ABDULLAH FALLING: Making Jordan a True Ally of the USA and Israel

Today, I spent several minutes reading an article by Caroline Glick, an Israeli writer on Middle Eastern matters. In doing so, I found myself encouraged to write this content. I am not necessarily trying to respond to Caroline, but to try to present an extended argument from a Jordanian Citizen who was forced to leave his country.  I fled because of what I faced as a result of the ruling of the Royal Regime in Jordan that has led Jordan towards backwardness.

First, Caroline thoroughly presented her arguments regarding the actions of Abdullah towards Israel and the US. She succeeded in analyzing the actions of Abdullah and his strategy. I have to admit, I never expected a Jewish writer to present a good level of understanding to the situation as what Caroline did, however, her conclusions about Abdullah seemed to me that she is more inclined to accept the fact that Abdullah is adopting a double-faced policy, that is, to be friendly with the US and Israel in their face then backstabbing them, because he is trying to appease his hostile people who are anti-Israel and America.

As a Jordanian citizen, I find myself in need of elaborating on some facts, for example, Caroline mentioned that the Israeli Government agreed to pay 5 million JDs to Jordan as a compensation of the Embassy Accident. I have read this headline on the Jordanian Media that is controlled by the King, and the media said that they got this news based on a source from the Jordanian Government that indicated that these funds would go for the victims’ families. The Jordanian media also said that the Israeli Diplomat would be legally followed in Israel as part of the agreement of both the Jordanian and Israeli Governments.

This was actually a surprise to me and other Jordanians, because we personally believe that releasing a fund like that in a democratic country like Israel will need the consent of the Israeli Government, also, the Israeli Prime Minister stated clearly that the damage would not go for the families of the victims. Moreover, the Israeli sources said that these funds would go for reparation of the Embassy after the accident. Another fact to note here is that not all the three victims were actually from the Embassy accident, as there is one victim who was a Judge that was killed in a controversial accident few years ago. It is worth mentioning that Abdullah visited the victims’ families of the Israeli Embassy Accident and one of the families was showed on an interview where they cursed Jews clearly after the accident before Abdullah paid them a condolence visit.

I grew up in Jordan, and since we were in schools, our Jordanian curricula indoctrinated us against Israel. At the same time, these curricula built the students on the blind loyalty to the King who rules an absolute undemocratic Monarchy.

The Hashemite Regime has been ruling by fear more than by loyalty because Jordan was under martial laws for a long time before 1989 when the late King Hussein abolished those laws and called for Parliament elections. It is important to understand that the Jordanians have been for long decades indoctrinated by what the Regime wanted them to receive, because democracy does not exist when the people want to disagree with the ruling King.

One aspect of the blind obedience based on fear and a result of indoctrination was clearly shown in the recent unrest that was ignited by the Regime itself after the US President Donald Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. A week later, the unelected Jordanian Government that is assigned completely by the King called the people to protest against Trump’s decision, the demonstrations on the streets were led not only by ministers and MPs, but the King’s daughter Princess Salma herself led one protest.

During those protests, one could have heard slogans calling for armed struggle against Israel, and cheers for Palestinian Militias like Hamas. This did not stop here. In a tweet from his account dated on the 8th December, 2017, the King himself tweeted a cheer for those protests in Jordan that his Regime called for and are still running on daily basis outside the US Embassy. While his Palestinian wife Rania did also cheer for what she called Palestinian Martyrs who were killed by Israel on the 9th December from her twitter account, in a similar language that was used by Yasser Arafat who used to laud what he called “Martyrs” of Israeli attacks.

On the other hand, An example of punishment for disagreeing with the king happens when Jordanians try to adopt a different ideology than what the King wants them to follow, no matter how liberal this ideology can be. I believe even Caroline knows this, if a Jordanian visits Israel he will be demonized severely in the society. If he is a business owner, his business will be targeted. If he is an MP, he would face memos to deselect him by his MP colleges. If he is a normal person from a tribe, he will find his image published on all the Jordanian Media in a bad way so that he can get racked in the society.

The Regime that has signed a peace treaty with Israel, and one of the acts of that treaty calls for ending the hostility not only between governments, but between the people, and to encourage normalization between both nations. However, this Jordanian Regime is not banning or holding responsibility on these media or the organizations that target and terrorize these individuals who normalize with Israel, and not even trying to protect the victims of such hostile actions.

