Whether through Sudanese ports, Libyan overland routes, the Rafah border crossing, or smuggling tunnels, Iran has been reasserting its role as the leading regional state sponsor of terror against Israel by funneling arms to Gaza.
Were reports of imminent financial collapse of Iran premature? If Iran can fund weapons shipments to Gaza to the degree alleged by Israeli officials in this report, it would seem so.
The U.S. finances terrorism by providing insufficient safeguards in the distribution of foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and United Nations Refugee Worker’s Administration (UNRWA) according to a lawsuit filed against Hillary Clinton and other Obama administration officials.
Money Jihad has been making this point for years: why is it a crime when ordinary citizens send money to terrorists, but when the federal government does nobody bats an eye?
This lawsuit is about unlawfully disbursed aid to the Palestinian territories, but the same wrongdoing applies to U.S. negotiations with the Taliban. If you and I communicate with the Taliban and give them money in order to incentivize a certain behavior, we’d be in prison. If the State Department does uses taxpayer money to help bribe the Taliban to sit across from them at the negotiating table, they get praised by the foreign policy “experts.”
In either case, what federal officials are doing is providing material support—money—directly or indirectly to a terrorist organization in violation of U.S. law.
From Shurat HaDin on Nov. 27:
Hillary Clinton sued by Americans over funding of Palestinian terror groups
Federal suit alleges that the US State Dept violated the Anti-Terrorism Act, and abandoned Congressional safeguards, transparency and reporting requirements
Tel Aviv, Nov. 27, 2012: A group of 24 Americans living in Israel, including victims of terrorism, filed a lawsuit today against the US government over its funding of Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
The civil action, filed in the district court of Washington DC, alleges that the US Department of State, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has ignored congressional safeguards and transparency requirements attached to US aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). In addition, the plaintiffs claim that the White House has not been complying with the regulations and reporting obligations governing presidential waivers which facilitate emergency funding to the Palestinians. As a result of this non-compliance, US funds have been flowing to terror groups like Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Palestine Liberation Front.
According to the lawsuit, Americans living in proximity to these Palestinian terror groups are in the class of individuals that Congress sought to protect through the safeguards and regulations that the White House, State Department and USAID are disregarding.
The suit asks the federal court to review the conduct of the State Department and the safeguards on funds being distributed by USAID in its programs to the PA and to the United Nations Refugee Worker’s Administration (UNRWA) and seeks to suspend future American aid to the PA and UNRWA until all the Congressionally legislated regulations and reporting requirements are fully complied with.
Click here to view the lawsuit
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Norman Steiner of New York and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Tel Aviv.
Darshan-Leitner, the director of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, stressed that “once handed over, US funding of the PA and UNRWA is difficult to trace and the State Department has been lax in requiring the Palestinians to utilize bank accounts and other transfer methods that ensure transparency.” The founder of the Israeli counter-terror group added that “elements of the US Government, particularly the State Department and USAID, are breaking the law and must cease all funding of the PA immediately. US aid to the Palestinians is killing innocent people.”
Steiner added: “The American people are opposed to terror and do not want to fund it via their taxes. The ongoing non-compliance of the White House and State Department with Congressionally mandated protections cannot be allowed to continue.”
The United States Department of State, under the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, is prohibited from providing “material support” to proscribed terrorist groups. It is estimated that since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the United States State Department, via USAID has given over $4 billion to Palestinians, with portions of that funding illegally landing in the hands of terrorists. During the last four fiscal years, average aid has been roughly $600 million per year. Additionally, the United States gives approximately $200 million to the United Nations body UNRWA, each year, and during the fiscal years 2008 and 2009, UNRWA gave roughly $500 million of their funding to recipients in the West Bank and Gaza.
Under the Anti-Terrorism Act, the State Department is required to certify that the Palestinian government is committed to a peace co-existence with Israel before distributing funds, and ensure that no part of funding is used for Palestinian terrorism. The plaintiffs allege that these crucial safeguards, transparency obligations and reporting requirements are being negligently ignored.
