Declaration Against Genocide

Despite more than a decade of genocide in southern Sudan against Christians, animists and now African Muslims (not Arab and insufficiently Muslim, you see), only a heroic few—like American Anti-Slavery Group co-founder Charles Jacobs and Village Voice reporter Nat Hentoff have done much to stop them.

Congratulations, therefore, to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, for widely circulating a “Declaration against Genocide,” with an urgent request that organizations and individuals (especially college and graduate students and faculty members) quickly sign it.

Horowitz courageously cites the Islamic origins of the latest calls for genocide: His Freedom Center asks “all campus groups to repudiate the genocidal passage in the Islamic Hadith” reading: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: ‘The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him’!”

Furthermore, he specifically calls on the Muslim Students Association, to condemn the Hamas Charter, which states: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

Declaration signatories also reject Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call for “a world without America and Israel.”

And of course they repudiate Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who labels the Jewish people “a cancer … liable to spread again at any moment,” and boasts that, “If the Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

For several years, the Freedom Center has actively participated in the fight against genocide, as in FrontPageMagazine, where many of its writers (myself included) have covered the Sudanese and Darfur genocides in the hopes of stopping them.

So it will be particularly interesting to see reactions from such parties as George Soros’ MoveOn.org, and the purported “encyclopedia,” SourceWatch. On its “news” page on Feb. 14, 2008, the latter feigned concern about victims of jihad genocide in Sudan and Darfur—but only so as to deride celebrities like Steven Spielberg and corporate sponsors of China’s Olympic games for trying to “keep quiet” on the issue.

And where does SourceWatch stand? Well, not in the humanitarian ranks, certainly. The Tides Foundation-funded charity has itself been pretty quiet, actually—and does not report global condemnation of Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir’s Islamic Khartoum government; it only states (as if doubting the reality) “The U.S. Department of State has ‘labelled’ [sic] Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism.”

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Affirming the West

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 18, 2008

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism
by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus, 2007), 555 pages.

For the last quarter century, many political leaders and candidates have been overly swayed by the willful misinterpretation of Western history instigated by Columbia University’s infamous late professor, Edward Said. As a bromide, Western civilization could greatly benefit if the current crop of presidential hopefuls would immediately read Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Prometheus, 2007).

Besides clearly identifying the magnitude of the damage Said and his mindless sycophants have done, the book will also provide an instant curative for foolish ideas so widely generated by Islamic dyspepsia. At long last, Western politicians have a yardstick by which to measure our cultural and political grandeurs (including an enormous, highly beneficial propensity for self-criticism), as compared to the social dysfunction, disintegration and horrors wrought through 1,400 years of Islamic history, and continuing in our own age.

Henceforward, in fact, all college professors requiring students to read Edward Said’s Orientalism should also require Ibn Warraq’s 24-karat, 555-page tome. Students (and future leaders) might otherwise accept Said’s fundamentally flawed evaluation of the West—what Ibn Warraq with exacting detail identifies as inadequate methods, incoherence, tendentious interpretations—and amusing, but nevertheless exceedingly dangerous, “historical howlers.”

Said earns Ibn Warraq’s credit for courage and self-criticism; he did note the foolishness of Arab writers adhering to such “out-moded and discredited ideas,” as “the Jews never suffered…, the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion,” or supporting convicted criminal, French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.

But what irony Ibn Warraq also finds—that “self-examination for Arabs and Muslims, and especially criticism of Islam in the West” has grown nearly impossible thanks largely to the “pernicious influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism.” The book “taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity,” by blaming all Arab and Muslim miseries on those “wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists,” but for whom Arabs and Muslims almost universally claim their worlds would once again achieve ascendancy.

Alas, Said neglected the vast era of Islamic imperialism, Ibn Warraq observes—from Mohammed’s invention of the “one true faith” through the 17th Century, with relapses when ever adequate wealth, time and war materiel were available. Enriched with 20th century petrodollars, the Islamic world renewed this effort–via the ‘modernized’ Muslim Brotherhood strategy of ancient Islamic supremacist jihad—and in the 21st century continues aggressively pursuing financial jihad, particularly through “shari’a finance.”