When political analysts look at this strategy, one would find that it is the same strategy that has been deployed by the Jordanian Regime to secure its existence.  The strategy is simply to play the bad alternative game, so that the Hashemites can stay as the only game players in Jordan.  Any dismissal of their Regime could mean a demon in charge. Consequently, the gates of hell would be opened on Israel and the borders would no longer be safe.

Unfortunately, this hype of fear has always got into Israeli and Western decision makers minds, however, the actual facts in Jordan and how the country is ruled could post a definite challenge to this traditional look that the Regime has built over decades.

If you look at Egypt for example, during Mubarak Era, the same hype was sold to the West, that is, if his Regime falls, the Muslims Brotherhood will take charge and will wage Jihad on Israel, during the one-year tenure of the Islamist President Mohammed Morsi the Egyptian/Israeli Peace Treaty was maintained, and the borders were secure, because any Egyptian Politician understands the cost of a war or hostility with Israel on both his country and the Region, when Sisi took over, the situation did not deteriorate, in fact it improved for Israel and the US as he barred the Muslims Brotherhood Party from Egypt, which was a main source of instigation towards hostility against Israel.

In Jordan, the situation is more severe to forbid any Political animosity against Israel than any other country in the Region. Jordan is dependent on Israel for its water resources, as Jordan is classified as the second top poorest country in water resources around the world, no matter how rich the country is, water is priceless. The country receives aid from the US on annual basis because the Jordanian Regime is banning Jordanians from extracting their lands resources like oil, and this in itself is another story because the Regime wants to keep Jordanians economically dependent on the king’s doles so that he can secure another reason for loyalty and obedience, but going to the point, the US aids assist the annual budget and they are vital to Jordan to secure the public funds.

The most important aspect in the American Jordanian Relation is that the US has secured more than close relations with the Jordanian Army and Intelligence.  In fact, the US has influence on both parties. These two institutions are the ones that are keeping the King in power. This King who travels outside the country most of his time during the year, which actually makes him a Part Time Leader in Jordan. Most importantly, it makes him irrelevant in any stability equation in the country.

Does all the preceding mean that overthrowing Abdullah would finally open the gates of heaven for Israel? The answer is not immediately, but it will help improving the situation for Israel and Jordan. The reason is that the Jordanians are fed up with the King and his Regime’s Economic Policy, and in the recent years their fear from criticizing the Regime has started to vanish, because a poor and a hungry man will not have fear anymore. So a new leadership will be welcome not to wage wars, but to help overcoming the Economic struggles that the Jordanians were put through as a result of the corruption of Abdullah and his Regime. Our people want food and want to live better lives, however, under Abdullah, the GDP Per Capita in Jordan has slumped to become less than many regional countries. This is while the unemployment in Jordan has hit unprecedented ranges. Some sad stories about Jordanians looking for food in trash bins are circulated from time to time. Other sorrows of Jordanians setting themselves on fire because of poverty, on the same time, Abdullah and his wife are enjoying a lavishing life and have become multi billionaires according to reports, all of this at the expense of the Jordanian taxpayers. So, a new leadership will be met with optimism to tackle these challenges that are the top priorities of the Jordanians, and definitely not wars against Israel.

Abdullah has always taken Israel as a tool to transfer his problems to, during the past month, his Regime went through a tough time to pass the 2018 Budget that was based on raising the prices of bread and many essential goods. The people were and still frustrated and angry about Abdullah and his Regime, so he took the smart trick to transfer his people anger towards Israel and the US. He benefited from Trump’s Decision on the Embassy to indoctrinate his people against Israel and to forget their economic hardships as part of their Jihad Obligation, Abdullah Regime ordered Imams at Mosques to continue preaching about Israel during the past month. This is based on orders from the Ministry of Religious Affairs that control the topics of Fridays Sermons at Mosques.  All the Mosques are obligated to follow these instructions.

Abdullah also used to turn the compass towards Israel on many occasions when his regime was in trouble. He would order his people who guard Al-Aqsa Mosque (based on his Hashemite guardianship on Holy sites) to let the attendants smuggle some weapons with them inside the mosque under the excuse of defending Al-Aqsa. This is so they can provoke Israeli Soldiers response and create unrest in order to escalate so that his Regime Agents in Jordan can use it to sway the Jordanians towards hostility against Israel The result are protests outside the Israeli Embassy and other places to forget Abdullah ill-administration of their public government and funds.