One of the lawyers handling the case is Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the director of Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, which appears on our blogroll.
Sudanese and Eritrean refugees are being abducted by Bedouin gangsters for exorbitant ransoms. Human rights activists refer to the ongoing terror campaign as “the world’s forgotten hostage crisis.” Surely, the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt will do something to put a stop to this racket within their own borders, right? Don’t hold your breath.
The Atlantic (h/t @ChallaHuAkbar) has the latest this overlooked crime spree:
CAIRO — Memories of torture still haunt 17 year-old Ksamet five weeks after she was released from a small, underground room where Bedouins held her captive for two months in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. She was repeatedly raped, beaten, and burned as family and friends abroad raised money for her $25,000 ransom. “They tortured us almost every day,” Ksamet, from Eritrea, said through an interpreter. “And every week, if we didn’t pay, they’d torture us even more.”
The young woman is one of hundreds of Africans who have been held against their will in the lawless region that borders Israel, often severely abused and largely ignored by the international community. Bedouin are holding over 1,000 people, and Egyptian police are detaining 500 more, according to Meron Estefanos, a Sweden-based Eritrean activist and radio presenter who has spoken to hundreds of Eritreans held hostage in the Sinai.
The steady flow of people north through the Sinai has taken place since 2006 and initially consisted mainly of Sudanese migrants paying to be smuggled to economic opportunities in Israel. In 2008, many Eritreans seeking asylum in Israel started to come, too. The vast majority were trying to escape poverty and conscription under an oppressive dictatorship where indefinite national service is mandatory for most — frequently into their 40s and 50s. Legally leaving the country is nearly impossible…
While many Eritreans taken hostage in the Sinai had paid smugglers to take them to Israel, more and more of those held hostage over the past three years never even had a desire to go there. Many have been kidnapped in or around refugee camps in Sudan and Ethiopia or on Sudan’s borders — or sold by rogue smugglers or corrupt Sudanese border guards — and brought to Sinai where Bedouin extort them for cash. “I had no intention of going to Israel,” said Ksamet, who left behind two sick parents after the military drafted her. “I wanted to go to Khartoum.”
Instead, her and her fiancé, who was also fleeing military service, made it just across the border to Kassala, a city in eastern Sudan only a dozen miles from Eritrea. But after four days there, her smugglers — whom she had paid about $3,300 — sold her to members of the Rashaida tribe of Eritrea and Sudan, notorious for trafficking people and weapons up the Red Sea coast. Ksamet’s fiancé ran free before they could get ahold of him. “I still don’t know where he is,” she said.
Hostages report being subjected to electrocution, burned with molten plastic, beaten with chains and rods, hung by their hair, and threatened with organ harvesting, among other torture methods, according to refugee-aid groups and activists. Sexual abuse ranges from rape and the burning of genitalia to sodomy with heated objects — even to children.
Eritrean villages sometimes sell off homes, livestock, and jewelry to free relatives from the kidnappers; ransoms can reach $50,000. The Bedouin put their captives on the phone with family in the diaspora, beating them so their relatives hear them scream as they plead for help.
The Bedouin hold them for months on average, and many people do not survive. Dumped corpses litter the desert, with 4,000 dead over past five years, according to a September report Estefanos co-authored through Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, and Europe External Policy Advisors, a research center in Brussels. “The treatment has gotten to a level where they would rather die than live,” said an employee at a refugee-aid organization in Cairo.
Those raising money often pool funds to free women and children first. Ksamet was one of three women in a group of 14 that also included children. “I was the only woman left” after the other two paid their ransom, Ksamet said. “So they prioritized me.” Often even when the ransom is met, activists say, the Bedouin merely collect the money and sell their human haul on to the next group of kidnappers, ensuring more rounds of beatings and begging…
What the article doesn’t detail, like many other news reports on the subject, is what exactly the Bedouin do with the money they receive. But according to a Guardian article earlier this year, the beneficiaries of the human trafficking and weapons trafficking program are “Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.” A separate AP report suggested that Sinai militants may use the money for cross-border attacks against Israel.
