What was intended to be the Israeli case against Yasser Arafat may also end up being a comprehensive indictment of Saudi involvement in Middle Eastern terror. Whether or not that was the intention of the Israeli government from the beginning, all the ties that bind Arafat to terror, bind Riyadh with the same cord.
Israel denies intentionally building a case against the Saudis, according to Lt. Col. Mira Eisen. As she points out, truckloads of documents were seized during the incursion and raids on Arafat’s headquarters buildings. “We have the facts now. We didn’t have them before,” she told Fox News’ John Gibson Sunday.
It’s hard to argue with her logic. If Israel had the facts before, they certainly wouldn’t have covered them up to protect Saudi Arabia.
Sharon brought a dossier compiled by Israeli military intelligence that he says indicates the “systematic and ongoing transfer of large sums of money to the Palestinians by official Saudi institutions for the express purpose of supporting the intifada.”
That isn’t too hard an allegation to prove. The Saudi Interior Minister also heads the Saudi Committee for Support of the Al Quds Intifada.
The Saudis claim the support is of a humanitarian and religious nature. According to the IDF dossier, the Saudis transferred “large sums of money in a systematic and ongoing manner to families of suicide terrorists, to the Hamas organization, and to persons and entities identified with Hamas.”
The dossier even documents internal disagreements about how the money would be channeled. The Saudis wanted it to go through Hamas-backed charities. The Palestinian Authority wanted to disburse the money. The Saudis decided in the end to use Hamas because they feared the PA would skim money off the top.
The information is detailed and documented with notations written in Arafat’s own hand. The PA alleges they are forgeries. Most western media reports are peppered with words like, “alleged” and “purported to be” and “unverified.”
It is unlikely that forgeries would get past U.S. intelligence. It is even less likely that Israel would take the chance. At long last, Arafat’s deeds have begun to drown out his words. The last thing Israel needs is to be accused of is manufacturing evidence. All their political gains would evaporate in an instant.
According to the files released by the Israelis, the family of the average suicide bomber receives about $33,000 in donations from the Arab world. That is about equal to six year’s salary.
To argue that does not play a role in the willingness of poverty-stricken Arab families to sacrifice their children to the intifada is pure naivet?.
At the same moment that Prime Minister Sharon was showing his scrapbook to President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell was giving a joint press conference with the Saudi ambassador.
In a statement, Powell expressed solidarity with the Saudis, thanked them for coming up with a new peace plan [unchanged since Israel first rejected it in 1967], and generally praised the Saudis for being such good sports.
It appears there are three competing schools of thought in the Bush administration for how best to handle the Middle East crisis, and no one discipline has risen to preeminence. It appears that President Bush sees Arafat for what he is and is serious in his support for a Jewish state in the Middle East. There is the Cheney-Rumsfeld school of thought – which boils down, in essence, to a “pox on both their houses.” And there is the Colin Powell-globalist worldview in which the U.N. should be the final arbiter in the Middle East.
There are no two-headed animals in nature. The same applies in government. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Somebody in Washington has to decide to be boss where Middle East policy is concerned.
The Powell Doctrine favors the U.N. policy of endless negotiation with anybody who will set aside time for a chat. The Powell Doctrine has the U.S. demanding Israel continue negotiations with Yasser Arafat, a proven terrorist.
It has the U.S. inviting the Saudis, proved to be state sponsors of terror, to tea to discuss how best to settle the crisis in the Middle East. (Which would have been an absurdity equivalent to inviting Josef Goebbels to join the Allied Nations for a discussion on improving Jewish public image in Nazi Germany.)
But the Bush Doctrine – the one that is supposed to count – prohibits negotiating with terrorists, terrorist states or states that support terror. And Ariel Sharon’s dossier puts the Saudis, Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians all in the same boat with Yasser Arafat.
If President Bush continues to force Israel to negotiate with “proven terrorists,” then his entire moral basis for war on terrorism becomes a sham. It demonstrates that his administration determines who is a terrorist on the basis of whether they kill people “who are politically correct.” The administration’s interpretation of terrorism is no longer based on the president’s own expressed definition, which he gave when he launched his “righteous war on terrorism.”
It is hard to imagine that President Bush, once confronted with the evidence, and coupled with what our own intelligence services tell him, will doubt that both the PA and the Saudis are exactly what the files captured in Arafat’s headquarters say they are: terrorists and sponsors of terrorists!
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