It is also important to understand that the new generation of Jordanians are not interested in wars anymore, unlike the media that Abdullah is trying to spread, the new generations are becoming more mind liberated from the past heritage, so I just wonder about Pew Research that Caroline referred to that was conducted years ago on Jordanians and showed that 100% of Jordanians hate Jews. As a researcher, I think a 100% is definitely demonizing to any society, and here I am, a Jordanian atheist who has many Jewish friends and I do not hate Jews, many in Jordan whom I know are also liberals and not against Jews or Israel, but their voices cannot be raised because of the lack of protection from the Regime to them.

The question I was asking myself when reading Caroline suggestions about taming Abdullah so that he can lead a social development change among his people to liberate their behavior towards Israel and the US. Does this actually serve him or his Regime Agenda, especially when the Hashemites have always based their existence on the hype of being the best option for Jordan? I believe the answer is clearly no. However, Abdullah would try to manipulate the western world with a different tactic now. This is to create a leftist or semi secular front in Jordan to claim that his Regime is supporting liberals and to market it to the west.  This is actually happening now, as in the last Parliament Elections in Jordan in 2016 when the Abdullah Regime supported a list called ‘Maan’ meaning “Together.” This list raised the slogan of the civilian state, and to confront the people who try to mix religion with politics. So far so good, but the political principles for this list were clearly calling to stand against Israel and the normalization with Israel! This list was supported by the former Advisor of Abdullah Marwan Muasher who was also a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and a VP for Carnegie Endowment of Peace. A few days ago this list has developed into a political party that is called the Civilian Coalition. They conducted their opening conference with the attendance of Muasher and Maan List MP. The Principles of this party that were repeated inside the conference did not only call to work against Israel and normalization with Israel, but some of this party members spoke for liberation of Palestine from the River to the Sea (Meaning to demolish Israel as a whole). Now Abdullah can market this party to the west as an evidence that he is encouraging Anti-Islamic Parties. This is a proof that even the semi secular productions of this Regime are not working either.

A new Jordanian leadership even if it becomes an Islamist in the worst-case scenario like what happened in Egypt, won’t stand for long and will soon find itself with limited options if it tried to escalate the situation with Israel. Moreover, changes scenarios can include even a military based rule for a temporary period where these illegitimate Political Islamist Groups can be barred so that any coming elections would bring moderates into power. This could be similar to Ataturk or Sisi Approaches but with much modern and bespoke application.

As mentioned, recently the frustration has been building up with Jordanians against the king due to many factors, most importantly the poverty, unemployment, and the repression of this regime to speech freedom, any expert on Jordan cannot be optimistic enough to believe that Abdullah will stay in power for long. The question is, will the US and Israel leave this change uncontrolled because they want to keep their bargain on a man who has become a source of frustration to many of his people or will they embrace the reality and try to deal in advance with the inevitable change?

WHAT WE GET FOR THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS WE GIVE TO TERRORISTS

Arts, appeasement and AIDS bombs.

“We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect,” President Trump tweeted. “With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

The President of the United States has a very good point. But it’s not as if the Islamic terrorists in the West Bank and Gazan territories of Israel have ever been willing to do more than occasionally talk peace before getting bored and stomping away from the table. And then stabbing a few children to death.

The United States has paid the PLO’s Palestinian Authority billions to occasionally pretend to talk about peace. There isn’t a dollar amount high enough to get the terrorists to actually agree to peace.

We know two things about the terrorist leader who will succeed Arafat and Abbas. His name will start with an ‘A’ and like Arafat and Abbas, he’ll wait around for the perfect moment in a peace negotiation with a lefty president before, as Arafat did to Clinton and Abbas did to Obama, breaking it all up.

And that’s one of the priceless things that the fake terror statelet of the Palestinian Authority gives us for our hundreds of millions of dollars. Every decade its leader will lead on a lefty and then leave him at the altar. It may cost us another few billion, but somewhere around 2026, President Cory Booker will be certain that he’s finally solved the Palestinian problem only to sit there confused with egg on his face.

Is that worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Maybe not. But it’s also a good lesson to lefties that they don’t understand the Muslim world and that no matter how hard they try, they never will.

But that’s not all that we get for our money.