The Arab League has imposed a formal economic boycott against Israel since 1948 to the present. In 1977, Congress passed legislation prohibiting U.S. businesses from becoming instruments of foreign-led, non-U.S. boycotts such as the Arab League boycott of Israel.
Under the law, if an entity asks an American firm for assurance that it does no business with Israel, the U.S. company is supposed to report that request to the federal government. The business is not supposed to comply with the request or furnish information to the requestor that would help the Arab League enforce its boycott.
The Bureau of Industry and Security’s Office of Antiboycott Compliance has settled with seven U.S. companies in 2012 for 44 alleged violations of antiboycott regulations this year:
The companies were required to pay over $100,000 total in civil penalties for the above violations this year.
A possible defense of the businesses is that requests from importers or banks from the Arab League states are deceptively designed to elicit the information they want without directly inquiring about business dealings with Israel. Instead, they’ll request a signed statement confirming that a company’s ship can enter an Arab port, which is designed to weed out companies and shippers that have done business with Israel.
Nevertheless, U.S. antiboycott regulations have been on the books for over 40 years, and companies—particularly those doing business in the Middle East—should know that by now.
Hat tip and thanks to Twitter pal RushetteNY for suggesting coverage of antiboycott compliance.
First, the report from the Times of Israel:
Egyptian authorities reportedly seize 1.7 million documents proving Jewish ownership of assets in Cairo
Two tons of papers, about to be shipped to Israel, grabbed by police in what Egyptian media call ‘dangerous security breach’
Egyptian authorities confiscated some 1.7 million documents reportedly proving Jewish ownership of land and assets in Cairo. The documents were reportedly about to be shipped out of the country to Israel, in what the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram is calling “the most dangerous case of security breach in history.”
The documents were found in 13 large cases, ready to be transported to Jordan and from there to Israel, Egyptian media reported Sunday.
Elaph, a Saudi-owned news site, reported that Egyptian police received notice that the packages were being held at a shipping company in the Nasser City district of Cairo. Upon arriving at the scene, police found over 1.7 million documents dating back to the 19th century, dealing with Jewish ownership of assets in Cairo. The documents, according to the security source speaking to the Saudi site, weighed over two tons.
Preliminary investigations have revealed that the documents were supposed to be used in an Israeli lawsuit involving Jewish property lost in Egypt’s 1952 revolution, the site reported. According to Elaph, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is personally following the case, which it said affects Egypt’s national security.
The documents were reportedly stolen on December 16, 2011, from a Cairo research institution, the Institut d’Égypte, during public riots that erupted following president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster.
According to Al-Ahram, an unnamed senior member of former Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) was involved in the efforts at smuggling the documents out of the country, in the service of a French-Jewish woman. Another man implicated by Al-Ahram is a Jewish Lebanese businessman named Robert Khalil Sarsaq, who also holds other nationalities. Elaph’s source claimed that the two are suspected of having ties with the Mossad.
The source noted that some of the documents, containing Jewish ownership deeds for banks, companies and real estate, date back to 1863. The documents are now being held by Egypt’s general prosecution.
Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon recently launched a campaign encouraging Jewish refugees from Arab states to come forward and present testimonials of the circumstances that led them to flee their countries of origin.
Egypt’s Jewish community numbered some 75,000 before the founding of Israel in 1948. By 1957, only several thousand Jews were left in the country; most of the others had fled under Arab pressure, according to contemporary accounts.
In 2009, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu established a national advisory council to examine Jewish claims of lost property in Arab countries, but the council was moved from the Justice Ministry to the Pensioner Affairs Ministry, and did little to register property claims.
Now for the grain of salt. The reliable Elder of Ziyon doubts the story, writing:
I asked a friend who is an expert in such matters whether this makes sense, and the respose was “It seems that the Egyptians are running scared about this whole Israeli campaign to recover Jewish assets. They are quite capable of framing a woman in order to try and scare off any Jews who might want to take the law into their own hands. And it’s a warning to any Egyptian who might be thinking of helping Israel gather information!”
