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.

28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism

Palestinian children: In a meaningful financial
sense, these innocents are the return on European
and American investment.  

Over at the ParliamentToday.com update service ("operated by Parliamentary News Services, Press Gallery, House of Commons") they posted the following exchange today to their subscribers, one of whom (H/T Michael H.) kindly forwarded it along to us.

E-001778/2014 | Monday, 3 March 2014
Question for written answer to the Commission (Vice-President/High Representative)
Rule 117: Michał Tomasz Kamiński (ECR)
VP/HR — Salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons

It is a well-known fact that the Palestinian Authority proudly owns up to illegally spending over 6% of its budget — donated by, among others, the EU, where funding terrorism is against the law — on salaries for terrorists in Israeli prisons and pensions for the families of suicide bombers. The Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Minister, Issa Qarake, has admitted on television that the salaries are directly proportional to the terrorists’ sentences and the number of Jews they have killed.
1. What information can the EEAS provide concerning this case?
2. What is the Commission’s strategy to stop EU funds 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?

Answer given by Mr Füle on behalf of the Commission

The EU is aware that the Palestinian Authority has a system of allowances in place for Palestinian prisoners, their families and ex-detainees. This scheme 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. The Commission would also refer the Honourable Member to its answer to Written Question E-14320/2013

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. 

Some might be interested to know that we wrote about this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal Europe as far back as September 2003: see "Blood, Money and Education" [here]. The issue was by no means new or unknown even then.

In fact, from personal knowledge, there has been an inside understanding among the civil servants of the EC 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 truly hideous things that everyone knows are done with those European funds that go to Ramallah.

In all those years during which torrents of European funding, amounting to 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 one financial audit, until the one published this past December [full text here]. 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".

And what did that audit find?

• 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.)

Whatever the 2013 audit report says (and it studiously side-steps any attempt to tackle the profoundly embarassing matter of PA financial rewards for convicted terrorists), 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 may have inserted ex ante this and ex post that, but the Euros keep flowing into Ramallah. The Abbas insiders keep telling their own people 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”.

Is it only Europe? Of course not. The US government has very 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. (In doubt about what we mean? Please 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".) 

For the record: despite our repeatedly sending personal messages to State Department and White House representatives throughout the more than seven months since we wrote that post, we are still without an answer from Washington. 

And in case anyone's wondering: yes, this does leave us with a very bitter feeling.

10-Dec-13: EU may have located the billions it "lost" in Palestine. Or not.

[Image Source]

Some weeks ago, we wrote here about financial corruption and how it impacts on people's lives in the worst way. See "13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!". We followed it up with a second piece: "7-Nov-13: A principled effort to stop foreign aid being stolen? Probably not.")

Both referred to a report in the October 13, 2013 edition of the London Times:

£1.95bn EU aid lost in Palestine Times, London | Bojan Pancevski, Brussels | Published: 13 October 2013 | 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, the Luxembourg-based watchdog. Brussels transferred more than £1.95bn to the occupied territories between 2008 and 2012 but had little control over how it was spent, the auditors say in an unpublished report seen by The Sunday Times. EU investigators who visited sites in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank noted “significant shortcomings” in the management of funds sent to Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU. A spokesman for the court declined to comment.

Not exactly the kind of reporting that causes our hearts to sing. The passive language of that Times of London headline was outrageous, of course. Two billion pounds lost? Were they dropped, forgotten, mislaid?

Inspiring motto: the auditors are guarding
European taxpayers' hard-earned money.
A pity this is the first audit of the torrent
of EU funding to the Palestinians in 13 years.
Still, better late than never...

Obviously not. We noted then and numerous times in the past seven years of blogging here that European funding of the Palestinian Arabs is a story of ongoing massive malfeasance, as the article itself suggests. The influence that money on that scale has on active, ongoing terrorism and incitement to terror is clear to anyone who wants to see. (We provided some details at "10-Nov-13: Who finances those savage acts of terror? And why is this so poorly understood?")

We exchanged a flurry of emails with the press officer of the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg in October. Turned out that despite the confident language of the London Times reporter (whose response we have not managed to get), the audit report into the colossal Palestinian scandal had in fact not been published, and still has not. Other than to say that

A report touching on aid to the PA should be published toward the end of the year

the agency's lips were sealed about it at the time. But that's about to change. 