The peace process with the PLO was the original test case for the Arab Spring and the Iran Deal. All three were founded on the same stupid belief that if you give the terrorists almost everything they want, they won’t kill you. Every year that passes shows that no matter what you give them, the terrorists will kill you. Bribing killers doesn’t work. Meeting their demands is impossible because there are always more.

If we had paid more attention to Arafat’s lying smirk, maybe we wouldn’t have fallen for the Arab Spring or the Iran Deal. And that’s another thing that the terrorists give us in exchange for all our hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Palestinian Authority is a living museum of terrorist treachery. Its peace negotiations are an ongoing demonstration of the folly of appeasing terrorists.

Most small children learn not to put their hands on a hot stove at a very young age. Unfortunately none of them become politicians. And so every time a new president starts thinking about appeasing Islamic terrorists by letting them take over Egypt or develop nuclear weapons, he can test his terrorist appeasement theories in the confines of the smaller sandbox of the West Bank and Gaza.

Decades of testing have thus far produced no peace and no smarter politicians. After a few hundred years of peace negotiations, there still won’t be any peace. But maybe there will be smarter politicians.

Of the two impossible things in this scenario, smarter politicians are more plausible than nicer terrorists.

If we can just keep the peace process going for another few centuries, maybe our distant descendants will finally figure out that appeasing terrorists really doesn’t work. Not even if you offer them parts of Jerusalem, freeze settlements and agree to build a giant statue of Mohammed’s flying demon horse.

But that’s not all that we get from the hundreds of millions of dollars that we lavish on terrorist welfare.

Consider the arts.

The PLO’s takeover of the territories in ’67 Israel unleashed an unprecedented burst of artistic creativity. There’s hardly a gray concrete wall anywhere in Ramallah that isn’t decorated with murals of a smiling Arafat beaming down on the wretched suckers he spent his life ripping off. And then there are the posters of the suicide bombers, the ritual burnings of American flags and the Jihadist poetry readings.

“Our blood is food for the revolution/Yasser Arafat, for you we shall die” and “Sons of Zion, most evil among creation/barbaric apes and wretched ‎pigs” are examples of the arts that we subsidize. And while those poems may sound pretty horrible, they’re still better than what we get for our money at the NEA.

And then there’s the pioneering technological research being carried out by top PLO scientists.

Before the Car Jihad could be efficiently deployed on the streets of New York, Nice, Barcelona and London, it was field tested by expert Palestinian researchers in Jerusalem. Suicide bombings, airline hijackings and many of the other tools of the modern Islamic terrorist were refined in the PLO lab.

The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend each year funding the PLO is an investment in new terror tools and techniques. The terrorists of tomorrow are counting on us to fund their research. And every dollar we give the Palestinian Authority is an investment in helping the terrorists kill us in new and interesting ways. The possibilities are as horrifying as they are endless.

Back in ’04, a member of the PLO’s Fatah faction tried to build an AIDS bomb.

Rami Abdullah, an engineering student, wanted to blow himself up while carrying blood from a donor infected with AIDS. “After a period, it will kill a lot of people,” he explained.

Abdullah has already promised that if he gets out, he’ll try to live the dream of building an AIDS bomb.

An AIDS bomb plot by Tanzim, the most violent terror arm of the Palestinian Authority, was planned over Passover back then. But the lab Jihadis never figured out how to make it work. One day though, if we keep funding them, they might figure it out. And then we too can enjoy AIDS bombs in our cities.

And isn’t that worth a mere few hundred million dollars a year?

We could stop funding terrorists. Also we could stop smoking, running full tilt into glass doors and finally pull off that New Year’s resolution to stop drinking antifreeze. Those would all be good ideas. And they would make us safer and happier. So you can expect Washington D.C. to reject them out of hand.

The experts are convinced that if we don’t fund the terrorists, they’ll behave even worse. So far we haven’t actually tested this theory. No one wants to find out what they can come up with that’s worse than an AIDS bomb.

But if anyone in Washington D.C. can stop doing that stupid thing all the experts insist we need to do, it’s President Trump. And so just maybe this can be the year we stop running into glass doors, drinking antifreeze and funding terrorists. We may lose out on some Arafat murals and AIDS bombs, but the Americans who are regularly killed every year by Palestinian Islamic terrorists will thank him for it.

And if not, we can always look forward to President Elizabeth Warren being humiliated by President Ahmed of the PLO as he walks away from the table despite being offered 99% of Israel and Netanyahu’s first-born son. And then unleashes toddler stone throwers and AIDS suicide bombers across Jerusalem.