The story seems fishy to me as well. It seems that if you wanted to smuggle papers from Egypt to Israel, Jordan would not be the preferred route – a European country would make a lot more sense. Chances are they found a lot of documents, a minority of which had something to do with Jews, and their imaginations took over from there.
Whether the particulars of the document transfer are accurate, larger problem of confiscated Jewish property by Islamic governments remains. It occurred in Turkey, it happened in Iraq, and this case illustrates that the same thing happened in Egypt.
Israel is condemned by elites, leftists, the U.N., and Muslims for “stealing” Arab property, but when it comes to Jewish property, one can hear the crickets chirping.
A civil rights legal foundation that represents the victims of terrorism is reporting that the Australian government is passing funds to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group through two non-governmental organizations. Chalking it up to confusion over names, the government of Australia claims it has done nothing wrong.
Of course it isn’t the first time that a Western government has funded Gaza jihadists through gross negligence, and it won’t be the last. From the Israel Law Center via Israel.co.nz:
World Vision Continuing to Fund Terror Group?
Last February Shurat HaDin [Israel Law Center] revealed that the large NGO World Vision, which distributes massive amounts of Australian government aid to Gaza, has been funding a Palestinian terrorist organization’s charitable front. AusAid, the Australian government’s entity in charge of supervising the country’s foreign aid grants, initially suspended funding to the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (UAWC), alleged by us to be an instrument for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is a designated terrorist organization in Australia and the providing of any material support to it is illegal.
After suspending funding for a month, however, AusAid, on behalf of Australia’s Foreign Ministry, declared it had thoroughly investigated the matter and found no reason why it shouldn’t reinstate its support for the PFLP group. AusAid, while announcing this resumption of funding, proclaimed that it decided to reinstate its support to the UAWC because it was a registered charity in Israel! We were shocked by this explanation, as we had already searched and could not find that the UAWC was listed in Israel’s registry of charities. Moreover, there was overwhelming proof that there was a connection between the UAWC and PFLP. The PFLP’s website stated that it established the UAWC, with the latter agreeing that the terrorist group could utilize its Gaza buildings for training. In addition, several of UAWC’s executive directors are known terrorists, including its director, Bashir al Khieri, who had served time in an Israeli prison for PFLP activities. This past week, the UAWC even put out press releases complaining that Israel’s security services recently raided their offices in Jericho and arrested staff members for their involvement in terrorism.
All of this is going on while AusAid continues to publicly maintain that the UAWC is not the PFLP. Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, defending AusAid, gave public assurances that no Australian taxpayer funds were being provided to the Palestinian terrorist group. After our investigation, it was conclusively determined that a tremendous fraud was being perpetrated by World Vision and AusAid against the Australian public. Above all, the organization they claim is registered in Israel is not the UAWC but a different charity with a similar sounding name – the Committee of Agricultural Works (CAW). CAW and the UAWC, which AusAid believes is one and the same, have very similar names but were founded ten years apart, all while having a totally different board of directors. One is indeed registered in Israel and the other is indeed an instrument of the PFLP.
Amazingly, AusAid and World Vision continue to pretend that they are funding the Israeli charity CAW, while Australian funds are actually being provided to the UAWC in Gaza. Read the rest of this entry ?
The Financial Times has an excellent article on recent natural gas discoveries off the coast of Israel. For many decades, the commonly held perception of Israel was that it is the only country in the Middle East without oil. The recent discoveries, which involved hard work and long odds, turn the old perception on its head.
Energy independence is extremely important for the U.S. and the West at large. But it may be a matter of existential survival for Israel. Israel has had to depend exclusively on imported energy in the past, leaving it vulnerable to price shocks and supply interruptions. Natural gas deposits at Tamar and Leviathan will go a long way in helping Israel to write its own future.