Terror-advocating “experts” such as Pakistan’s Taqi Usmani—a former Pakistani Shari’a Court jurist—set standards for Islamic banking, an MB construct established solely to promote Islamic supremacy. Indeed, to date Usmani remains on the shari’a advisory board of Saudi Arabia’s terror-funding Dallah al-Baraka Group; his Islamic California online bookstore hawks works by U.S.-designated terrorists, and in July 2007 Usmani advised Muslims to live peacefully in Great Britain only until they have the strength to win battles and “establish the supremacy of Islam.” Similarly, Syrian Abdul Sattar Abu Ghuddah is a senior-level advisor to al-Baraka.

Said’s Orientalism alone, as Ibn Warraq also correctly contends, “bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam”—although Said was himself Christian, and not a scholar of Islam—and added late-modern inadmissibility to the 1,400-year-old Islamic tradition embedded in Shari’a law. Namely, any Muslim (or non-Muslim) criticizing Mohammed or Islam thereby becomes guilty of blasphemy, which under the identical Islamic legal code warrants a death sentence.

Ibn Warraq does not merely criticize Said, however. He also shows at great length many of them innumerable benefits the West delivered to the Islamic world. As Egyptian Nobel-prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz stated, “thanks to Napoleon’s campaign” there, Egypt emerged from “centuries of obscurantism” into modernity, including Western scholars’ discoveries of ancient pre-Islamic Egypt, which anchors Egypt’s tourist industry today.

Said contended that “the Orient was viewed as something inviting French interest, penetration, insemination–in short colonization…” Yet the German, Russian, Italian and Western Jewish scholars whom Said didn’t mention (whose existence gutted his thesis) created the very fields of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Arabic studies. They included Paul Kahle, Rudolf Geyer, Hubert Grimme, Anton Baumstark, Carl Heinrich Becker, Carl Brockelmann, S. P. Tolstov, Leone Caetani—and Abraham Geiger and his famed protegee, Ignaz Goldziher.

Not only these Westerners, but almost all of Western history and thought, from ancient Greece onward—were guided by what Ibn Warraq calls “three tutelary guiding lights,”—rationalism (truth and objective knowledge); universalism (openness to others’ ideas); and self-criticism. He examines these attributes at length, in classical antiquity, early Christianity, Indian history and orientalists, archaeologists, and even the British Empire and Lord George Nathaniel Curzon.

All, Ibn Warraq exactingly proves, pursued objective truth and knowledge, were open to others and all humanity—and consistently criticized themselves and their societies to effect improvements. In fact, India’s rich Buddhist traditions were little known until the 19th century, when Western scholars recovered texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Pali, thereby discovering a host of Indian monuments that were subsequently excavated and restored. Sir Jadunuth Sarkar thus noted that “the greatest gift of the English, after universal peace and modernization of society…—is the Renaissance which marked our 19th century.” This was little wonder, since during 500 years of Muslim jihad invasions, from 1000 through 1525, an estimated 80 million Hindus perished, according to Indian scholar K.S. Lal.

In contrast, Ibn Warraq observes that Islamic orthodoxy has always been and remains “suspicious of ‘knowledge for its own sake’,” since “Unfettered intellectual inquiry is deemed dangerous to the faith.” That would explain the Arab Human Development Report of 2003 finding, Ibn Warraq writes, that

the total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year. Greece, with a population of fewer than 11 million, translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translated into Arabic.

Yet Said blamed all the Middle East’s ills on Westerners, conveniently forgetting that Arab and Muslim pleas for assistance often brought Western “imperialists” to the Middle East in the first place, as Ibn Warraq also shows.

Efraim and Inari Karsh conclusively prove in Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Master in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1999), the Muslim world repeatedly sought help from the Western powers. Upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1789 conquest of Egypt, Ottoman Sultan Selim III declared Jihad against the French—joining the infidel British and Russian empires to protect his imperial territories from the French. In 1804, the Ottomans requested and received territorial integrity guarantees from the Russian and Austrian empires. In 1809, the Ottomans allied with the infidel British after squabbling with Russia.