Everyone who pays the smallest attention to what is known about Arafat, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority understands that the taint and smell of financial impropriety hangs heavy in the air. Yet despite this, the last time an audit into EU funding of the Palestinians was done was... 13 years ago. 

Patten, Arafat, Prodi, Shaath

Given the effect on human lives, that's simply incomprehensible. And almost entirely un-noticed or unremarked by the mainstream news media.

We're hoping there have been no behind-the-scenes manipulations underway to minimize the political fallout of another Palestinian Arab foreign aid scandal. Stranger things have been known to happen (see "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"). 

Will the as-yet-unreleased report about billions having disappeared in the darkness of the Palestinian regime's private parts be buried or detoothed? Tomorrow, in Brussels, we may find out. 

An EU announcement says:

Since 2008, the EU’s largest programme in the occupied Palestinian territory has been PEGASE Direct Financial Support (DFS), which provided approximately €1 billion in funding from 2008 to 2012. This European Court of Auditors performance audit examined if the Commission and the European External Action Service had managed this programme well for that period. PEGASE DFS seeks to help the Palestinian Authority to meet its obligations to civil servants, pensioners and vulnerable families, maintain essential public services and improve public finances. The main conclusions and recommendations of the report will be presented to the press by Mr Hans Gustaf Wessberg (SE) the Member of the Court responsible for the report.

It happens at 10:30 am, Western Europe time, tomorrow, Wednesday. There will be live video coverage via the European Commission Audiovisual Service here. We're told from Brussels this morning that the video will archived for on-demand review afterwards.

We're hoping some enterprising journalists will press for post-report reactions from the likes of Baron Patten of Barnes and former PA prime minister and finance minister Salam Fayyad, each of whom have played a key role in the giving, the taking and the massive opacity that has accompanied the process from the outset.

We're a little less optimistic that members of the Yasser Arafat family will share what they know about those missing millions. But perhaps someone from the EU's OLAF office will step forward and fill in some of the missing details.

UPDATE Tuesday night, December 10: See "10-Dec-13: In Brussels, is the EU preparing to whitewash PA corruption?"

7-Nov-13: A principled effort to stop foreign aid being stolen? Probably not.

The Daily Express UK used the photo above to illustrate the grinding poverty
of Country X [Image Source]

The news item below is in the UK's headlines today.

We have concealed from the quoted text the identity of the country whose officials stole a million or so pounds to save everyone a little embarrassment. But in all other respects, it's a verbatim copy of a report from the web site of one of Britain's leading news channels.

Oh, and here's a suggestion. Before reading further, take a moment and click here to understand the vast scale on which scandalous corruption has been a factor in European foreign aid. And not only European, of course.

Done? Good. Now read on.

Foreign aid to "Country X" halted after officials steal £1.3m | By Macer Hall | Daily Express UK | Published: Thu, November 7, 2013 |
British ministers have axed foreign aid to "Country X"
The scheduled package of £37.5 million cash over two years is now to go directly to charities working with the country’s poor. It is the first time that Britain has cut grants to a government after corruption but the decision by Tory International Development Secretary Justine Greening is unlikely to placate opponents of overseas aid.
Ms Greening said: “Swift action by Britain and "Country X" ensured our funds were returned in full, but we cannot return to business as usual.”
The theft was detected by the XXX auditor general working with Whitehall officials.
Prime minister [name deleted] said security has been improved. “Police have undertaken extensive investigations in the affected ministries,” he said.
David Cameron has angered many voters by increasing foreign aid to nearly £12 billion a year while cutting other budgets.
Robert Oxley of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Cancelling aid to a government after the fact simply isn’t good enough. Cash from taxpayers pockets has already ended up in the wrong hands.”

It's genuinely refreshing to see the stewards of taxpayers' money showing some spine. The role of auditors is critical when it comes to delivering funds that will be spent by petty officials operating far from the bright lights and checks and balances of European treasuries. Without their investigations, where would we be?

Now pause.

