The surpassing corruption of Arafat and of all of his henchmen, such as Mahmoud Abbas, and of all of his henchmen’s henchmen, such as Mohammed Dahlan, is what enrages the true-blue less corrupt members of Hamas. What enrages them, that is, is not the murderousness of Arafat and Fatah when murder was its main instrument, but the money that Arafat and Company received “for the ‘Palestinian’ people” from Infidel taxpayers. Those taxpayers were often oblivious to the amounts being sent by their own foolish governments, governments whose idea of dealing with the Arabs is to “win hearts and win minds” by taking a special interest in the least legitimate, and certainly least deserving of non-Muslim largesse: those who are so easily called, with such carelessness, “refugees” — “Arab refugees” before the Six-Day-War, and presto-chango, “‘Palestinian’ refugees” after that war.
It was not the business of the world’s Infidels to be inveigled into paying for them when they became what are too-easily and often inaccurately called “Arab refugees,” and certainly not to make them the most spoiled group of “refugees.” What is blandly described as the land of “refugees” turns out to be the usual not very attractive but standard Arab conurbations to be found all over Arab lands. And of course there are the usual shops with electronic goods, and DVD stores, and Internet cafes, and plenty of money left to outfit “security services” and “fighters” in what is surely the largest source of employment, if you can call it that, among people who have become used to permanent support by the world’s Infidels. They like that support. They do not think they need to try to figure out how to sustain themselves, much less stop having families with 12 and 15 children. How often do you read of the complaint of Abu Thisorthat, a “grizzled farmer with 14 children” who can’t “support them”? I’ll bet he can’t, and I’ll bet no one dares to suggest that perhaps the Arabs with their dozen children as a small family should cease to presume that Infidel taxpayers, who carefully limit their own family size because, in many cases, of the cost, should start to do likewise, or find some source of income from their own efforts, or from rich fellow Muslims in the Gulf. And then we’ll see how the Saudis and Kuwaitis and Emiratis respond to being asked to pay, forever, for the ever-expanded population of “Palestinians.”
The corruption is partly visible, and partly hidden. When Arafat died, the “Palestinian authority” somehow discovered it was missing billions and billions of dollars — perhaps as much as $5 billion. It was money from Infidel taxpayers, in North America and Western Europe. Where did it all go? Hundreds of millions must have gone to Suha Arafat, living lavishly in Paris, attending fashion shows and suchlike, while we, the taxpayers of Europe and America who made this possible, are not visiting Paris (it’s too expensive), not to mention Dior or Chanel, any time soon. Why was this money not retrieved? Why was it not sufficient cause to cut off all further funds?
We know why. The “Palestinian Authority” is nothing but a gang, and this gang, called Fatah for shorthand, now has another, rival gang, a gang less corrupt, but even more fanatically religious. The gang of Fatah can be called the Slow Jihadists. They want to eliminate Israel, but they want to eliminate it a little more slowly, in a decade or two or three, by pushing it back into thoroughly indefensible borders, by making its protection even more of a nightmare than it is today (for god’s sake just look at a map). They want to push it back to the armistice lines of 1949 — never the “borders,” as the BBC and NPR like to call them, for the Arabs never agreed to recognize those armistice lines as “borders,” even though the Israelis kept offering to do so for nearly two decades, until the Six-Day War. Young law students learn that in the formation of contracts, an offer once made and then rejected disappears, and cannot be revived on the mere decision of the offeree to change — for whatever reason — his mind. And certainly the Arabs not only rejected the offer for turning those 1949 armistice lines into permanent borders through peace treaties. They have also made war against Israel for more than fifty years. They have conducted Jihad sometimes by open warfare (qital) or through terrorism, but always by economic and diplomatic pressure designed to weaken and isolate Israel. And it is ludicrous for them to pretend that nearly sixty years have not made a difference, and that they can go right back to pressing for Israel to return to the 1949 Armistice Lines, when there is nothing to require this, and indeed, it is Israel that should be stressing its legal, moral and historic claims to the territory it now possesses, which is roughly Western Palestine, consisting of 22% of the territory that was originally assigned to Great Britain as the Mandatory Authority for Palestine. The other 78%, including all of Palestine east of the Jordan, was assigned by the British unilaterally (and the members of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations were horrified at what the British had done) to a “country” quickly concocted for Abdullah, of the Hashemite sons, and called “The Emirate of Transjordan” (later promoted to “the Arab Kingdom of Jordan”).