Britain and France opposed construction of the Suez Canal, which they feared would violate the Ottoman Empire and hurt over-land trade routes to Asia. In 1866, though, the Sultan relented and conceded to Egypt’s khedives. Then, Khedive Ismail’s bribery of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (to build his mini-Egyptian empire) nearly bankrupted his protectorate. To lighten his massive debts, Ismail in 1875 sold his Suez shares to Britain for roughly their Â£4 million nominal value.

Despite even the ensuing riots, British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1868-74; 1880-85; 1886 and 1892-94) did not heed repeated Ottoman pleas that England rule Egypt. Only in 1882 did Gladstone agree—after the Ottomans begged for a British naval squadron. Yet the British “imperialists” tried mightily to return canal ownership to Egypt—which the Sultan ironically refused.

Said arrived in his extreme state of vacuousness–contrary to the vast evidence—by deriving his methods from the superficiality of French “existentialists, structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists” with “grandiose theories” supported by “flimsy history or empirical foundations.” Consequently, Said’s Orientalism “gave those unable to think for themselves a formula,” which could apply “to every cultural phenomenon without having to …’conduct any real archival research requiring mastery of languages, or research in the field’.” Not surprisingly, Said’s signature work displays “all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not have much time for empirical research, or…making sense of his results.”

But again, Ibn Warraq does not simply complain. He defends the West, as the title of this superb volume suggests, by offering many of the historical comparison that Said offends worst by neglecting. Said tries the West on the basis of a few examples, taken out of context, “judged and condemned as the source of all evil.” He excoriates the West for practicing slavery, despite its abolition, for example.

However, Ibn Warraq shows that things were all together otherwise. “Black Africa was a full and active partner in the slave trade,” produced black captives and was solely responsible for organizing and controlling their sales. “African powers remained in control of the sale of the slaves as long as the slave trade lasted.”

Moreover, Arabs participated heavily in the black slave trade as well–according to their own accounts, which Bin Warraq duly cites. The 10th century Arab geographer al-Maqdisi termed Bantu-speaking East Africans and Africans generally as “Zanj.” Al-Maqdisi wrote, “they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair and little understanding.” Similarly, a 10th century Islamic Persian treatise described black Africans as “people distant from the standards of humanity,” while a 13th century Persian observed, “the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji.” And Islamic social scientist, economist, historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) wrote, “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery because [they] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.”

In fact Muslim traders were far more culpable than Westerners. From the 1700s through the 1920s, Arab traders handled over 17 million black slaves—including 1.5 million who died en route, many crossing the Sahara, according to a 2004 comparative study by Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau. By contrast, little more than 11 million crossed the Atlantic. Whereas the Occident finally outlawed slavery, abolitionism “did not resonate in either black Africa or the Islamic world.” Indeed, Muslims regarded Western abolitionists as “a threat to their very livelihood but also as an affront to their religion,” writes A. Azumah in Islam and Slavery. Thus Orientals were the largest slave traders, as Ibn Warraq shows here, through collected sources.

Even the supposedly “tolerant” Ottomans accepted slavery, “perpetuated [it] by tradition and sanctioned [it] by religion” and lacked an abolitionist movement, according to Ehud Toledano and Turkish historian Y.H. Erdem (again, carefully cited).

The Ottomans also engaged in a huge enterprise manufacturing and trading eunuchs–males usually castrated during boyhood. In the Muslim Mediterranean—southern Europe, North Africa and the Near East including all of the Ottoman Empire at its largest point—“large harems [maintained] by the upper classes greatly stimulated demand for males who could be trusted with large numbers of nubile women.” Eunuchs survived “total removal of testicles and penis” that caused extensive hemorrhaging and death rates of 90% or more in the sub-Saharan west and west-central Africa, according to Jan Hogendorn’s 1999 essay, “The Hideous Trade.”

Said includes none of these historically significant factors in Orientalism, much less any others of his works.

