous murder."
The Times's Janine di Giovanni suggested that Israel's mission to destroy suicide bomb-making factories in Jenin (a town from which at the Palestinians own admission 28 suicide bombers had already set out) was an excuse by Ariel Sharon to attack children with chickenpox.
The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg wrote, "The scale [of destruction] is almost beyond imagination."
In case British readers didn't get the message from their "news reporters," the editorial writers spelled it out loud and clear. On April 17, the Guardian's lead editorial compared the Israeli incursion in Jenin with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. "Jenin," wrote the Guardian, was "every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made."
Whereas the Guardian's editorial writers compared the Jewish state to al Qaida, Evening Standard commentators merely compared the Israeli government to the Taliban. Writing on April 15, A. N. Wilson, one of the Evening Standard's leading columnists, accused Israel of "the poisoning of water supplies" (a libel dangerously reminiscent of ancient anti-Semitic myths) and wrote "we are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide."
He also attempted to pit Christians against Jews by accusing Israel of "the willful burning of several church buildings," and making the perhaps even more incredible assertion that "Many young Muslims in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians, educated at St George's Jerusalem, who felt that their parents' mild faith was not enough to fight the oppressor."
Other commentators threw in the Holocaust, turning it against Israel. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading columnist for the Independent wrote (April 15): "I would suggest that Ariel Sharon should be tried for crimes against humanity...and be damned for so debasing the profoundly important legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop forever nations turning themselves into ethnic killing machines."
Many of the hostile comments were leveled at the U.S. "Why, for God's sake, can't Mr Powell do the decent thing and demand an explanation for the extraordinary, sinister events that have taken place in Jenin? Does he really have to debase himself in this way? Does he think that meeting Arafat, or refusing to do so, takes precedence over the enormous slaughter that has overwhelmed the Palestinians?" wrote Robert Fisk in the Independent.
'Staining The Star Of David With Blood'
In the wake of the media attacks, came the politicians. Speaking in the House of Commons on April 16, Gerald Kaufman, a veteran Labor member of parliament and a former shadow foreign secretary, announced that Ariel Sharon was a "war criminal" who led a "repulsive government." To nods of approval from his fellow parliamentarians, Kaufman, who is Jewish, said the "methods of barbarism against the Palestinians" supposedly employed by the Israeli army were "staining the Star of David with blood."
Speaking on behalf of the opposition Conservative party, John Gummer, a former cabinet minister, also lashed out at Israel. He said he was basing his admonition on "the evidence before us." Was Gummer perhaps referring to the twisted news reports he may have watched from the BBC's correspondent Orla Guerin?
Or maybe his evidence stemmed from the account given by Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, who on return from a fleeting fact-finding mission to Jenin, told parliament she had a "croaky voice" and this was all the fault of dust caused by Israeli tanks.
Clwyd's voice wasn't sufficiently croaky, though, to prevent her from calling on all European states to withdraw their ambassadors from Israel. Not to be outdone by politicians, Britain's esteemed academics went further. Tom Paulin, who lectures in 19th- and 20th-century literature at Oxford University, opined that the U.S.-born Jews who live on the West Bank of the river Jordan should be "shot dead."
"They are Nazis, racists," he said, adding (though one might have thought this was unnecessary after his previous comment) "I feel nothing but hatred for them." (Paulin is also one of BBC television's regular commentators on the arts. The BBC says it will continue to invite him even after these remarks; Oxford University has taken no action against him.) Only One Witness? On closer examination, the "facts" on which many of the media reports were based - "facts" that no doubt played a role in inspiring such hateful remarks as Paulin's - reveal an even greater scandal.
The British media appear to have based much of its evidence of "genocide" on a single individual: "Kamal Anis, a labourer" (Times), "Kamal Anis, 28" (Daily Telegraph), "A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis" (Independent), and referred to the same supposed victim - "the burned remains of a man, Bashar" (Evening Standard), "Bashir died in agony" (Times), "A man named only as Bashar once lived there" (Daily Telegraph).
