The business of terror and the impact of money-making and power on the search for peace

...That WSJ report prompts us to recall what we wrote here 15 months ago when Schanzer's allegations appeared. We noted how dishonesty and embezzlement on a colossal scale in the Palestinian Authority had not been interred with the dead Arafat, the exhumation of whose body was then also a news item.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
04 October '13..

Corruption, money and terrorism have always been closely intermingled and nowhere more than in terrorism's Palestinian Arab variant. Illustrating this again, the Wall Street Journal carries an article today by Sohrab Ahmari, entitled "An American Blogger vs. Palestine's First Family".

It opens with this:

In June 2012, Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote online for Foreign Policy magazine about allegations of corruption surrounding the sons of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Tarek and Yasser... Schanzer had detailed Yasser Abbas' business empire, noting that it includes a monopoly on the distribution of some U.S. cigarette brands in the Palestinian territories; an engineering firm that in 2005 built a sewage system in Hebron with $2 million paid by the U.S. government; the chairmanship of a publicly traded insurance company; and a construction firm that has also received U.S. taxpayer funds... In September 2012, Yasser Abbas filed a libel suit against Schanzer and Foreign Policy. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan tossed out the case last week, concluding that the suit was intended to silence critics...

Schanzer's Foreign Policy article ["The Brothers Abbas | Are the sons of the Palestinian president growing rich off their father's system?", June 5, 2012] is online here.

That WSJ report prompts us to recall what we wrote here 15 months ago when Schanzer's allegations appeared. We noted how dishonesty and embezzlement on a colossal scale in the Palestinian Authority had not been interred with the dead Arafat, the exhumation of whose body was then also a news item. Arafat's widow Suha had for years embodied the brazenness and venality [see our post from May 16, 2012] that characterize the ongoing exploitation by higher-up Palestinian Arabs of those lower down.

Following Arafat, his successor Mahmoud Abbas became the focus of enquiring investigators. Published analysis in July 2012, and no less true today, remind us again of the practical reasons why peace, reconciliation and mutual understanding with the Palestinian Arabs are, and remain, so elusive.

(Continue)

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