Then the money from Infidel lands started to come in, mostly through UNRWWA. Ever since the “Palestinian Authority” took control of Gaza (save for the Jewish villages that were abandoned intact, their farms and especially those greenhouses turned over intact, a turn-key operation that the local Arabs had only to use productively — and instead they dismantled and destroyed the whole thing, overnight) and of the Arabs (“Palestinians) of the West Bank, the money has poured into that “Authority.” Or rather, it has poured into the coffers of Arafat, and Abbas, and Dahlan, and the tens of thousands of Fatah-men who march around in black balaklavas, killing whatever Jewish family they manage to catch alone in an outing, or hitchhiking, or shopping in an Arab town (in order to help the “Arabs” that naive Jewish visitor must have thought) or visiting an Arab friend or colleague. These unwary visitors are unaware of the depth of the hatred and the surpassing murderousness, by dint of non-stop cradle-to-grave inculcated Jew-hatred, of so many who are now free of all constraints under the “Palestinian Authority.”
The Fast Jihadists of Hamas, being True Believers even truer than the Slow Jihadists, may share the desire of Fatah to destroy Israel, but they don’t want to have to do even the minimum — even the transparent wink-and-nod of Abbas, about “recognizing” Israel. They don’t want to do this even though it is a meaningless phrase, or rather, a phrase that means only that Abbas is willing to offer a transparent lie to Infidels (for he continues to tell the truth about his ultimate goal to Arab audiences, just as Arafat did). And what is perhaps worst of all, those Infidels are eager, desperate, not to believe him, but just to pretend to believe him, so that they may turn on the tap of the disguised Jizyah of foreign aid. And that is exactly what they are doing today — hastening in a disgusting fashion to reward Fatah. For what? For its corruption and misuse of billions of dollars in Gaza?
Will giving Fatah help end the Lesser Jihad against Israel? It will simply allow the buying of more villas in southern France, more apartments in Paris and London, more children of the mahmoud-abbases being sent to study at expensive schools in Europe and America. And meanwhile, the fury will grow, too, in the “West Bank,” as the same diversion of funds continues. For there is no idea that government under Arab Muslim rule is anything other than a way of laying your hands on riches. Those riches do not come, and cannot come, from their own economies. Those economies are in a state of permanent backwardness because of both inshallah-fatalism and the historic Arab penchant for living on riches seized from, or inveigled from, others — the tradition of the nomadic raider and warrior. Where there is some modest agriculture, all improvements have come from outside, from the West, for innovation does not come easily to, and certainly is not a feature of, Muslim societies suffused with hatred for “bida” or “innovation,” and where, beginning in the mosques but extending to all areas of life, the habit of mental submission is encouraged.
Those riches for some, in the last several decades, have come from the bonanza of oil (and now gas) revenues. And how are those riches distributed? Well, in every case the rulers, the ruling families, seize a very large amount for themselves. And in Islam, the ruler is to be obeyed. The notion that political legitimacy could come from the expressed will of the people, when the people are merely slaves of Allah, long-inured to the idea of submission, and not from the will expressed by Allah in Qur’an (and glossed by the contents of Hadith and sira, which together form much of the Sunnah), makes no sense in Islamic societies, to Muslim minds. So the rulers rule, and take and take. The Al-Thani take the gas wealth of Qatar. The As-Sabah take the oil wealth of Kuwait. Even those who rule lands do not have much or any oil, such as the Al-Maktoum of Dubai, owe their wealth to the oil and gas revenues of those all about them, who enjoy the local luxe that Dubai, dhow-shaped hotels and all, offers. And the biggest theft in world history is surely that of the Al-Saud. They came out of the Nejd, and slowly conquered most of Arabia, and in 1920 finally defeated the Shammar tribe, the largest tribe in eastern Arabia, extending into Iraq, and thus laid claim to an “Arabia” that they then modestly named after themselves as “Saudi” Arabia.
If the Americans and Europeans are foolish enough to now try to keep “the dream of ‘Palestinian’ statehood alive,” that means the dream of the Lesser Jihad against Israel, pursued by the weapons of choice of the Slow Jihad. By keeping this “dream” alive they will be cruelly transferring to Israel the policy fruits of their own ignorance of Islam. The permanent peril in which Israel lives is not mitigated but enhanced by any further concessions, immoral and a-historic, forced upon that tiny country. And if the Western governments are unable to recognize the Lesser Jihad against Israel, and the Islamic basis of that Jihad, if they still persist in pretending that the Slow Jihad is no Jihad at all, but that Abbas is a “moderate” and “pragmatic” and ultimately “wants peace,” they do not harm Israel alone.
