Tag: Yasser Arafat

Suha Arafat Apparently Wins Big in Husband’s Death

The Jerusalem Post republishes a report alleging what has been rumored over the past week — that the reason Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha was holding out on declaring him dead was to increase her post-Arafat financial position (emphasis added),

Yasser Arafat’s widow, Suha, is expected to receive a sum of $22 million a year out of the Palestinian Authority budget, according to the Italian newspaper Corriere De La Serra.

The paper said Suha reached an agreement about the money during a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO’s newly elected chairman, who visited while she was staying next to her husband’s bed in the French military hospital outside Paris.

It said Abbas personally promised Suha that she would receive $22 million a year to cover her expenses in Paris. The paper noted that in July Arafat transferred to his wife $11 million to cover her living costs for the first six months of the year.

Abbas and the Palestinian leadership were forced to strike the deal with Suha after she refused to allow them to visit her husband in hospital.

$22 million for Suha while the per capita income in the Palestinian Authority hovers at around $1,000.

Source:

Report: Suha to receive $ 22m. a year from PA. Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2004.

WCC On Arafat

The useful idiots at the World Council of Churches released a letter praising Yasser Arafat as a man of peace,

President Arafat will be remembered for bringing the Palestinian people together and for his unique and tenacious contribution to the cause of establishing their national home.

We stand with the Churches of the Holy Land to honour his commitment to their place in the Palestinian society, its affairs and its future. President Arafat often made sure to mention the church as well as the mosque as core institutions of Palestinian national life. True to the customs of mutual respect among his diverse people, he celebrated Christmas with the churches of Bethlehem as circumstances permitted.

On his long road as a leader, Yasser Arafat came to the recognition that true justice embraces peace, security and hope for both Palestinians and Israelis. His path has now ended, amid the rocks and thorns of occupation, at a distance from the goal he sought. As he is laid to rest the world will see – from the location of his final resting place – how far the Palestinian people must still travel together.

As far as I can tell, the WCC has never sent such a letter to Israel on behalf of those murdered by Arafat-supported terrorists.

Of course this is is the same organization that was all but pro-Soviet in the 1970s and 1980s and ignored the persecution of Christians and freedom activists behind the Iron Curtain.

As John Leon noted of the WCC,

The persistent folly of the World Council of Churches on this issue made news in July when its former president, Konrad Raiser, apologized for not supporting freedom movements during the Cold War. At this rate, a future president of the World Council might decide he’s finally ready to apologize for ignoring severe abuses in today’s vicious dictatorships, oh, sometime maybe around 2030.

Leo notes that a study of the WCC and similar lefty Christian groups found they were all but obssessed with the United States and Israel,

The report, covering the years 2000 to 2003, found that of 197 human-rights criticisms by mainline churches and groups, 37 percent were aimed at Israel and 32 percent at the United States. Only 19 percent of these criticisms were directed at nations listed as “unfree” in Freedom House’s respected annual listing of free, partly free, and unfree nations. So Israel was twice as likely to be hammered by the mainliners as all the unfree authoritarian nations put together. The fixation on Israel left little time and inclination for these churches to notice the most dangerous violations of human rights around the world. Not one nation bordering Israel was criticized by a single mainline church or group, the IRD report says. No criticisms at all were leveled at China, Libya, Syria, or North Korea.

The other day I wrote a piece, I Wish the Terrorists Were Christians. If I were doing a rewrite, I’d call it “I Wish the Terrorists Were Christians or Jews.”

Source:

When churches head left. John Leo, October 11, 2004.

WCC grant in 1978 caused dismay even among liberals. Presbeterian Layman, October-November 1978.

World Council of Churches asked to intervene for suffering people of Sudan. Presebeterian Layman, December 15, 1998.

WCC Flunked Cold War Test: Ex-leader says council should have backed anti-Communist dissidents. Stephen Brown, August 6, 2004.

Jimmy Carter on Arafat

Back in October, Jimmy Carter accused Bush of a number of things including exploiting 9/11 for political purposes,

The basic reason is that our country suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack … and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander in chief, fighting a global threat against America

For the terrorist Arafat, however, Carter has nothing but praise, calling Arafat “”a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate.”

Carter goes on to again criticize Bush for having isolated Arafat,

While he provided indispensable leadership to a revolutionary movement and was instrumental in forging a peace agreement with Israel in 1993, he was excluded from the negotiating role in more recent years.

