The Daily Brief

This from JPost’s Caroline Glick:

Each of the PA’s 26 ministers is set to receive a $76,000 Audi, while each of the 86 “mere legislators” will suffice with cars costing the PA budget $45,000 apiece. All told, the PA will spend almost $6 million on vehicles for the Palestinians most able to buy their own luxury cars. And this allocation does not include what must necessarily follow: The politicians will approve a budget for chauffeurs and receive disbursements for gas and insurance for their PA-supplied vehicles.

As well, no doubt, as in the past, senior PA officials will also receive these perks. Since on average each Palestinian ministry has four or five directors-general and another dozen deputy directors-general plus 10 to 20 department heads, it can be safely assumed that in the next few weeks the PLC, (if it hasn’t already), will be approving the outlay of tens of millions of dollars for cars and drivers and gas for all of these PA VIPs.

The cars are just one tiny example of the waste, graft and purloining of PA funds by its politicians, militia commanders and bureaucrats, which have rendered the Palestinians one of the poorest Arab societies in the world today. It should be emphasized that this impoverishment has occurred during a decade which saw the 2.3 million Palestinians receive more international donor aid per capita than has ever been transferred to any group by the international community in the history of foreign aid.

WHEN DISCUSSING the question of international assistance to the PA, it is necessary to relate to two other aspects of PA spending. First is the fact that the billions of dollars that have been stolen from the PA’s budget over the years were taken by all the heads of the PA – from Arafat to Abbas to current Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei to Muhammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub. That is, it was not only Arafat and his economic adviser Muhammad Rashid who were stealing the billions. Commenting on this state of affairs in 1996, Abbas himself told a senior UN official: “You simply have to accept the fact that we are all corrupt.”

[…]

That is, all those who attack DeLay believe that “in the interests of peace” the US should support the continuation of the PA’s kleptocratic, terror-supporting tyranny over Palestinian society.

That the Israeli government has been pushing Congress to approve direct aid to the PA is made all the more ironic by the fact that the Foreign Ministry launched a strenuous protest of the EU’s announcement last week that, in spite of mountains of documentary evidence Israel provided, Brussels could not conclusively determine if some of the billions of dollars it has transferred to the PA since 1994 have been used to finance terrorism.

It is reassuring to know that in this period during which Israeli policy has become near-schizophrenic and the Bush administration appears convinced – in spite of all evidence – that Abbas is a man who can be trusted, at least one powerful man in Washington is not buying into the current peace charade.

Thank you for your courage and your wisdom, Tom DeLay.

Similar to Castro’s need for US sanctions against Cuba, as a propaganda tool to explain Cuba’s continued economic failure, the PA’s leadership need the war with Israel to continue ad infinitum, both as justification for continued western aid, and cover for their profligate graft.

Hat Tip: Roger L. Simon

Update: In a related story, Forbes lists Castro as being worth $550million.

Stanford Professor and Die Zeit Publisher Josef Joffe offers this must-read analysis of the Arab-Israeli situation in Foreign Policy magazine:

Now to the hard version. Ever so subtly, a more baleful tone slips into this narrative: Israel is not merely an unruly neighbor but an unwelcome intruder. Still timidly uttered outside the Arab world, this version’s proponents in the West bestride the stage as truth-sayers who dare to defy taboo. Thus, the British writer A.N. Wilson declares that he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Israel, through its own actions, has proven it does not have the right to exist. And, following Sept. 11, 2001, Brazilian scholar Jose Arthur Giannotti said: “Let us agree that the history of the Middle East would be entirely different without the State of Israel, which opened a wound between Islam and the West. Can you get rid of Muslim terrorism without getting rid of this wound which is the source of the frustration of potential terrorists?”

Read the whole thing.