PALESTINIAN TERROR, COURTESY OF THE E.U. This message is brought to you by the European Union: “If the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree, the rock and the tree will say, ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.'” Did the E.U. fund such wretched anti-Jewish drivel? Yes, that and much more, says a blistering investigative article in Germany’s Die Zeit. The above quotation is from a sermon broadcast on PA-TV, the Palestinian Authority’s official television station. For years now the E.U. has been funding PA-TV to establish an “open and pluralistic information system and thereby the formation of a democratic Palestinian society.” The station’s failure to do that hasn’t stopped the euros from pouring in. Also, textbooks in PA schools never mention the state of Israel but find space to glorify murderers like the infamous “Engineer.” Yet this hasn’t stopped the E.U. from subsidizing the education system’s “buildings, salaries, and the schoolbook commission . . . to the tune of 330 million euros since the 1993 Oslo agreements.” So hasn’t the E.U., as the Die Zeit reporters allege, financed terrorism against Israel? This is exactly what the Israeli government documents with evidence captured by its military. But E.U. commissioner Chris Patten replies that “the E.U. Commission has to date not been shown any hard evidence that the E.U. funds have been misused to finance terrorism or for any other purpose.” Die Zeit takes a look at the evidence and disagrees. Take the illegal arms shipment aboard the Karine A, for example. A cash-strapped Arafat paid $10 million for that cargo. At which time, Die Zeit reports, the E.U. was contributing “10 percent of Yasser Arafat’s day-to-day budget and 50 percent of all aid payments.” Commissioner Patten protests that strict oversight by the IMF, the middleman for such funding, requires that E.U. moneys not be misspent. But that’s not what the IMF says. “We don’t have auditing responsibilities,” representatives assure Die Zeit. What then, the authors ask, to make of Israeli reports connecting accounts holding E.U. funds to payments made to terrorists? The German federal intelligence service (BND) investigated and found “no direct proof” that Arafat used E.U. funds to finance terrorism. But the same report allowed rather damningly that “Arafat evidently doesn’t distinguish between the structure of the Palestinian Authority and his Fatah Movement.” And the Germans should know. The BND, it turns out, “has been training and equipping Arafat’s intelligence service since the 1993 Oslo Accords.” The article continues: “Now the German government is vexed by the question of whether the BND protege has converted . . . from an anti-terror force to a terror organization.” At least Germans are troubled by the possibility that they have funded and trained a Palestinian terrorist bureaucracy. Meanwhile the rest of Europe can hardly raise its voice to object to the PA’s new textbooks showing a Palestinian state stretching from Jordan to the Mediterranean. DEMOCRATIC RIFT There’s big trouble–racial and ethnic trouble–between the Congressional Black Caucus and House Democratic leaders. In early June, caucus members (all are Democrats) summoned Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, Whip Nancy Pelosi, and two others to a special meeting. The subject: helping Rep. Earl Hilliard of Alabama defeat a primary challenger in the June 25 runoff. The challenger, Artur Davis, was getting campaign contributions from donors angry with Hilliard’s anti-Israel views. Hilliard had refused to support a resolution criticizing Palestinian suicide bombings. At the CBC session, Davis was cited for making an appeal to Jewish Democrats, even traveling to New York for two fund-raisers. If Democratic leaders don’t rescue Hilliard, CBC members said they would block aid to Israel. Democratic leaders quickly urged House members to donate $1,000 each to Hilliard’s campaign. But the letter wasn’t signed by two prominent Democratic honchos from New York–Charles Rangel, a CBC member and ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Nita Lowey, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The letter caused the anger to ease a bit, and a CBC member, Alcee Hastings of Florida, met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to avert a major black-Jewish rift in the Democratic party. But the issue may rise again in the case of the August runoff between Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and her challenger, Denise Majette, who has also received donations from Jewish Democrats. McKinney is famous not only for suggesting President Bush knew the September 11 terrorist attacks were coming and did nothing to stop them, but also for her criticism of then Mayor Rudy Giuliani for refusing to accept $10 million from an anti-Israel Saudi sheikh. There’s more. Ethan Wallison and Rachel Van Dongen of Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, wrote a detailed account of the flap. It was a great piece of reporting, but major newspapers and TV news outlets didn’t pick up the story. Now imagine if it had been a story about threats by right-wing Christians to Republican leaders. That would have been front-page news for sure. PREFERENCE FOR PATAKI When New York comptroller Carl McCall won the support of that state’s Democratic convention last month, The Scrapbook saw it as a positive development. Anything that diminishes the likelihood that Andrew Cuomo will be New York’s next governor is a positive development. What’s more, the McCall victory provoked this knee-slapper from Cuomo. Formally rejected by his party, Andrew Cuomo–son and top staffer of former Gov. Mario Cuomo, former HUD secretary, husband of a Kennedy–is now trying to win the September primary by running as an “outsider.” Next thing you know, they’ll call him a “good government” Democrat. Actually, his campaign already does. McCall is known simply as a public servant with integrity. His latest proposal, though, is curious to say the least. Speaking to troubled juveniles at Covenant House in New York City last week, McCall made this pitch concerning college financial aid. “Just because you are an ex-offender, you should not be denied education aid,” he told them. “In fact, if you’re an ex-offender, I think you ought to get preference.” But while youths across the state unsheathed their weapons and snatched up video cameras to record the crimes that would earn them a preference, McCall made this clarification. “I don’t mean ‘preferential treatment’ in terms of putting them ahead of other people.” For some reason, fuzzy-headed reporters still didn’t get it. So McCall gave it another try. “In terms of our attitude, we ought to understand that these are people who need special help and, therefore, we have to go out of our way to be sensitive to their concerns,” he said. “We’re talking about preference in terms of our attitude, in terms of how we deal with them. Period.” Right. The Scrapbook suspects George Pataki will get preference from New York voters this fall. Period. ARMING THE CRITICS The Scrapbook notes with pride an attack on The Weekly Standard’s own David Skinner by one Ralph Luker on the History News Network website. Luker’s article actually reinforces Skinner’s point that a surprising number of scholars and scholarly institutions have shrunk from passing judgment on Michael Bellesiles, the historian at Emory University whose grossly dishonest but prize-winning book “Arming America” has been shielded from criticism by Columbia University, its Bancroft Committee, the Organization of American Historians, and others. Almost two years after “Arming America” was published and easily a year and a half after major portions of its evidence have been debunked, Luker says it is still not time to reach a conclusion. “Academic learning” proceeds at a “leisurely pace,” Luker writes. “Journalism demands instant judgment; scholarship insists that a process of discussion and debate be allowed to proceed.” Maybe it’s “the leisurely pace of academic learning” that kept Luker from
disputing even one criticism of Bellesiles’s work. Then again he rather quickly answered the scores of critics brought out by his article. The Scrapbook has really enjoyed this feud, especially the part examining Luker’s own credentials, most prominently his role as a co-editor of the first two volumes of the Martin Luther King Jr. papers. In that controversy, the editors discovered King’s wide-ranging plagiarism only to keep it secret for two years before making the story public. Leisurely, indeed.