Independent: "Kamal Anis saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank."
Times: "Kamal Anis says the Israelis levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over it to flatten it.''
Evidently, as can be seen from the following reports, British journalists hadn't been speaking to the same Palestinian witnesses as American journalists.
Los Angeles Times: Palestinians in Jenin "painted a picture of a vicious house-to-house battle in which Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian gunmen intermixed with the camp's civilian population."
Boston Globe: Following extensive interviews with "civilians and fighters" in Jenin "none reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed." On the other hand, referring to the deaths of Israeli soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, an "Islamic Jihad grenade-thrower," told the Globe "This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us."
Some in the American press also mentioned the video filmed by the Israeli army (and shown on Israeli television) of Palestinians moving corpses of people who had previously died of natural causes, rather than in the course of the Jenin fighting, into graveyards around the camp to fabricate "evidence" in advance of the now-canceled U.N. fact-finding mission.
But if Europeans readers don't trust American journalists, perhaps they are ready to believe the testimony given in the Arab press. Take, for example, the extensive interview with a Palestinian bomb-maker, Omar, in the leading Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram.
"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the [Jenin] camp," Omar said. "We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them... We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the houses - in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas... the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving. The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area." Perhaps what is most shocking, though, is that the British press had closed its ears to the Israelis themselves - a society with one of the most vigorous and self-critical democracies in the world.
In the words of Kenneth Preiss, a professor at Ben Gurion University: "Please inform the reporters trying to figure out if the Israeli army is trying to 'hide a massacre' of Palestinians, that Israel's citizen army includes journalists, members of parliament, professors, doctors, human rights activists, members of every political party, and every other kind of person, all within sight and cell phone distance of home and editorial offices.
Were the slightest infringements to have taken place, there would be demonstrations outside the prime minister's office in no time." (NationalReviewOnline)
Tom Gross is a former Middle East reporter for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News.
Yasser Arafat Takes What He Likes
Rachel Ehrenfeld National Review - July 12, 2002 (edited)
The first public evidence that Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization had at least $10 billion came to light when the Pakistani-owned rogue Bank of Credit and Commerce International was shut down by the Bank of England on July 5, 1991. Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) published its own estimate of the PLO's loot in a 1993 briefing paper on organizations threatening the UK, calling it "the richest of all terrorist organizations." NCIS estimated the PLO's ill-gotten gains at $8-10 billion. In addition, the PLO enjoyed an annual income of about $1.5-2 billion from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc."
In the U.S., the General Accounting Office investigation of Arafat and the PA's wealth in November 1995 was kept secret because the CIA insisted that the publicity would hurt the "national security interest." This despite the CIA's own report in 1990 that the PLO had $8-14 billion.
Then came the Oslo accords. Following the 1993 ceremony on the White House lawn, Arafat pleaded poverty and set out, hat in hand, on a world aid tour, claiming that the peace process would collapse without financial support from the international community.
Exactly how much money Arafat and his gang have pocketed is hard to ascertain. But the conspicuous consumption of Arafat and his inner circle - rows of ostentatious villas, shopping sprees in Paris, and late-model Mercedes-Benzes - has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Palestinians, who live in dismal conditions.
When $326 million disappeared from PA coffers in 1996, the Palestinian Legislative Council established a special commission to investigate corruption within the PA. The ensuing report found that nearly 40 percent of the PA's $800 million annual budget (coming mostly from foreign aid) had been lost through corruption and mismanagement. The PA's comptroller wrote: "The overall picture is one of a Mafia-style government, where the main point of being in public office is to get rich quick." Arafat suppressed the report but promised reform.
In October 1999, Azmi Shuaibi, chairman of the PLC's Budget Committee, had harsh words for the PA at the 9th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Durban, South Africa: "The recent corruption found in the PA is similar to the corruption that exists in the rest of the Arab countries' governments."