Here’s a long excerpt, but you should take a look at the full piece:
Field of dreams: Israel’s natural gas
Aug. 31
By Tobias Buck
After decades of importing every drop of fuel, Israel has struck it rich, uncovering vast reserves of natural gas in the Mediterranean
The black and yellow helicopter heads north from Tel Aviv, passing over empty beaches, a yacht harbour and a string of sprawling seafront residences that house some of Israel’s wealthiest families. After a few minutes the pilot makes a sharp turn to the left and steers his ageing Bell 412 towards the open sea.
For more than half an hour, all there is to see is the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Then suddenly a hulking mass of brightly painted steel rises from the midday haze. Towering more than 100m above the water, this is the Sedco Express, a drilling rig that has been operating in this stretch of ocean for almost three years. As the helicopter touches down on the landing pad, we see a small blue and white Star of David flag fluttering in the wind. It is the only sign that the Sedco Express sits atop one of the greatest treasures that Israel has ever found. Far below, connected to the rig by a slender steel pipe that runs through 1,700m of ocean and another 4,500m of rock and sand, lies a vast reservoir of natural gas known as the Tamar field.
The men on board the Sedco Express are busy testing the field’s multiple wells in preparation for the long-awaited day next April, when a US-Israeli consortium will start pumping the gas onshore. With reserves of almost 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the Tamar field is a hugely valuable asset for the Israeli economy. Discovered in January 2009, it was the biggest gas find in the world that year, and by far the biggest ever made in Israeli waters. But the record held for barely two years. In December 2010, Tamar was dwarfed by the discovery of the Leviathan gasfield some 20 miles farther east – the largest deepwater gas reservoir found anywhere in the world over the past decade. The two fields, together with a string of smaller discoveries, will cover Israel’s domestic demand for gas for at least the next 25 years, and still leave hundreds of billions of cubic feet for sale abroad. The government take from the gasfields alone is forecast to reach at least $140bn over the next three decades – a staggering sum for a relatively small economy such as Israel’s.
You didn’t think that international donor aid only helped Hezbollah did you?
UNRWA has announced a joint project with Human Appeal International, an Islamic charity that has been revealed to be a member of the Union of Good charity network that supports Hamas. The project is intended to help “education,” and we can expect that the curriculum will not be moderate, peaceful, tolerant, or secular.
Hat tip to Twitter user Sharkiya East @Sharkiya for the insight and link to UNRWA’s press release:
Human Appeal International and UNRWA launch education project in Gaza
29 June 2012
Gaza
UNRWA and Human Appeal International, an Emirati NGO based in the Emirate of Ajman, have launched their first joint education project in Gaza. Under the project, nine additional classrooms will be constructed at the Al Durj Primary School in Gaza City. A ceremony held to mark the signing of the agreement between the Agency and the contractor was attended by the director of Human Appeal in Gaza, Mr. Imad Haddad, and the deputy director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, Mr. Scott Anderson.
Welcoming this contribution, Mr. Anderson said: “Providing education is one of the Agency’s most important interventions in Gaza, and we are delighted that Human Appeal International has come on board with us as a partner. These new classrooms will go a significant way in easing the strain on space in Al Durj School. UNRWA, the students, and the teachers are very grateful to Human Appeal International for its support.”
Mr. Imad Haddad, director of Human Appeal in Gaza, said: “We look forward to continuing our co-operation with UNRWA in different fields such as health, relief and social services, and especially education. This latest project builds upon our past efforts in Gaza, especially during the 2008-2009 war, and we hope to take further steps towards enhancing co-operation in the future.”
Al Durj Primary School currently educates 1900 students in two shifts. The new classrooms will help to ease the overcrowding that has been endemic in Gaza schools by providing additional learning space for some 630 students in the morning and afternoon sessions. Due to increasing need for places in UNRWA schools in Gaza, students are often crowded into classrooms with insufficient space, with three children frequently having to sit on desks designed for just two students, which has affected concentration levels and academic achievement.