Ibn Warraq includes hundreds more such nuggets in this work. Together, these scrupulously documented historical facts render Defending the West so important that every self-respecting librarian in the world (especially those in Middle East studies) should grace their shelves with several copies.

Indeed, the public should do everything possible to quickly circulate 100,000 copies of this extraordinary book quickly to educators, political leaders and all others in roles critical to ideological and military self-defense. Then, they should encourage millions more readers to circulate a second 100,000 copies—and speedily wear them out from reading.
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Alyssa A. Lappen, a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy, is a former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance.

Rewarding Palestinian Terrorism

by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
Pajamas Media | February 16, 2008

Unwavering U.S. determination to fund, train, and arm more than 50,000 Palestinian “soldiers” raises serious doubts about the repeated promises President George W. Bush has made to secure Israel’s safety and bring peace to the Middle East.

If the Bush administration gets its way, $4.2 billion to $7 billion in American taxpayer dollars over the next five years may fund training and purchase arms for tens of thousands of seasoned Palestinian terrorists. Many are veteran murderers, released from Israeli prisons in “confidence building” measures repeatedly demanded by the U.S.

It’s as if the U.S. proposed sending money, arms, and military instructors to help Sudanese strongman, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, assist Darfur refugees — against whom he openly pursues genocide.

Rewarding Palestinian terrorism began in earnest in September 1993 with the Oslo Accords. Closely examining funds and propaganda mechanisms that facilitated PLO persuasion of the West should have indicated how al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations operate financially and otherwise. Alas, the U.S. and the West paid no attention.

Instead, in 1994 the U.S. helped establish the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by one of the most wanted criminals in the world — the Muslim Brotherhood member and Soviet-trained jihadist Yasser Arafat. His comrade in arms, vizier, and chief negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, follows in Arafat’s footsteps — albeit without the trademark kafiyah and beard — even more successfully.

Ignoring $10 billion [PDF] in Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) loot that Arafat already controlled, plus more than $2 billion in illegal annual income, the West showered millions more on Arafat. The West assumed that giving the PA legitimacy, funding it, and persuading Israel to cede territory would convince Palestinians to stop targeting Israel and the West.

As the world recognized the PA, however, Palestinians abused their new status. They expanded their illegal activities and terrorism. The more violent the Palestinians became, the more money and concessions they exacted from the West.

In 2001, a year into the second intifada, official donations to the PA jumped over 80% from $555 million to $1.002 billion [PDF] — including at least $114 million from the U.S. Sure enough, that year hundreds of Israelis were murdered and thousands injured in at least 121 attacks.

The U.S. distributes funds to the Palestinians through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Until now, the U.S. funded only selected projects, which were expected to be vetted and certified by the USAID to ensure recipients used the funds only for their allocated purposes, and did not “commit, threaten or support terrorism.”

Yet, in dozens of cases the USAID mission for the West Bank and Gaza failed to enforce federal laws requiring they bar organizations and individuals that threaten, support, or are affiliated with terrorism. The USAID also failed to certify that recipients have not provided material support for terrorism.

In at least 74 cases, according to a December 2007 audit, the mission “failed to comply” [PDF] with the anti-terrorism requirements of Executive Order 13224. It failed to vet subcontractors and require anti-terrorism certification for all contractors and subcontractors who received money.

Yet, the USAID mission even now plans to forfeit requirements on cumulative payments of under $25,000 annually. It should be noted that $25,000 can buy 50 Katyusha rockets.

The USAID mission argued that the prohibition against cash assistance to the PA is “technically an anti-corruption measure and not an anti-terrorism measure.” Thus, they claim they violated no anti-terrorism clause.

Such clever manipulation of U.S. laws to prevent funding terrorist and corrupt regimes seems equivalent to the irrational Bush Administration rationale for giving $150 million in cash directly to the PA within a new $555 million aid package.

This would be the first time the U.S. gives the utterly corrupt PA cash to use as it likes, even to share with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Notwithstanding Fatah-Hamas leadership disagreements branding each other “murderers and thieves,” on Jan. 30 Abbas agreed to give Hamas $3.1 billion of $7.7 billion pledged by international donors in Paris last December.