Because that’s what we get for our hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s all we’ll ever get from the PLO.

Published in FrontPageMag.

AMERICAN GREATNESS AND THE PLO

The creation of a PLO state will not make the Middle East more stable.

Eight years from now, China will outstrip the US as the world’s largest economy. In three years, Israeli GDP per capita will outstrip Japan’s. These two data points are useful to bear in mind as we consider the Trump administration’s sudden decision to go retro and embrace the Clinton administration’s foreign policy on Israel from the early 1990s.

When then US president Bill Clinton decided to embrace Yasser Arafat, the architect of modern terrorism, it seemed like a safe bet.

The US had just won the Cold War. With the demise of the Soviet Union, US dominance in the Middle East was unquestioned. Even then Syrian president Hafez Assad provided symbolic support for the US-led war against his Baathist counterpart Saddam Hussein.

Assad had no choice. His Soviet protector had just disappeared.

The PLO, for its part, had never been weaker. The Gulf states reacted to Arafat’s support for Saddam in the 1991 war by cutting the PLO off financially. The Palestinian uprising against Israel, which broke out in 1988, sputtered into oblivion in late 1990 because without Arab money, Arafat and his cronies couldn’t pay anyone to attack Israelis.

As for the Arabs, operating under the US’s protective shield, in 1993 the Arab world appeared impermeable to internal pressure. No one imagined that Arab nationalism or the reign of presidents for life, kings and emirs would ever be questioned.

As for Israel, its decision to bow to the US’s demand during the Gulf War to stand down and do nothing in response to Iraq’s unprovoked Scud missile attacks was informed by a sense that Israel could not afford to stand up to America. While many debated the wisdom of this conclusion, the fact was that Israel in 1991 was economically weak. Its per capita income stood at around $15,000. Its economy was entirely dependent on the US and Europe.

With America’s power at an all-time high, Clinton and his people had every reason to believe that with minimal effort, they would be able to reach a peace deal between the Israelis and the PLO.

In the event, the assessment that peace would be an easy effort turned out to be entirely wrong. Arafat and his deputy Mahmoud Abbas played the Americans for fools. Worse, they humiliated Clinton.

In July 2000, when Arafat rejected Israel’s US-supported offer of peace at Camp David, it wasn’t just the notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel that he rejected. He rejected the notion that you cannot stand up to America.

Clinton aggravated the deleterious effect of Arafat’s action when rather than either retaliate against the PLO chieftain or at a minimum cutting his losses and walking away, Clinton spent the last months and weeks of his presidency pursuing Arafat and begging him to agree to a deal. Clinton went so far as to present his own peace offer to the PLO chief with less than a month left in office. And Arafat stomped away.

A lot of people were watching what happened. And a lot of people drew the logical conclusion: the US is a paper tiger. You can humiliate it. You can attack it. And the Americans, secure in their belief that unlike every other world power in history their primacy was permanent, would do nothing to you.

When Clinton left office, it wasn’t just the peace process that lay in shambles. America’s reputation was also massively weakened. In contempt of Washington, North Korea was racing toward the nuclear finish line.

Iran was taking over south Lebanon through Hezbollah and murdering Americans in Saudi Arabia.

India and Pakistan went nuclear.

And al-Qaida bombed two US embassies and one US naval destroyer.

How could Clinton pay attention to these things when he was captivated by the notion that once a peace deal was signed with the PLO, all the problems of the region would disappear?

He couldn’t.

And in time, neither could his successors. George W. Bush and Barack Obama each in time adopted Clinton’s near religious faith in the curative powers of embracing the PLO at Israel’s expense. Why should the world’s sole superpower deal with the difficult and bloody pathologies of the Islamic world? Why should it consider modernizing its alliances with its Asian partners as China rose seemingly inexorably? Why should it consider its inability to expand the US economy by 4% a year as a national security threat when all would be well the minute that the PLO agreed to a deal with a diminished and enfeebled Jewish state?

And so three American presidents have wasted 24 years ignoring serious and growing threats and changing global conditions while embracing the fantasy that the PLO holds the keys to global peace, or the ultimate deal or American exculpation of the sins of its past.

Israel for its part has followed its American friends down the garden path, even as the rationale for doing so has vastly diminished.