UNRWA provides education to some 218,000 children in Gaza in 243 schools, many of which suffer from overcrowding and run-down premises as rapid population growth rates have increased demand on UNRWA schools. To address this, UNRWA with the support of its generous donors, has embarked on a plan to construct additional schools and classrooms across the Gaza Strip.
Author and researcher Jacob Campbell
Jacob Campbell, a research fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, has uncovered a European Commission plan to subsidize Lebanese schools despite the announcement by Lebanon’s eduction minister and Hezbollah official that students will be taught “a culture of Resistance.” Specifically, the European Union has pledged €3.8 million for a Lebanese citizen education program and is contributing €13.7 million toward Lebanon’s “Education Sector Development Plan.”
This assumes that the money won’t be lost forever as it’s channeled through a completely tainted Lebanese financial system prior to its arrival at the indoctrination camps.
Here’s an excerpt from Campbell’s article, “Helping Hezbollah“:
… If Hezbollah is to consolidate its rule over Lebanon, it must command the loyalty of the country’s youth. And, having inherited the previous government’s five-year Education Sector Development Plan (ESDP), Hezbollah is in the ideal position to achieve this by embedding its own ideology into Lebanon’s education system.
Keen to support the strengthening of “students’ national identity and civic responsibilities” in a nation as perennially blighted by sectarian strife as Lebanon is the European Union, which has committed €3.8 million for the development of a citizenship education programme in Lebanese schools. Well-intentioned as this is, it overlooks the fact that Hezbollah’s conception of civic responsibility is fundamentally at odds with the European Union’s. This was most starkly evident in February, when the Lebanese Minister of Education issued a memorandum obligating all public schools to spend an hour imbuing “the culture of Resistance” in children.
Nor has Hezbollah’s attempt to indoctrinate an entire generation stopped there. As part of the ESDP, which the European Union is co-financing with a total budget of €13.7 million, the Lebanese government is seeking to launch a standardised history curriculum. According to the most recent proposal, history lessons will include teaching pupils to appreciate “the Resistance’s importance in terms of defending Lebanon”. The draft syllabus has also been criticised for writing the pro-democracy Cedar Revolution out of Lebanon’s history, as well as omitting Lebanon’s struggle against the Syrian army and Palestinian militias during the civil war. To all impartial observers, it is clear that Hezbollah is exploiting the ESDP to greatly exaggerate its centrality to Lebanese national identity.
When Paul Nuttall MEP submitted a parliamentary question asking whether the European Commission would cancel its financial assistance to the Lebanese Ministry of Education in light of Hezbollah’s efforts to brainwash students, Commissioner Štefan Füle responded by saying that any cessation of funding “would be counterproductive”. Given that the Lebanese Minister of Education announced in May that he has enlisted the help of his Iranian counterpart in implementing the ESDP, the European Commission ought to consider that what is truly counterproductive is sponsoring a project that appears to have been outsourced to Hezbollah’s paymasters in Tehran…
Read the full piece here.
Mr. Campbell also tells Money Jihad that, “As a Eurosceptic, I resent the squandering of taxpayers’ money by an unelected and unaccountable European Commission,” especially if it empowers Hezbollah—an organization committed to terrorism against Israel.
If you live in Europe or America (and especially if you’re a young adult), you too must be wary of a future of being saddled with public debt incurred by profligate politicians elected decades before you could even vote. The money involved in this Lebanese case may not seem like much in the grand scheme of government waste and abuse. But how long can your government sustain itself when it engages in, not just expensive welfare programs at home, but continuous foreign aid welfare to an Islamic world that is innately hostile and unappreciative of Europe and the U.S.?
Incidentally, U.S. aid to Lebanon was $73.1 million in 2008, $125.7 in 2009, an estimated $229 million in 2010, and a requested $246.3 million in 2011 according to a Congressional Research Service report.
Turkey’s dangerous Islamic charity IHH has commemorated as “martyrs” the armed flotilla goons who resisted Israeli forces during the Mavi Marmara blockade-running attempt in 2010.
