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March 24, 2008
When Will We Learn? History Repeating, Again!
By Ilana Freedman, Editor and CEO, Gerard Group International
GUEST COLUMNISTS: US Rewarding Arab Terrorism; Cash To Go Directly to PA
By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld & Alyssa Lappen, American Center for Democracy
QUICK TAKE: Learning From Experience; The Folly of Our International Policy
By Richard Freedman, Staff Writer, Gerard Group International
I once had a boss who used to come to my desk while I was working on a high-pressure, time-critical assignment and ask me "Are you done yet?" He didn't ask once, or even twice, but kept coming back every few minutes and asking the same question, hoping that this time the answer would be different. Each time he asked, I would answer, "As soon as I am done, I will call you." But it made no difference, because in a few minutes he would return with the same question. He didn't learn from my answer and his continual badgering didn't change the outcome.
The following two articles are about much the same situation, but the implications of repeating the same mistakes and creating the same, inevitable outcome are exponentially more serious when carried out in the world arena. They are frequently matters of life and death, but not to those who develop and implement the international policy. To them, the dead are no more than numbers in an accounting of casualties, and there are no consequences for getting it wrong.
For far too many years, our quest for a 'peace' between Israel and her Muslim neighbors has been driven by policies that have been dead wrong from the beginning. We have not learned from our mistakes, but keep repeating them, hoping for a different outcome.
We consort with terrorists, euphemizing them in order to legitimize the discussions, not recognizing how our enemies perceive us as stupid and weak, and use our own folly to marginalize us in the international arena.
We send our best and brightest to train Palestinian police in counter-terrorism, and fail to observe that we are contributing to the deadly problem by giving dangerous tools to those who wear their uniforms during the day and build bombs at night.
We pour millions of dollars into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority, and turn a blind eye to their misuse of the funds to support of their own terrorist activities
In all of this, we defeat ourselves from the outset. Abbas is still a terrorist in a suit who follows in the footsteps of his mentor Yasser Arafat. He speaks words of conciliation to his American benefactors, while practicing duplicity as he strengthens the terrorists among his own people. He hints at a return to terrorism as a legitimate policy of state without comment or consequence from those who seek "a peaceful solution".
There can be no peace without a peace partner. Our quest for peace in the Middle East is doomed to failure so long as we refuse to learn from our mistakes and continue to follow the same destructive policies that have failed so dismally in the past.
Ilana Freedman is Editor of IntelAnalysis and CEO of Gerard Group International, Inc.
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Bush Administration's search for partners to promote "peace" and "democracy" within the Palestinian Authority (PA) resembles Lord Charles Bowen's "blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat - which isn't there".
For the first time, the Bush Administration plans to give $150 million in cash directly to the Palestinian Authority (PA) Treasury, as part of a $496.5 million "aid" package, including $410 million for development programs. This added to the $86.5 million for CIA "security training", which Congress authorized in April 2007.
The CIA has apparently assumed the Palestinian terrorist-training role previously held by the former Soviet Union. Since 1994, the CIA armed and trained thousands of Palestinian "security forces", who subsequently joined every Palestinian terrorist organization.
CIA Palestinian training success is best described by a member of the PA's Chairman own security unit - Force 17, officer Abu Yusef: "The operations of the Palestinian resistance would [not] have been so successful and "would not have killed more than 1,000 Israelis since 2000, and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without [American military] trainings," he boasted in August 2007.
Since the Oslo Accords, the PA received some $14 billion to $20 billion in international aid, according to a 2007 Funding for Peace Coalition (FPC) report to the British Parliament. Each Palestinian received $4,000 to $8,000 per year. In comparison, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), provided $1 billion in humanitarian aid for 2.5 million Darfur refugees from 2003 to 2006 - only $100 per person annually. Moreover, of the $7 billion pledged international aid, only $5 billion were spent to assist more than 5 million Tsunami victims in more than 15 countries on two continents.
The PA received "the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere", according to former World Bank country director for Gaza and the West Bank, Nigel Roberts. Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of Gazans spent more than $300 million in less than two week shopping spree, after Hamas blew up the border with Egypt. Yet, the Palestinian economy is in ruins, Why?
In March 2007, PA Prime Minister and former World Bank official Salam Fayyad, told London's Daily Telegraph: "No one can give donors that assurance" that funds reach their designated destinations. "Where is all of the transparency in all of this? It's gone." Controlling Palestinian finances, Fayyad concluded, is "virtually impossible".
Palestinian violence has escalated since the 1994 PA establishment and PA officials have produced an unbroken record of unfulfilled promises and outright deception. Yet President George W. Bush in his January 28 State of the Union Address, reassured the Palestinians that "America will do, and I will do, everything we can to help them achieve...a Palestinian state by the end of this year."
