The "right of return" is a non-negotiable theme that maintains these refugees can never be assimilated into the Arab world. Since 1948, Arabs who were forced to be "Palestinians" have left the camps, but had to tithe their income to Arafat. The tithes were collected by the governments of any Arab state where they were living only as alien residents. Meanwhile, the United States and other Western nations' taxpayers helped support those in the refugee camps. The Arab League's donations were always minimal and PLO money usually spent on training and weapons.
From 1964 on, Palestinian terrorism became a protection racket, as Saudi billionaires and the Arab League paid the PLO to roil the conflict with Israel's Jews and keep their own impoverished populations distracted from their leaders' personal opulence. The PLO became a big business during those years, renting itself out to the Soviet Union and KGB and allying itself to revolutionary causes from the IRA to the Basque Separatist Movement to Castro's Cuba by providing training by its military wing.
The PLO also went into legitimate businesses. By the 1970s, the PLO established SAMED, an Arabic acronym for Palestinian Martyr's Sons Enterprises. SAMED is actually a worldwide conglomerate swimming in money. Its portfolio includes farms, restaurants, retail stores, factories and even oil refineries. It holds real estate investments in France, Spain and England, and owns several newspapers. It even has controlling interest in a Monte Carlo radio station. The portfolio also includes large amounts of money invested in Wall Street and in stock exchanges in Tokyo, Paris and Frankfurt, including a large share of Mercedes Benz. Airlines in the Maldives, Caledonia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nicaragua, and duty free shops all over Africa are also in the portfolio, since they serve as covers for moving terrorists around and providing them travel documents - all while turning a profit.
Mandatory tithing to Arafat by Palestinians living in other Arab states generated some $50 million dollars a year, while the Saudis and Gulf States donated billions of dollars to the PLO. Intelligence agencies have estimated that the PLO added $5 million dollars per day to its coffers during the 1970s and '80s, and British National Criminal Intelligence Services in 1994 estimated the PLO's net worth at $10 billion dollars. Besides SAMED, the Palestine Commercial Services Company today has a monopoly in flour, cement, cigarettes, oil and construction material in the Palestinian Authority. The Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO) controls 93% of all investments in the emerging "State of Palestine".
The PLO even expanded its operations to the illicit drug trade. Sallagh Dabbagh, the PLO former treasurer, stated, "The entire future of the PLO operation for liberation may hinge on our exporting more drugs around the world." Other illegal enterprises included counterfeiting US currency, money laundering, arms smuggling, murders for hire and even bank robberies. The Guinness Book of World Records estimated PLO-organized bank robberies in Europe netted in excess of 100 million dollars.
Despite all this, the PLO was still raking it in at the height of the "peace process". Direct aid and funds through non-governmental organizations exceeding at least $125 million a month, for only 3.2 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, came from the US, the EU and the Arab League (that only gives nominally). PLO leaders, though, were buying and smuggling guns to destroy Israel, while rewarding Arafat's wife an annuity worthy of a potentate.
This doesn't include millions in UN funds for UNWRA, the United Nations Welfare Relief Agency, that is run not by the UN, but by the Palestinians themselves. UN aid estimates that Palestinians received $300 a year per person in handouts as "refugees", the highest figure given any refugees in the world. While many an average Palestinian may be poor due to graft by the leadership, terrorists in the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade were being paid $50,000 a year; a salary many Americans would love to make, but a fortune in the Middle East, where $800 a month is considered a good income.
Even fewer Americans know that Edward Abington, the former US state department consul general in Jerusalem, went to work for the PLO as their chief lobbyist in Washington at a salary of 2.5 million dollars annually. This, right after he agreed, in his former capacity, to donate 400 million dollars of USAID taxpayer money to the Palestinian Authority.
The first time I learned about the compulsory tithing was in the Eighties from a man who grew up in an infamous Lebanese refugee camp. I am still as outraged about it now as I was then. For those refugees who are allowed the priviledge of leaving the camp to pursue employment opportunities or even the right to beg for alms outside the camps must turn over a portion of their daily earnings to the thugs that run the camps. For most Palestinian refugees there are only three choices: starve, pay it and be grateful to be alive for today or join the beast.
Most people who have heard about it from me live in a kind of denial about it and prefer to believe that the world’s favourite victims could never brutalize or abuse their own; otherwise the western media would have been all over the story. But let’s face facts. Throughout the years there have been voices crying out but they have been downed out by others who prefer their terrorists be covered in the righteous mantle of “freedom fighters’ rather than acknowledge the truth that their freedom fighters are nothing more than cut-throat thieves, extortionists and murderers. There is a reason why the PLO made it into the record books and from all accounts the dubious distinction of being the world’s premier bank robbers is not being threatened by any group located anywhere in the world in the immediate future.
Think about this for a minute. Since the return of the PLO under the Oslo Accords why has there not been one single serious attempt made to relocate a single Palestinian Refugee from any of the neighboring Arab refugee camps into the West Bank or Gaza? Blame Arafat all you want to but he was nothing more than one man in the chain of command in the Palestinian mafia. Chairman Abbas is no better. There was/is an opportunity to ease up the life of those refugees in the neighboring Arab refugee camps and the opportunity still exists but no political party within the Palestinian Authority ran on a platform promising to return immediately any refugee who wanted to settle in the West Bank or Gaza nor would they – it would be bad for business.
(Tipped off by Iris Blog)
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