While the Americans surrendered their universities to the fantasies of anti-American multiculturalists and grievance mongers, Israel has modernized its markets, strengthened its society and revolutionized its economy.

One of the reasons Israel didn’t dare to question the Americans in the early 1990s was its terrible credit rating. In 1988 Israel’s credit rating was – BBB. And it needed to borrow billions of dollars to pay for the absorption needs of a million Jews from the former Soviet Union who moved to Israel from 1989 through 2006. US loan guarantees were the only way Israel could borrow money at affordable rates.

Over the intervening quarter century, those million Jews were the major driver in developing Israel’s information economy.

The main reason that Israel has maintained its slavish devotion to America’s PLO fetish is that our leftist elites, that dominate the media, share it. Like the American foreign policy discourse, Israel’s elites’ assessment of Israel’s priorities has remained frozen in time for the past 24 years.

The same cannot be said of the public.

The vast majority of Israelis have greeted President Donald Trump’s sudden embrace of his predecessor’s obsession with the PLO with surprise and at best bemusement.

“Well, good luck with that,” is the most polite response.

It isn’t simply that unlike the American foreign policy establishment, the vast majority of Israelis are convinced there is no deal to be had with the PLO. Most Israelis simply don’t care anymore. They view the PLO and the Palestinians as largely irrelevant.

When Israeli leaders outside the leftist elite’s echo chambers prefer to speak with foreign audiences about anything beside the Palestinians, it isn’t because they are trying to avoid an unpleasant conversation. It is because they don’t see the point anymore.

The notion that a PLO state will make the region more stable as far more coherent Arab states collapse is absurd.

The notion that it is necessary to empower the PLO to win Arab allies when the Arabs are beating a path to Israel’s door begging for help in defeating Sunni jihadists and Iran is ridiculous.

The notion that Israel’s ability to expand its markets is contingent on peace with the PLO when every week more world leaders descend on Jerusalem to sign trade deals with Israel is not even worthy of a giggle.

As for demography, the American hysteria is bizarre.

The Palestinians already have passports and vote – when they are allowed to – in their own elections. Why would Israel be expected to let them vote for the Knesset?

Beyond that, Jewish immigration to Israel remains high. Israel’s Jewish birthrates have surpassed its Muslim birthrates both within sovereign Israel and in Judea and Samaria.

So why would Israel give up Jerusalem for demography?

As for Israel’s Arab citizens, the truth it that but for the meddling of foreign governments, Israel’s Arab population would have integrated fully into Israeli society a decade ago.

Next week, President Trump will arrive here. His meeting last week with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and statements by administration officials since make clear that Trump intends to be the fourth US president to get sucked into the PLO vortex.

Trump will arrive in Israel believing that his campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again,” and his goal of reaching the “ultimate deal” with the PLO are complementary aims.

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains nothing else to Trump when they meet next week, he should explain to him that the two goals are mutually exclusive. And if he has any extra time, Netanyahu should give Trump the details of the massive price America has paid, since 1993, for its three past presidents’ obsession with the PLO.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

Understanding the Left’s Language Inversion

As noted by many, there is a striking double standard that is applied to the far-Left. The world seems to allow their statements and views to be heard and treated seriously, while the far-Right is correctly shunned and treated as a pariah.

Why is this?

Let’s look at the British Labour party as an example. The far-left ‘Momentum’ movement within the party is the reason why Jeremy Corbyn has once again been elected as its leader. This is a man who called Hamas and Hezbollah “my friends” and had his picture taken with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. This is the man the Momentum movement has kept in leadership and they have basically taken over a centre Left party, not in some third world country, but in the United Kingdom. With such a man at the head of the party they will never win a national election especially when many MP’s from his own party have no confidence in him.   

Another example is the Democrat party in America, where the runner up to the chairman of the party was Keith Ellison, who was a member of the radical Nation of Islam, a virulent racist and anti-Semitic organisation. He has said things himself, even as late as 2010, that are anti-Semitic and he is known to hold far-Left views. As the runner up of the chairman elections he was made Deputy Chair of the Democrat party. This is yet another example of how the far-Left have shockingly managed to become mainstream.

The reason for all this lies in their use of inverted language, which is rooted in relativism, the Lefts’ idol. When they speak of equality, liberation, freedom and other such liberal concepts they do not mean it in the way a normal democratic liberal would. Rather; equality, liberation and freedom in the way they mean often equals the mirror opposite. This inversion of language is used to cover up their radical views and it then gains them access to the mainstream political parties.

