By Barry Rubin, Asaf Romirowsky, and Jonathan Spyer

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On the surface, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) seems a humanitarian group helping Palestinian refugees. In reality, it actually helps destroy the chance of Arab-Israeli peace, promotes terrorism, and holds Palestainians back from rebuilding their lives.

Unique in history, UNRWA’s job is to keep Palestinian refugees in suspended animation–and at low living standards–until they achieve the goal set for them by the PLO and Hamas: Israel’s extinction. In the meantime, their suffering and anger is maintained as a weapon to encourage them toward violence and intransigence.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

So now, “THE Absolut vodka company has apologised for an advertising campaign depicting the south-western United States as part of Mexico…” This “depiction” is the same sentiment advocated by the Nation of Aztlan, which “calls for the United States to return ‘Aztlan’ territory - Aztlan being the mythic homeland of the Mexican people, or Aztecs, which according to legend is found in the American Southwest or Northern Mexico. The group’s nationalist message is blurred by frequent appeals anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, homophobia and other expressions of hatred.” Isn’t that special? Absolut sure has a strange (offensive? hateful?) — idea of its target audience. Here’s an example of the Absolut campaign imagery:

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Mexican local and national government seems unwilling to crack down on continual gang-related drug violence. Certainly, many illegals are just seeking jobs in the U.S., but when did America become responsible for solving Mexico’s rampant corruption and unemployment problems? Certainly, a good number of illegals are drug gang members seeking to acquire turf and revenue in the U.S. Read the following, then think about whether the U.S. should have an open-door immigration policy:

Mexican medical investigators are working to identify four burned bodies discovered on a ranch near the Mexican border town of Palomas, which is across the border from Columbus, New Mexico. …

The latest violence in the border town of 8,000 came the day after the town’s chief of police requested U.S. asylum saying that he feared for his safety.

Luna County deputies and border patrol officials said that Chief Emilio Perez was under the protections of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Also last week, Colmbus Mayor Eddie Espinoza reported he had been getting a root canal in a Palomas dental office when two armed man burst in and robbed the dentist.

Officials believe the surge in violence in and around Palomas signals an escalation of a turf battle by rival drug gangs along the U.S-Mexico border.

DOH! Notice that the Palomas police chief didn’t ask the Mexican government for asylum.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

I always suspected those communist murderers of being touchy-feeling feminists — you know, in a misogynistic, paternalistic kind of way (I’m being sarcastic). Seriously, these recent revelations about Mao Zedong only add further proof of what an evil megalomaniac he was:

Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department’s historian office. “We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them, we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”

After Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” the chairman said, “We have too many women. . . . They give birth to children, and our children are too many.” …

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By Phyllis Chesler

According to Las Vegas ex-prostitute Jody Williams, founder of Sex Workers Anonymous, we should compare the “promotion of prostitution with the way the tobacco companies market cigarettes. “They’re taking advantage of your ignorance of the industry,” she told the Pahrump Valley Times on September 7, 2007 at a press conference.

Williams said ex-prostitutes came to her organization suffering from a variety of physical and emotional disorders. “Women in prostitution suffer from the same combat stress that Vietnam and combat vets do, but they have fewer services than vets do,” she said.

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by Asaf Romirowsky*

An Islamic group came to Temple University last spring with an offer to provide $1.5 million for an endowed chair in Islamic studies to honor religion professor Mahmoud Ayoub. After months of talks, the deal never got off the ground, once trustees and others raised concerns about the contributor, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a nonprofit research group that had been under scrutiny as part of a government probe into the funding of suspected terrorists.