Nevertheless, US-favored PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 1957 with Yasser Arafat co-founded the al Fatah terrorist group, assumed the role of his predecessor. Like Muslim Brotherhood, Marxist-trained Jihadist Arafat, neither does Abbas "recognize that confronting terror is essential to achieving a state where his people can live in dignity and at peace with Israel," as President Bush declared.
Abbas remains committed to the organization's raison d'etre - destroying Israel and expelling the Jewish people from the region. Despite public Fatah-Hamas leadership disagreements, branding one another "murderers and thieves", Abbas arranged on Jan. 30 to give Hamas $3.1 billion of $7.7 billion that international donor community pledged last December in Paris.
Abbas' support for Hamas is not new. In Feb. 2007, He announced, "We must unite the Hamas and Fatah blood in the struggle against Israel as we did at the beginning of the intifada." He stated this en route to Mecca to meet with the Saudi King, and Hamas terror chiefs Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh. The Saudis pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in "humanitarian aid" - which, like previous pledges, they failed to deliver.
Rather than $660 million in annual aid the Saudis promised in 2002, the kingdom donated only $84 million since then, according to World Bank reports. Other Arab League members, who in 2002 promised $55 million monthly to foster PA economic development, gave even less.
Meanwhile, however, the Saudis and the Gulf states funneled hundreds of millions of petrodollars - some raised in government-sponsored telethons - to reward Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas and Palestinian Jihad suicide bombers and fuel the anti-Israel Jihad. Indeed, "Saudi Arabia remains a source of recruits and finances for...Levant-based militants," said National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on February 5, 2008.
McConnell should have included USAID on his terror-funding list. A Dec. 2007 USAID audit reported that the mission administering its funds gave money to groups and institutions affiliated with US designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It warned: "Without additional controls, the mission could inadvertently provide support to entities or individuals associated with terrorism."
USAID "failure" to prevent funds from reaching Palestinian terrorist is not surprising given US previous Administrations support for Arafat, and now for Abbas, who repeatedly claims: "We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation," while reiterating his desire for "a political partnership with Hamas".
It is time for President Bush to remove his blinders and stop donating US-taxpayer funds to this murderous partnership. It is also time for Congress to demand a proper monitoring program to oversee the legitimate use of US aid to the Palestinians.
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It. She is director of the American Center for Democracy and member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Alyssa A. Lappen, Senior Fellow at the ACD, is a former editor for Forbes, Corporate Finance, Working Woman and Institutional Investor.
Published with the express permission of the authors.
What happens when a scientist formulates a scientific principle? Other scientists examine the principle, developing ways to test its consequences. They try to falsify it, coming up with a sequence of events which, if they can be shown to occur, would disprove the theory. For example, the theory that light was carried by a medium known as the ether was disproved by a set of tests known as the Michaelson-Morley experiments. They try to prove it, coming up with predictions which result from the principle but which wouldn't otherwise have been expected. For example, when Einstein suggested that light waves could be bent by gravity, scientists calculated that the effect could be measured during a solar eclipse in the apparent displacement of stars behind the sun.
It's rare, almost unheard of, for a theory to be accepted in science without this kind of rigorous examination. Yet many seem quite ready to accept counter-intuitive theories in other areas. In particular, there is the theory that negotiating with and making concessions to terrorists is the road to peace. The desire for an easy answer is the only thing supporting this theory; one might call it wishful thinking. Yet the theory is contradicted by all available evidence and experience, and even by what the terrorists say in their own language, for domestic consumption. Every concession that should, according to this theory, bring us closer to peace, instead strengthens the terrorists in their opposition to peace. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza only made it easier for the terrorists to fire rockets at the civilian population of Israel.
We know what we have to do to force peace on a belligerent population that supports its fighters in continued struggle. We have the experience on two fronts from World War II. It's not a prospect appealing to the humanitarians among us, but we have to make it so unpleasant for the civilians supporting the war that they withdraw their support. We even have the experience from our own Civil War, where the South was ready to continue fighting, despite dreadful losses on the battlefield, until Sherman's March through Georgia devastated the South. We have to accept that war brings inevitable suffering to civilians, and it is better to bring it to the civilians who support fighting than to the civilians who want peace.
When the international community, ignoring the incessant shelling of Sderot, the suicide bombers, and the armed attacks on individual Israelis, tells Israel to "show restraint" and to "avoid a humanitarian crisis" by their "disproportionate" response, they should be required to provide evidence to support their approach. It's a nice theory, but all the evidence is against it.
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