This was a gift given by Fidel Castro to the PLO. While it is known that Fidel’s secret police trained hundreds of Palestinian terrorists, it is not so well known that Fidel trained Yassar Arafat in the art of language inversion. Using the language of human rights and liberation as a cover, Fidel trained Arafat how to take the moral high ground away from Israel. He learned to portray Israel as the aggressor, a colonial and imperialistic creation. He depicted that the Palestinians are the victims of many crimes and are justified for their “resistance” against the State of Israel. This tactic seems to have spread to the Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda and to the terror state of Iran who use the same language inversion to attack America and the West for their “imperialism”. This in itself would not be such a problem, because it is unlikely they would be listened to based upon their reputation, but the major problem is when this kind of language is used by the far-Left in Western countries. This provides a cover for the terrorists and makes defeating them significantly and incomparably harder.

It must be emphasised that the real war is a war of concepts, not just words. When concepts lose their meaning and are free for interpretation by anyone it is a very small step away from nihilism, which should never be allowed to take root in any liberal democracy.

In order for the West to survive spiritually it must make a firm commitment to absolutism and a firm rejection of relativism.

Yasser Arafat, A Fake Hero, A Lord of Corruption

The Palestinian Authority (PA) was once called the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (the PLO). It was chaired by Yasser Arafat, a hero of Palestinian resistance movement, a godfather of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and an ideological figure for almost every young Palestinian. Very few people knew that Yasser Arafat was a fake hero, a lord of corruption and a true godfather of Palestinian terrorism.

Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat received millions and millions of dollars every year from Western countries and the Muslim world. The Muslim world considered Arafat to be a hero of Jerusalem and even they considered him as a second Saladin who would finally liberate their land from the Jewish occupation.  The Muslim world knew very little or nothing about Yasser’s double faced status. Leaders like him have two faces, two languages, and two sets of promises. When they communicate with the international community, they use one set of languages and values, and make statements and commitments relating to a desire for peace and co-existence. When they turn their faces towards their own nations, they show a monstrous face. When they address their people, they never talk about peace, instead inciting their people towards terrorism. And they are even better at enriching themselves at the expense of the well-being of their people.

Yasser Arafat was one of the best of them. He always used his people to conduct terrorist activities and in return he and his organisation received billions of dollars from countries that included Qatar, Iran, Syria, Russia and other Arab countries

Yasser Arafat also never disclosed his actual wealth even to his party and family. He was one of the most greedy and cruel persons of in the short history of the Palestinians. A friend who worked with Israeli intelligence disclosed that Arafat died along with the knowledge regarding 75% of his secret foreign accounts and no one supposedly knows where they are and how to access them.  This is the wealth stolen from Palestinian aid received as donations to change Palestinian lives. The remaining 25% of Arafat’s personal accounts were openly transferred to his family. His wife and his daughter live in a most luxurious palace in the Parisian suburbs. Their wealthy life style can be compared to European royalty.  According to my Israeli friend, together the two of them spend approximately $50,000 daily maintaining this luxurious and fashionable life style. They even do not bother to live among their own people, people this father and husband supposedly fought a war for during much of his adult life. They care nothing about these people who live in intense poverty, they only concern is maintaining their life style.

In 2003, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to carry out an audit and found at least two billion dollars of Palestinian Authority Fund monies that were missing. It is now believed most probably that these funds were transferred to Arafat’s family in Paris. While Yasser Arafat was in a Paris hospital, his wife Soha Arafat agreed to disclose Arafat’s medical record on the condition of stopping the ongoing investigation into the missing funds. The PA was very frustrated not to be able to officially locate and recover the missing money which they were assured to have been transferred to Soha Arafat’s Swiss bank accounts. Finally, they agreed to pay her $2 million dollar a year for the rest of her life. Whether this means she secretly returned the money or not is speculation.

Israel’s Mossad not only believed but provided enough proofs to the government of Israel that Yasser Arafat controlled a personal financial portfolio estimated to be in the region of $6.5 billion.