The IHH website has posted an article including comments made by the IHH’s Gaza representative at an event praising the Mavi Marmara thugs earlier this month, in which the representative promised to continue the voyage that the fateful ship began:
Mavi Marmara martyrs commemorated in Gaza
The victims of an Israeli attack on Freedom Flotilla which claimed the lives of nine peace activists in 2010 have been commemorated with a ceremony in Gaza.
Victims of the Freedom Flotilla and Mavi Marmara, which was part of the flotilla, are being commemorated with prayers across Turkey and the world.
While the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation last week organized a commemoration ceremony on board the Mavi Marmara ship and a march in Taksim Square in İstanbul to commemorate Mavi Marmara martyrs, our brothers and sisters in Gaza also commemorated the victims and sent their greetings to Turkey.
The commemoration ceremony which took place in front of the Mavi Marmara Martyrs’ Monument at Gaza Sea port attracted huge interest from the world media.
“We respectfully commemorate our brothers who sacrificed their lives for the cause of Palestine and voice our gratitude to Turkey,” said the participants of the ceremony.
Public authorities from Gaza and Palestine who delivered speeches at the event said they will never forget the martyrs, Turkey’s support and sufferings for Gaza.
Many Palestinian families, particularly children also attended the ceremony. Holding Turkish flags in their hands, Gazans said: “Thank you Turkey.”
IHH Gaza representative Mehmet Kaya who attended the ceremony, gave some information about the IHH’s relief activities in Gaza and talked about the Mavi Marmara attack and the ensuing developments.
“We met at this square in order not to forget the attack on Mavi Marmara. The aid ships of the flotilla set sail in order to alleviate the pains of Gazans but they were attacked by Israel on their way to Gaza. Thanks to the sacrifices of our martyrs, we won, Mavi Marmara won, Gaza won, the resistance and Palestinian cause won. There are a lot of things to do. Our goal is to ensure the freedom of Palestine and al-Quds. We will do our best to this effect. Mavi Marmara continues its voyage. Mavi Marmara continues its voyage having the support of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt [which toppled their despotic leaders]. This process will continue with Syria. The despotic administration in Syria will also be overthrown and the people will win. Arab Spring is the Spring of Islam and we will see more beautiful days. We will continue our struggle until Masjid-i Aqsa is free. Allah willing, we will pray at Masjid-i Aqsa. The world will hear the voice of Muslims. Israel was isolated after its attack on Mavi Marmara. It lost the support of Egypt, its relations with Turkey hit a deadlock. Our nine brothers were martyred but we did not give up from our struggle. Thanks to the sacrifices of our martyrs, thousands of Furkans, Ali Haydars, Cevdets and Fahrettins [names of the some of the Mavi Marmara victims] will be raised. Before the launch of a case in Turkey against perpetrators of the Mavi Marmara attack, some people were saying that it is impossible for such a case to be filed in Turkey but it did take place. There are courageous people in our country. Every Israeli soldier who took part in the Mavi Marmara attack will give an accounting of their actions.”
What’s disturbing isn’t just the Islamic charity’s involvement in the anti-Israel attack, or the charity’s support for Hamas, or Turkey’s approval of the action, but how widespread and prominent the IHH has become.
IHH purports to have operatives in 95 countries. Few, if any, Islamic charities claim that level of reach and influence. In many ways, IHH appears to be Turkey’s answer to Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League, or an answer to Iran’s Hezbollah. It is a nationally sponsored vehicle used to gain radical, international, Jew-hating, pro-sharia influence.
Case can proceed against terror-funding bank
January 22, 2013Progress made as court rejects bank’s appeal
Arab Bank’s refusal to turn over records has been a major obstacle in the Linde v. Arab Bank terrorist financing case. To move beyond the legal stalemate, the presiding judge said the jury could infer what it wants to about Arab Bank’s secrecy. The bank appealed the judge’s jury instruction to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court ruled Friday that it had no standing to review the case at this time (h/t @ChallahHuAkbar), and that there’s nothing drastic enough about the judge’s instruction to cause the circuit court to intervene.
From Bloomberg:
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