Money is fungible. PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official, made this clear in a 2007 interview with London’s Daily Telegraph. “No one can [assure] donors” that funds reach their designated destinations, Fayyad declared. He went on to state that controlling Palestinian finances is “virtually impossible.”

But on February 11 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., a straight-faced Fayyad claimed his “government’s platform is amongst the most progressive in the region.” and that it has ensured “transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of the law.”

Even if true, the incitement to murder Israelis in PA media and schools is reaching deafening decibels. The Bush administration clearly needs a good oronthologist.

Even though Fatah took joint responsibility with Hamas for a suicide bombing that killed an Israeli shopper in Dimona on February 4, the Bush Administration may be considering a PA request to intervene on its behalf in U.S. courts against the families of Palestinian terror victims awarded compensation for the loses.

“Frankly, the Palestinian authority, which is corrupt and cavorts with terror, is not the basis for a Palestinian state moving forward,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on June 24, 2002.

The more the PA changed, the more it stayed the same. Incredibly, the only thing that changed was U.S. policy.
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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.

More lies (and fool’s gold) revealed

By Alyssa A. Lappen

Family Security Matters | Feb. 11, 2008

In “The Lies of the Nixon Center” (Nov. 15, 2007), I unraveled some tall tales of its former senior fellow Alexis Debat, a purported Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Agence France Presse had reported in September 2002 that Debat had never been employed in any capacity by the French Defense Ministry (as he claimed)—which terror expert Jean Charles Brisard further corroborated. He had never earned a Sorbonne Ph.D. (as he also claimed), either.

It’s worth noting now that my October 23, 2006 American Thinker piece, “Islam’s Useful Idiots,” also evidently caught New York University Law School’s Center for Law and Security and purported Muslim Brotherhood “expert” Nick Fielding with their pants down.

Debat—then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD)—appeared at the Center’s October 19, 2006 Muslim Brotherhood seminar, claiming to be an “expert” on the subject. He made many ludicrous remarks. And in September 2007, Debat fled the U.S. to avoid a lawsuit and accusations of fraud in France–for fabricating interviews with several U.S. and global political leaders.

The October 2006 seminar also featured former Sunday Times reporter Nick Fielding as an “expert” on the MB, however; he made equally inane remarks. Center Director Karen J. Greenberg sang the MB’s praises. On visiting with “moderate” Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) founder Kamal Helbawy in London, Greenberg reported finding him a very kindly, grandfatherly type–and she decried U.S. State Department refusal to admit Helbawy to the country for the NYU conference.

Obviously Greenberg didn’t know. But in 2005, after then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced suicide bombings—even in Israel—Helbawy replied, “Well he is wrong…. He is not a Mufti.” In a Jamestown Foundation interview, Helbawy blamed “events in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine” as “a factor” behind the July 7, 2005 London bombings–along with U.K. participation in Iraq and its “policy toward the issue of Palestine.”

And in December 1992, Helbawy was taped telling the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Islamic war on Israel isn’t “a conflict of borders and land only. It is not even a conflict over human ideology and not over peace…. [I]t is an absolute clash of civilizations, between truth and falsehood. Between two conducts–one satanic, headed by Jews and their co-conspirators–and the other … religious, carried by Hamas, and the Islamic movement in particular and the Islamic people….” Muslims should never befriend “Jews and Christians,” he warned, who are only “allies to each other….”

Some grandfather.

Fielding denied the MB’s threat to the West and praised Helbawy as “a wonderful human being.” The 2005 election of 22 Muslim Brothers to Egypt’s parliament, Fielding said—and the January 2006 Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority vote—were cause for celebration. He turned his ire only on “the silence of the U.S. State Department in the face of [alleged] Egyptian government abuse” of Muslim Brothers—and the U.S. and international boycott of the Hamas-controlled PA. Fielding dubbed the MB “reformist,” and offering “the best possibility in the Middle East of leaders who can make deals and stick to them.”