Soon after, the London Daily Telegraph revealed that computer hackers had broken the security code of the PLO's computer system, uncovering records of about $8 billion the PLO held in numbered bank accounts in New York, Geneva, and Zurich, and smaller secret accounts in North Africa, Europe, and Asia. The newspaper also unearthed further secret holdings of the PLO - including front companies, European real estate, and shares in Mercedes-Benz and the national airlines of the Maldives and Guinea-Bissau - totalling about $50 billion for the year 2000 (up from $32 billion recorded in 1998). Naturally, Arafat and his men denied the report.
Ongoing demonstrations by disgruntled Palestinians frustrated with this corruption convinced Arafat that his rule was becoming shaky. It was in large measure to deflect internal turmoil that he launched the intifada.
In 2000, Arab countries pledged $1 billion to the PA to ease the economic hardship of the Palestinians. Past dealings with Arafat, however, prompted them to demand that "Chairman Arafat show complete transparency in the funds" and provide a detailed report on how the money would be spent. Arafat refused to comply, and the Arab leaders suspended transfer of the money, telling the PLO chairman that they were doing so "for fear that the money will end up in the wrong pockets."
By April 2001, however, things had changed: Arab donor countries, recognizing in Arafat's intifada a convenient distraction from their own countries' problems, began pumping money again into the PA. At least $45 million per month was transferred directly to Arafat, most notably from the Saudis and Saddam Hussein. This money was not given to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people, but to fund PLO terrorist training and organizations, such as Islamic Jihad and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Recently, the monthly donations from Arab nations were increased to $55 million, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars raised in special events to fund the escalating intifada, such as the now infamous Saudi telethon to raise money for the families of Palestinian homicide bombers.
Money flows in from the European Union, too. Despite voluminous evidence of use of aid money to fund terrorism collected by the Israeli Defense Forces at Arafat's compound in Ramallah - including handwritten instructions from Arafat himself - millions of dollars continue to pour in from the EU. Why? Chris Patten, the EU commissioner, wrote on May 7 that "the EU had not seen any hard evidence that the EU funds have been misused to finance terrorism or for any other purpose."
"Arafat Bombs, Europe Pays" was the headline of the German newspaper Die Zeit on June 7. The newspaper's special investigation into EU funding revealed that at least 4.1 billion euros have flowed from the EU to the PA since the autumn of 1993, in addition to hundreds of millions of euros in grants contributed by individual European countries. When the Israelis stopped transferring the PA's share of revenues from import duties after realizing where the money was going, the EU stepped in to replace those funds. Each month since June 2001, 10 million euros have been paid directly to Arafat.
Die Zeit reported that a few European legislators called for an end to the funding for fear that the money was being used to fund terrorism.
But Chris Patten dismissed these concerns, praising "Europe's especially strict mechanisms for ex-ante and ex-post controls." Not even the interception of the illegal arms shipment from Iran on the Karine-A fazed EU bureaucrats. So, the financial umbilical cord from Europe to the PA remains, and the IMF representative charged with monitoring how the funds are used admits that "we do not oversee how every euro is spent, because we are not auditors."
On June 19, following a slew of homicide bombings by Arafat's al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the EU parliament voted to give an additional $17.7 million to the PA. According to the Associated Press, "Patten conceded that corruption in Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and other problems made it impossible to know where every euro finally ended up [because] 'it's an impossible question to ask in the real world.'"
But perhaps some in the Arab world have had enough. On June 5, the Kuwaiti daily Al-Watan published documents it received from a Cairo branch of a Middle Eastern bank showing that Arafat had deposited $5.1 million into his personal account - to support his wife and daughter, who live in Paris and Switzerland. According to the same report, the money came from Arab aid funds that had been allocated for the Palestinian people.
By now, EU aid to Arafat and the PA has reached at least $4.5-5 billion. U.S. aid to the PA runs about $75 million annually, not including the millions of dollars sent each year from private sources. Corruption is rife, and today the Palestinians are further away from democracy than ever before. As long as Arafat controls the PA's funds and he and his gang remain in power, no real reform is possible.
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