PA Still Stealing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars

I just read a great article by my favorite Arab Israeli journalist, Khalled Abu Toameh, who I once had the opportunity to meet and converse with.  He is a brilliant and brutally honest author, and I recommend following his articles on the Jerusalem Post and other venues around the world.

This particular article brings to light an issue that I was unsure of today.  I have talked about Arafat’s corruption on multiple occasions in the past.  However, I have never known the scope of corruption in the PA today.  I had to assume that Hamas is stealing from the people for its own sake, but I had high hopes that the Fatah side of things was being a bit more helpful to its own people.

Nope.  Not the case.  Toameh gives several examples of Mahmoud Abbas stealing from the Palestinian people.  Here is just one example:

Just before the January 2006 parliamentary election, the US gave $3.2 million to help Fatah boost its image among Palestinians. The goal was to prevent Hamas from winning the vote back then. [Hamas did win in the end]. Shabaneh says that his investigations showed that the money was given to an advertisement company owned by Abbas’s family and that most of the money had “vanished.”

So, it seems that the United States, European Union, and the rest of the world that is trying to help establish a Palestinian economy and high quality of life might as well just stop for now.  That is, unless you enjoy seeing your money fund Mahmoud’s own checkbook.