Country X, whose foreign aid has now been frozen by the Brits because of a miserable £1.3m, or roughly US $2 million, happens to be impoverished Uganda. We typed the words "Country X" into the excerpt above.

Why? Because we want readers to pause and think about the contrast in polite British circles (and not only British) between how ordinary fraud and corruption is viewed when it's done by powerless little states in Africa and when it's done by the certain other not-so-powerless statelets. Please read on.

Three weeks ago, a tiny bit of light was shone on the elaborate and ongoing shell game, involving a thousand times as much money (repeat: a thousand times as much money) as the sums that went missing in Uganda. That's money provided largely by European taxpayers including the British. Money, we should add, that goes into the pockets of some of the most hideous people a person would ever want to meet, and it's probably still going on. (We wrote about it recently, here). 

Here's the news report from the October 13, 2013 edition of the London Times:

£1.95bn EU aid lost in Palestine | Times, London | Bojan Pancevski, Brussels | Published: 13 October 2013 | 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, the Luxembourg-based watchdog. Brussels transferred more than £1.95bn to the occupied territories between 2008 and 2012 but had little control over how it was spent, the auditors say in an unpublished report seen by The Sunday Times. EU investigators who visited sites in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank noted “significant shortcomings” in the management of funds sent to Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU. A spokesman for the court declined to comment.

The passive language of that Times of London headline is outrageous, of course. Two billion pounds were lost? Was it mislaid? Of course not. This is a story of massive malfeasance, as the article itself suggests. Its influence on active, ongoing terrorism and incitement to terror is clear to anyone who wants to see.

We personally contacted the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg three weeks ago, and exchanged a flurry of emails with its press officer. It turns out (and we have not seen this reported anywhere else) that despite the confident language of the London Times reporter, the audit report into the colossal Palestinian scandal has in fact not been published. Other than to say that

A report touching on aid to the PA should be published toward the end of the year

the agency's lips are sealed about it for now. 

Everyone who pays the smallest attention to what is known about Arafat, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority understands that the taint and smell of financial impropriety hangs heavy in the air. Despite this, the last time an audit into EU funding of the Palestinians was done was... 13 years ago. Why? Good question.

We can hope there are no behind-the-scenes manipulations underway at this moment to minimize the political fallout of another Palestinian Arab foreign aid scandal. We're aware that stranger things have been known to happen in the past (see "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"). 

Will the as-yet-unreleased report about billions having disappeared in the darkness of the Palestinian regime's private parts be buried or detoothed? Stay tuned.

13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!

Giving a hand in Brussels, May 2001: Chris Patten, Arafat, Romano Prodi,
Nabil Shaath [Image Source]

Seven years ago, we wrote here:

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.

Seven years: so much misery, so little progress.

For those wondering who OLAF is and what it did and did not do to facilitate the unjust enrichment of a large cohort of corrupt Palestinian Arab insiders, and/or who know little (or maybe nothing) about the connection between European funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism and the politician who is today the chairman of the BBC Trust, please read what we wrote back then. (And for a more recent update: "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs")

Today (literally) it became very relevant all over again. Here is the report that sparked a minor burst of interest in how the Palestinian Arabs have played, and continue to this very minute to play, an elaborate shell game funded by European taxpayers and benefiting some of the most hideous people a person would ever want to meet.

£1.95bn EU aid lost in Palestine | Times, London | Bojan Pancevski, Brussels | Published: 13 October 2013 | 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, the Luxembourg-based watchdog. Brussels transferred more than £1.95bn to the occupied territories between 2008 and 2012 but had little control over how it was spent, the auditors say in an unpublished report seen by The Sunday Times. EU investigators who visited sites in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank noted “significant shortcomings” in the management of funds sent to Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU. A spokesman for the court declined to comment.

It infuriates us to see the passive language of that Times of London headline. Two billion pounds were lost? Is someone suggesting it got mislaid?

Of course not. This is a story of massive malfeasance, as the article itself suggests and as, we hope, the as-yet unavailable audit report will show. A pity that the headline writer saw fit to soft-pedal and obfuscate but that's actually the essence of the story behind the story.

If there is one aspect of this saga of corruption and dishonesty that is truly beyond our comprehension 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?