Gag. Carter’s problem is that he was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He’d have made a great European statesman.

Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Prize

Let me see if I’ve got this straight? A Noble committee featuring a woman who aided the Nazi war effort decided to give the Peace Prize to a man who is good friend of former Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat and who in the past praised Niocale Ceausescu’s committment to human rights and more recently complained that U.S. criticism of China’s human rights record was too trenchant.

Sounds about right.

To The New York Times , Palestinian Torture Is Just an Afterthought

Last week, the warbloggers were all up in arms when the Aksa Martyrs Brigades — a Palestinian extremist group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement — executed 35 year-old Ikhklas Khouli for collaborating with Israel.

Such extrajudicial murders are bad enough, but in this case Ms. Khouli’s son, Bakir, said that he was tortured into providing incriminating evidence against his mother. Photos posted on news sites such as at Yahoo! of Bakir Khouli showed his back covered in welts just as if he had been repeatedly hit with an electrical cable just as he claimed. Khouli said in interviews that by the time the Aksa Martyrs Brigades torturers were done with him, he would have said anything to stop the interrogation. And what he did say — falsely he claims — was that his mother was a collaborator.

And so, being the sort of upstanding movement concerned about human rights, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades gave her a show trial and then took Ms. Khoui outside and shot her dead.

What is interesting is how The New York Times chose to cover the story. Serge Schmemann has a 1,453 word article about Ms. Khouli’s execution and the execution of another female “collaborator.” But rather than a story about horrific torture of alleged suspects by Palestinian groups, the article largely offers the Aksa Martyrs Brigades the opportunity to defend its actions. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades don’t want to torture and murder people, but the Israelis force them into it, you see (a nutty Israeli peace group actually took this absurdity to its logical conclusion by saying Israel was to blame when Palestinians terrorists torture and murder suspected Palestinian collaborators).

In fact, it is not until the reader has trudged through more than 1,300 words of Schmemann’s dry prose that the possibility of torture is even introduced. Even then with three pitiful paragraphs at the end to cover a major part of the story, Schmemann can’t bring himself to actually use the word “torture”. Instead Schmemann frames the story by noting that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed that Bakri Khouli testified against his mother voluntarily, but that the details of Bakri’s own account “tell a different story.”

Can you imagine, even for a moment, what would happen if a photo of a prisoner at Guantanamo was released showing the prisoner’s back covered in welts? Do you think The New York Times would relegate that fact to the final three paragraphs of a long story dominated by comments from Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft about just how guilty they are certain the prisoner really was and that this was the only way to deal with such witnesses? Hell, if Bakri Khouli had been tortured by the Israeli’s rather than by fellow Palestinians, this would be front page news for weeks and by now the United Nations would be calling for at least three international investigative teams to be put together to examine the crime.

It is odd that the Times and the rest of the world seem to think that when the Israeli’s accidentally kill civilians while trying to eliminate terrorists who are illegally placing themselves in civilian populations, that this is worthy of front page news for days on end. When Palestinian terrorists close to the president of the Palestinian Authority decide to torture children and execute women,however, even The New York Times can’t use the “t” word and the story is apparently of little interest around the world since it doesn’t fit the dominant media paradigm of Israeli oppressors vs. Palestinian victims.

Disgusting.

Source:

For Arab Informers, Death; For the Executioners, Justice. Serge Schmemann, The New York Times, September 1, 2002.

Of Norwegian Nurses and Nobel Prizes

Recently a lot of weblogs have been outraged over comments made by Norwegian Hanna Kvanmo who sits on the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Kvanmo expressed regrets that the committee had awarded Israel’s Shimon Peres the award — but, of course, she apparently thinks Yasser Arafat has done a standup job of upholding the prize’s values.

Fredrik Norman fills in the rest. Ms. Kvanmo’s position is a bit easier to understand in light of her activities during World War II.

On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway and conquered it in about two months. Kvanmo was one of about 1,000 young Norwegian women who joined the German Red Cross and went to work on the eastern front taking care of Nazi soldiers.

While the Nazis were rampaging across Europe, leaving death and destruction in their wake, Kvanmo chose to spend the war helping to treat war criminals (among other things, Kvanmo and others treated the wounds of members of the SS).

At the end of the war, many of these nurses were returned to Norway where they were sentenced to varying terms of prison for aiding the enemy.

Leave it to a woman who aided the Nazi war effort to lecture the rest of the world about peace.