The Arab media including the Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese newspapers received a top-secret report regarding the financial status of the PLO, disclosing that for years the PLO had a deficit of over $95 million a month. The report became even more explosive in the Arab world when the IMF revealed that Arafat had diverted a billion dollars or more of PLO funds to his and his and Soha’s personal Swiss bank accounts from1995 to 2000. A Palestinian lawyer who has investigated PLO corruption said,

… [I] knew of four Arafat loyalists who held secret Swiss bank accounts

The deals frequently involved the cement and building industries of the Palestinian territories. The corruption ran into millions of dollars, which Arafat covered up in return for the profiteers giving him a portion. It was often said Arafat was the godfather of all the godfathers. The secret investments of Yasser Arafat were disclosed by an American financial investigation team and the report stated that Arafat invested his secret money after it was transferred from PLO funds to his personal Swiss account. Some of those investments included the Coca Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company, and many venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands. The money for a large part of his investments came from public funds like Palestinian taxes. Virtually none of it was used for the welfare of Palestinian people and it was fully controlled by Arafat and his family.  Arafat travelled almost all of the rich Western and Arab countries around the word and crying to everyone that, “We (Palestinians) are devastated and our economy is going to collapse and we cannot pay salaries to Palestinian employees and it is because of Israel’s occupation and blockade”. He convinced those countries and the IMF that the words of his mouth were true and if they were not going to fund PLO, the Palestinian economy would be damaged and would collapse completely. They did not yet suspect that Yasser Arafat was draining a huge amount of that money into his personal bank accounts and his people were really still being deprived through high unemployment and poor economy which those funds were supposed to be relieving.

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Under the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995, it was agreed that Israel would collect sales tax on goods purchased by Palestinians living in Israel under Green Card status and transfer that money to Palestinian treasury but instead transferred immediately transferred it into his private accounts. From the outset of the Oslo Accords until 2000, Israel put the tax revenue into Arafat’s accounts at Bank Leumi in downtown Tel Aviv. Israel’s intent was that Arafat would use it to clean the area of terrorists and for the Palestinians’ welfare.

According to US officials,

Arafat had nearly $3 billion in his personal financial portfolio of the known 25%

But, again, this part of his portfolio was already known to the Intelligence departments and the Western financial powers. At that time nobody was aware of the absconded 75% of the monies, the part only he-and likely his wife and daughter- knew about.

According to an Israeli official, when Yasser Arafat was alive he paid $100,000 per month out of the Palestinian budget to his wife Soha who remained in Paris where she lived lavishly on this allowance. Arafat had an additional account in the Swiss bank for the PA but the code name of the account was one only he knew. There had to have been more than $300 million in his other Swiss account at Bank Lombard Odier, as this is where all the money was transferred to from the Israel’s Bank Leumi. As was noted earlier, Arafat’s secret Swiss accounts were closed around the time he died and no one will say where that money went.

No one even knows about how high the salary amount was that Arafat collected as a Chairman of PLO when he was in exile. Arafat received hundreds of millions of dollars from the KGB (the USSR’s intelligence agency) and the Saudis.

The now-deceased Saddam Hussein reportedly handed Arafat a $50,000,000 check for supporting him during the first Gulf war.

Where that money gone, I believe Soha Arafat knows. Further scandals where Arafat was directly involved in kickbacks, such as that of the Gas and Petrol’s pipeline in to Palestinian areas and Arafat’s investment in world’s stock markets will be addressed  in other article at some point.

Many Palestinian people had and have little money, adequately paying jobs, and own decent homes and businesses. The Arafats of the Palestinian people have all money to dispense and have everything to fulfill Palestinian dreams. If he could have used that money to push up the Palestinians’ economy instead of diverting this money to pay terrorists’ salaries, those whose only job is to commit terrorism against the state of Israel, think of what might exist today.  He could have built schools and universities that sent Palestinian youngsters, making them an educated people who design new technologies, create medicines, and make the whole world a better place. Instead he sent them in to the training centers in order to create terrorists. Palestinian children should be looking at long, health, prosperous lives in their own country instead of seeing their only purpose in life as being one to die young.

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Yasser Arafat was not a hero of the Palestinians but a mafia lord in a corrupt network. He, his wife and daughter chose to be greedy money mongers who destroyed their people’s chance at a real nation and left a dark and hopeless future for the new generation of Palestinian people. Now, Gaza under Hamas and the PA under Mahmood Abbas continue running under Yasser Arafat’s steps to total corruption. In future articles I shall address their dirty politics of corruption and human rights abuses within the Muslim world.

Originally Published in TOI Blogs.