They will, if they pile more aid onto Abbas and Fatah, simply provide the aid that inevitably will enrich the local Arab rulers, and increase, rather than decrease, the popular appeal of Hamas, which whatever else it is, holds appeal for those not in the circle of rulers, not those who have been enjoying the diversion of outside funds for their own and their families’ benefit. Turning on the tap of Jizyah for Fatah will help Fatah buy weapons to kill Jews, and simply make the Israelis still more insecure, when they live in a condition of such peril that no Western government or people can possibly comprehend and certainly no government or people has shown the imaginative sympathy to fully comprehend that daily peril, not least because the Israelis manage, somehow — god knows how — to take it in stride.
But such aid will reinforce, in the local Arabs, the belief that such aid coming from the Infidels is theirs by right — that the Infidels must turn it on, and all that the Arabs need to is utter a meaningless phrase or two, and those purely for Western consumption. We can continue to have the propaganda of Jihad-hate streaming out of every radio and television show, especially those for children. We can put up posters everywhere of suicide bombers and hold their examples up for admiration and emulation. We can, in short, do everything Hamas does, except that we can also utter a phrase or two, and that Jizyah will flow.
And such aid will reinforce, in the minds of the donors, that they, the Infidels, simply must supply such aid, otherwise….otherwise, what? The idea has somehow become established that there is an Infidel Man’s Burden, and that everywhere there are poor Arabs and Muslims, so that tens of billions of dollars, or at this point hundreds of billions, must be transferred from the Western, Infidel lands, beyond the ten trillion transferred to Muslim members of OPEC since 1973 alone. Thus Egypt has received, from the United States alone, some $60 billion in economic and military aid, while it remains a center of anti-American venom (though described often as an “American ally”). Pakistan, too, has been receiving, and could not exist without, Western aid of every kind. American generals loved those ramrod-straight, terry-thomassed-moustachioed, Pakistani generals. For that matter, so did the Dulles-line of anti-Communist thought, which saw Islam as a “bulwark against Communism” — and that, apparently, was all ye knew on earth and all ye needed to know. Compare those stout Pakistan generals (Musharraf is only the latest in the line), with those bandung-conferencing, beatrice-and-sidney-webbistic, practically Bolshevik Indian rulers, such as Nehru and his foreign minister Krishna Menon. They were no good against the Communists; they even had Soviet experts building steel mills and such. But the Pakistani generals… ah, there was an ally!
And now the curtain rises again, on what should have been the third and final act of the farce known as the “Palestinians” and the Quartet and the “Two-State Solution,” as the audience of credulous Americans and Europeans, claps and demands that the tragicomedy go on forever. The curtain now rises on “West Bank.” The Good, Moderate, Pragmatic Representatives of the Palestinian People Are Seen Hard At Work, Tilling the Soil, Or Busily Innovating At Their Workbenches. Two workers now cross the stage carrying some highly advanced-looking piece of equipment, which in fact is made of cardboard. Or they are Tirelessly Typing on Computers. Meanwhile, a handful of disgruntled fanatics, who have NOTHING TO DO with the good Fatah-land Arabs, all of whom look strangely like Mahmoud Abbas at his most colorlessly trustworthy, wearing three-piece suits and carrying under one arm a copy of the American Constitution and under the other arm a copy of the Uniform Commercial Code, try to cause trouble. But in vain, because Abbas and Co. Beat Them Back With American Aid.
What a relief. What a relief to know that the “Palestinian Authority” is now thoroughly under the control of the Good Guys. The “moderates.” The “pragmatists.” The people who learned the responsibilities of rule under Chairman Arafat himself, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, and presiding genius, in every respect, of the “Palestinian Authority.” He was the presiding genius also of that devoutly-wished for, among those in Western capitals who have given up even the pretense of trying to think straight about things, “two-state solution.” This will ultimately and inevitably be, given Al-Hudaibiyya and the goals shared by the Slow Jihadists of Fatah and the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, just another step on the road to Israel’s destruction. On this Fatah and Hamas agree, even if they quarrel over tactics and timing, mainly because Fatah wants the money-tap of the Infidels turned on again — there are apartments to be bought in Europe, villas on the “West Bank” to be furnished at Western levels of opulence, children to be sent to school in the West.
So, boys, let’s turn on that tap. Bush and Rice are willing. All of Western Europe is chomping at the bit. Look at how that money flows. My god, it flows and flows and flows. Don’t let it ever stop.