My expose prompted Fielding to falsely accuse me of misrepresenting his remarks. The same day, a sanitized version of his comments miraculously appeared on Ikhwanweb.

Debat had boasted that before the year was out, “NYU will publish the video of my remarks…” and thereby absolve them. Alas, the Center published no video or audio in December 2006—or in 2007.

When Center archives were finally published in early 2008 (surprise, surprise), the promised tape of the Oct. 19, 2006 event was notably missing from the roster.

I’d first noted on Oct. 26, 2006 that no tape could vindicate Fielding or Debat,

unless it is complete and unedited. But that may not be in the cards. Asked if the Center would post the entire session, including the question and answer period, a spokesman stated, “We are considering editing the content,” a process that could easily also exclude many controversial remarks that I quoted from the respective experts. The excuse is time limitation, although streaming digital MP3 downloads are not limited by time. Who is dishonest now?

In November 2007, I recalled Debat’s false complaint of “misquotes and distortions”—easily refuted—and observed that NYU had not published a recording “which would have been too embarrassing.”

NYU was between a rock and a hard place. Issuing an edited tape of the Oct. 19 2006 event would verify that NYU, indeed, has something to hide. Releasing an unedited tape of the Debat and Fielding remarks and Q&A, on the other hand, would recall the Debat scandal—and confirm the accuracy of my original quotations. If it isn’t already, the Center would be a laughing stock for inviting either of them.

But I’m not laughing.

It’s tragic that a Law School claiming to study law and security gave a platform to the hokum pokum of two Muslim Brotherhood apologists, or false notions of a “moderate” MB. As the known parent of every Islamic terror group now operating, the Muslim Brotherhood is today also an unindicted terror funding co-conspirator.

Still more tragic is the apparent acceptance by mainstream media—and U.S. leaders and presidential candidates—of Nixon Center fellow Robert Leiken’s lethal notion that the MB is moderate and reformist—not least, since Leiken’s training is in Latin American politics. Patrick Poole elaborately detailed Leiken’s falsehoods in a 4-part April 2007 series.

The MB unconditionally states, in Arabic and English, its plans to Islamize the globe and impose shari’a (Islamic law) worldwide–largely through “flexibility” (muruna in Arabic). Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Mohammad Mahdi Akef calls on all MB “member organizations to serve” the global agenda to defeat the West, and on “individual members” worldwide to join the “resistance” to the U.S.—both financially and “through active participation.” Even some Arab Muslims describe the MB as one of the world’s most malevolent forces.

The present danger stems mostly from the massive Islamic assault on Western economies and markets, however—both through the global push to institutionalize so-called shari’a finance, and a barrage of Middle Eastern securities markets, corporate, strategic infrastructure, bank and other acquisitions.

Skeptics should simply compare current economic events to an MB strategic plan—“Towards a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy”—written in 1977 and 1982 and discovered in the late 2001 Swiss raid on the home of MB financier Yousef Nada. Written by MB spiritual leader Yousef Qaradawi and known as The Project, the plan instructs members to “establish the Islamic state and gradual, parallel work to control local power centers….” It also requires “special Islamic economic, social and other institutions,” and “the necessary economic institutions to provide financial support” to spread Islam.

Documents unearthed also prove the MB has long operated as a central terror funding command, wiring funds for terror attacks through banks like the now-shuttered Al Taqwa, Saudi Arabia’s Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation and Kuwait Finance House–as well as the Islamic Development Bank, a.k.a. the Intifada Bank for funding families of suicide bombers and Bank Meli of Iran.

Now, sovereign Saudi and Dubai interests are buying up Wall Street, too. And their structured Islamic finance is not nearly as benign as they’d like the world to believe.

U.S. AID for Terror

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/8/2008

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 U.S. 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, U.S.-favored PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 1957 with Yasser Arafat co-founded the al Fattah 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 reason d’etre–destroying Israel and expelling the Jewish people from the region. Despite public Fattah-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 Fattah 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 5 February 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-taxpayer funds to this murderous partnership. It is also time for Congress to demand a proper monitoring program to oversee the legitimate use of U.S. aid to the Palestinians.

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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.