Euro-Cash for Arafat

An update on the story of European subsidies for Arafat's reign of terror.

From this AP story:

The European Parliament suspended $18 million in aid for the Palestinian authority this month in light of allegations that the money was being used to fund terrorism.

The European Commission found no evidence to support the charges after an investigation that included meetings with Israeli officials, spokeswoman Emma Udwin said.

"None of the evidence bears out the allegations," she said, adding that even Israelis were backing away from the charge.

EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten was to push for the freeze to be lifted when he briefs members of parliament Wednesday, Udwin said.

The EU has budgeted 220 million euro (dlrs 208 million) for the Palestinian Authority this year, about half of which goes to make up for tax revenues frozen by Israel, Udwin said, adding that the amount frozen was having "no immediate impact" on that spending.

Udwin's statement is more than a little disingenous. The Die Zeit article I translated and posted last week contained an exhaustive catalog of the PA's misuse of EU aid. The allegations were not about direct funding of terrorism, but sloppy oversight where EU aid was diverted for weapons and terrorism, and of EU support for an educational system that teaches hatred and a broadcasting system that incites violence. Furthermore, the allegations were made not solely by Israel but by European legislators who visited the
Palestinian Authority and by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

But I would still be curious to know which Israelis are "backing away" and
from which specific charges they are and are not backing away from.

The German media covers this story far more closely than, say, the British press. Die Welt adds the news that even though Patten is aiming to restore the PA subsidies, he at least wants to impose some limits: "the EU Commission will not give the PA a clean bill of health. An EU investigation concluded that the PA has 122,000 civil servants who are dependent on Arafat. By far the largest share of the PA's $70 million monthly budget ($57 million) goes for this inflated apparatus. As a consequence, EU has imposed a 'hiring freeze' on Arafat's bureaucracy".

And wouldn't it be interesting to find out exactly what those 122,000 "bureaucrats" (terrorcrats?) who are allowed to remain on the payroll are actually doing to earn their wages?

But even if we look at the EU's own proud claims that the aid is going for "humanitarian" purposes, we see that some of it has gone to the Red Crescent Society for new ambulances (which even Amnesty International has acknowledged have been used for military purposes such as transporting explosives)

Furthermore, the EU continues to donate tens of millions of dollars to UNRWA, which provides life support for the notorious refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the Arab world. Now let's get real. These so-called refugee camps have been in existence since 1948, with more added in 1967. The residents are interred in the camps under the fantasy that they will someday be allowed to reclaim all of Palestine. In the meantime, these miserable inmates are fenced in by their, say, Lebanese hosts and denied the full rights (to the extent that those exist) of their neighbors. The greatest crime of Sabra and Shatilla is not that Christian Arabs murdered Moslem Palestinians in 1982, but that the Moslem Lebanese--twenty years later -- still keep their Moslem "brothers" in these fetid warehouses.

If anybody in Europe or the Arab World cared even a little bit about the "refugees", they would be working to resettle and integrate them into permanent communities in the Palestinian territories and in the Arab
countries. The refugee camps are not about humanitarian assistance. The only purpose of these festering trash heaps of human misery and bomb factories is to ensure a stable supply of martyrs and victims for the 24x7 entertainment of Arab television audiences. It is unconscionable for the US, the EU or anybody else to continue to subsidize these compost piles of poverty, hatred and incitement.

As Die Welt concluded with an implicit call to action: "the members of the European Parliament will decide mid-week [whether to resume payments to the PA]. Unless Patten can convince them, the payments will not be released".

If you happen to have friends in Europe who might not want their tax dollars going to Yassir Arafat, give them a head's up so they can contact their local Member of the European Parliament to voice their concerns.

(As it turns out we Americans are the single most generous supporter of UNRWA. We too need to demand that these funds should be withheld from the camps and redirected to support the resettlement and integration of the refugees into Arab countries).

UPDATE: Frankfurter Rundschau reports today that it was Israeli military officers who denied the charges that EU aid money was being used for terror attacks, citing unnamed senior EU diplomats (not the military officials directly). The story alleges a rift in Israeli diplomatic circles between Sharon's camp that wants to discredit the EU as a peacebroker and Peres' camp that wants to engage the EU. Furthermore, while the Die Zeit article interpreted the German intelligence reports to rule out direct evidence of EU funding of terror attacks, it certainly sounded like there was plenty of questionable activity. The Frankfurt paper, on the other hand, focuses solely on the "no direct evidence" part of the equation. In any event, the questions about EU funding for the PA are broader than any direct connection to terror attacks, which would presumably leave little direct evidence under any circumstances.

UPDATE 6/18: This story from the EU Observer found by way of Glenn Reynolds

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 17, 2002 06:33 AM