Counter-terrorism financing is, without any doubt, a highly politicised issue. After all, if one’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, or a third man’s tireless combatant in the holy jihad, then the act of collecting and transferring money to that terrorist/freedom fighter/tireless combatant to pay for his violent struggle must also be open to political interpretation. And, although it may sound like a post-modern political critique to say so, the definitions of terrorism, terror financing and so on that we commonly use in today’s world, certainly in the world of counter-terrorism professionals and analysts, are those imposed by the United States, Britain and other ’Western’ democratic states, rather than by Hizbollah, Colombian drug barons, the Tamil Tigers or Iran. So, too, are the financial regulations and codes of practice created by the UN, the Financial Action Task Force, the Wolfsberg Group, and dozens of national financial regulators.
The truth is that I don’t have a problem with this. Democracy, to use Churchill’s famous witticism, is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. The USA, Canada, Australia, the EU member states, Israel and other democracies are certainly all imperfect, have all kinds of injustice built into their political and legal structures, and suffer from all democracies’ inherent weakness, that the voters are constantly tempted by rash and self-serving politicians to choose short-term fixes for long-term problems. Nevertheless, the world’s democratic states that offer their citizens the greatest freedoms, the best quality of life, and the greatest sense of belonging to the society in which they live, they are the ones to which migrants gravitate from the undemocratic, unfree world; and that does give them some moral standing to impose their own interests and agenda on the rest of the world. It certainly gives them moral justification to defend themselves against those, whether other states or non-state actors, who try to harm and even destroy them. And this, at least at one level of analysis, is why ’we,’ who represent a minority of the word’s population, are justified in imposing the international regulatory regime for counter-terror financing and anti-money laundering.
It’s no secret that not everyone agrees with this, and that this regulatory regime is open to legitimate criticism for its inconsistencies and even stupidities. But what did come as a surprise to me was that the head of an organisation ostensibly dedicated to fighting financial crime and terror financing, the Anti Money Laundering Network, has just published a highly politicised attack on Israel, in a professional publication, for imposing restrictions on the Gaza Strip. Nigel Morris-Cotterill, wrote the following in Volume 8 No. 5 of the World Money Laundering Report:
"Lest we forget, in 2001, the United Nations produced analysis showing that Israel had killed three times more Palestinians than Palestinians had killed Israelis.... We must not forget, too, that Israel has systematically taken over the most fertile lands in Palestine, and the purest and most reliable water supplies. It has imposed, without any legal justification, restrictions on the movements of Palestinians within their own country so that workers are forced to spend hours each day at checkpoints travelling from home to work, militating against both productivity and the proper development of family life.
"Frequent airstrikes and military ground action in Gaza have left the district with substantial areas nothing more than rubble. As Palestinians try to build shops, offices and factories, Israel blows them up or knocks them down.
In the midst of this, Palestinians are blaming each other for the mess. But it is not a mess entirely of their own making: Israel and ’the West’ (a rather ridiculous term) are the root cause of the massive problems now facing Gaza."
Morris-Cotterill goes on to criticise Israel for refusing to hand over $50 million-odd per month in customs duties to the Hamas-led government in Gaza, and the USA for blocking and prosecuting the transfer of money to Hamas by Palestinian charities such as the Holy Land Foundation. The Hamas-led government, after all, was democratically elected, and it provides healthcare and social services for Gaza’s suffering population;’ so what right do Israel and the USA have to call it a terrorist organisation?
The peg for this article is actually the plan of an unnamed British surgeon whose charity organisation, having previously worked on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, now wants to provide training in trauma care in Gaza. But how can this possibly happen, Morris-Cotterill asks "if the actions he or his charities take are perceived as providing material support to Hamas he may be prevented passage into Gaza, may be arrested by Israel on exit or have funds frozen by financial institutions who are aware of the work being done. Arguably, he may also face arrest on return to the UK."
However, this self-righteous polemic suffers from two gaping flaws. One is that neither Israel nor the UK is likely to do anything at all to block or punish a genuinely charitable organisation working in Gaza, so long as it restricts its activities to medical training -- even in the midst of the violence, Israeli hospitals and doctors are doing humanitarian work together with Palestinian colleagues. The other, as Barak Seener points out in the article referred to by Ilan Weinglass earlier today, is that the Palestinian regime’s own corruption has consistently and cynically brought far more suffering on the Palestinian people than Israel has. The Palestinians are far from being innocent victims: they are the ones who voted in a political party that openly supports and promotes terrorism.
Morris-Cotterill doesn’t even attempt to prove that Hamas isn’t really responsible for the most of the current wave of missile and mortar attacks on Israel’s civilian population, to say nothing of the continued gang warfare that is destroying Gaza from within. Such an attempt would at least give him a pretext for claiming that the financial sanctions and other counter-terror financing activities aimed at the organisation are unjustified and inhumane.
So why is he going to the trouble of attacking Israel in a publication that otherwise conducts a completely serious professional discussion of money laundering, alongside the notices for forthcoming conferences on financial crime? The answer isn’t very difficult to find. Vortex Centrum Ltd., the AML consultancy that he heads and which also publishes the World Money Laundering Report, is based in Kuala Lumpur, capital of the one Muslim country that tries even harder than Saudi Arabia to boycott Israel. Cynical observers (such as this writer) may smile and say ’well, what do you expect?’ The problem is that if the professional views of an anti-money laundering consultant can get distorted so easily merely by being based in Malaysia, what does this say about the determination of the Malaysian authorities to fight Islamic terrorism in their own back yard?
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