This week a Palestinian court in Ramallah sentenced Mohammed Rashid, the shadowy moneyman of Yasser Arafat, to 15 years in prison after convicting him of siphoning off $33.5 million of foreign donations.
In recent years, Palestinians have received billions of dollars of assistance – from the United States, European Union, United Nations (and an occasional token gift from Arab countries). Yet where has all this money gone? Where are all the Palestinian hospitals, schools, roads and bridges??
The answer is that the Palestinian Authority has taken billions of international aid dollars and squandered it on an array of guns, bombs and missiles, while lining the pockets of a successive stream of corrupt officials. Indeed, Yasser Arafat achieved the ignoble distinction of appearing on the Forbes' list of "Wealthiest Kings, Queens and Despots" – having embezzled hundreds ofmillions of international aid dollars from Palestinian coffers. (Arafat's widow, Suha, still receives a $22 million annual allowance from the PA, guaranteed for lifetime.)
This is not an Arafat-specific problem. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is worth an estimated $100 million. Abbas's son Yasser – surprise! – enjoys a monopoly on the sale of U.S.-made cigarettes in the Palestinian areas, and owns an engineering company which got paid $1.89 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to build a sewage system in the West Bank town of Hebron.
Still other American funds go to finance terror activities. According to senior Palestinian security officer Abu Yousuf, American-run programs to train Palestinian security forces have been instrumental in the "success" of terror attacks: "I do not think that the operations of the Palestinian resistance would have been so successful, and would have killed more than one thousand Israelis since 2000, and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without these [American] trainings," he said.
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen – Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – has tried to put a hold on $150 million of U.S. aid to Palestinians until some accounting is given as to where the money goes: "The U.S. has given $3 billion in aid to the Palestinians in the last five years alone, and what do we have to show for it?" she said. "Now the administration is sending even more. Where is the accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars?"
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