Manfred Gerstenfled has a short but revealing article on how European Union funds find their way to explicitly anti-Israel groups, in addition to funding terrorism. Rijk Van Dam, a former Dutch member of the European Parliament , spoke to Gerstenfeld on this issue:
...And then there is the abuse by the Palestinian Authority of part of the many billions of Euros it gets in funding from the EU. Van Dam says: "There is no doubt that a substantial portion of European funding has served purposes such as corruption and terrorism."He added that at a meeting in the European Parliament the then Palestinian finance minister [and now Prime Minister Salam Fayad] was asked how European money was spent. He replied that he did not know, not a penny was left, and it had all gone to the pockets of fat cats.
From Guess who Europe's subsidizing?
The only shocking thing about this is that it's newsworthy anymore. Quite a few Terror Finance Blog contributors have written extensively on the issue, notably myself along with Rachel Ehrenfeld here and David Frankfurter here. I note that this is not really a dig at Salam Fayyad, who in my opinion at least did his best in a very difficult situation when he was finance minister (and seems a solid guy based on my one brief conversation with him).
An interesting phenomenon arises when I raise this subject with most Europeans, or even leftists. They usually do not understand what the big deal is. "Why shouldn't the PA steal aid funds? They're fighting for their freedom" is the sort of resonse I get. This goes a long way to explain why it has been so hard to get anything done on this issue.
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