Some would like to consider money given by Saudis and other Arab nations to American universities as generous gifts to those U.S. universities who have educated their elites. A closer look reveals a different picture that includes incitement, anti-Semitism and a skewed view of Islam.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Just where was the security for Benazir Bhutto? In Rawalpindi, the military headquarters of the Pakistan Armed Forces, two men walked right up to Bhutto unchallenged and murdered her in cold blood. It is all on film, and completely contradicts the pathetic story being peddled by President Musharraf and his “government.” Musharraf was supposedly in charge of providing security for Benazir, under “martial law” no less. Bhutto’s blood is on Musharraf’s hands — he was head of Pakistan’s Armed Forces until a few days ago. After watching the video, it is indisputable that the assassination could have been easily prevented. Bhutto was Musharraf’s only viable election opponent. In light of the Channel 4 video, I now believe Pakistan’s “President” either explicitly ordered Bhutto’s execution, or passively allowed it to happen — same difference.

There are myriad reasons to suspect Musharraf’s involvement:

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by Daniel Pipes*

Western financial aid to the Palestinians has, I showed last week, the perverse and counterintuitive effect of increasing their rate of homicides, including terrorist ones. This week, I offer two pieces of perhaps even stranger news about the many billions of dollars and record-shattering per-capita donations from the West: First, these have rendered the Palestinians poorer. Second, Palestinian impoverishment is a long-term positive development.

To begin, some basic facts about the Palestinian economy, drawing on a fine survey by Ziv Hellman, “Terminal Situation,” in the Dec. 24 issue of Jerusalem Report:

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by Daniel Pipes*

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.

Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.

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By Barry Rubin

My favorite sentence of the week is this one: “Asking for record $5.8 billion in aid through 2010, Palestinians promise fiscal reform.” Karen Laub wrote on this subject for the AP, December 5, 2007. The request came from “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas” to double projected aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA).

What is funny about that opening sentence is that the PA has received so much money before and squandered it. Reform promises have been made and broken for more than 13 years. It is hard to remember the PA has existed that long with so little positive achievement. If Palestinians have such a bad economy it is not due to the “occupation” or to Israel but to their own leaders’ greed, incompetence, failure to end violence, inability to present an attractive investment climate, and unwillingness to impose stability on their own lands.

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by Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Spyer*

For Israelis the United Nations is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are fully aware of the anti-Israel sentiment that the United Nations perpetuates, but on the other hand they want to be part of it and to have their voices heard. This stance is understandable. But it produces positions which sometimes directly contradict Israel’s clear interest.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Sell crap disguised as gold, then obfuscate when caught? The current sub-prime mortgage meltdown on Wall Street is sounding a lot like the dot-com bubble — as do all financial bubbles when they finally pop. What happened in the 2007 version of the Party-Like-Its-1999 fiasco? People with bad or marginal credit took out loans to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Banks/lenders relaxed their standards to facilitate these “subprime” loans. Then Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch and Citigroup bundled up these loans as mortgage-backed securities and sold them as “investments.” The result? “$900 billion in now-suspect securitized debt.” That’s nine hundred billion dollars, a real threat to our whole economy. Just as Wall Street put lipstick on worthless dot-com company pigs, they hocked subprime mortgages as (very risky) high-yield investment vehicles — and were not honest about what they were doing. From Fortune:

… Citigroup delayed for more than a week - from Saturday, October 27th until Sunday, November 4th - in announcing material information about the multi-billion-dollar write-downs it expects to record in this quarter. In the more than a week that passed, there were five trading days - October 29th through November 2nd - in which investors buying and selling Citigroup stock did not know that the write-downs were coming. …

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Benazir Bhutto almost gets incinerated, 136 of her supporters killed, scores wounded, and who does Pakistan’s government put on the case? The fox tending the chicken coop:

The detective leading the inquiry into Thursday’s suicide attack on Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been taken off the case, officials say.

Ms Bhutto’s supporters had complained that Manzur Mughal was present when her husband, Asif Zardari, was allegedly tortured by police eight years ago.

Sindh government officials say that Mr Mughal has now “disassociated himself” from the investigation. …

Uh, huh… Just like the BBC blamed Bhutto for antagonizing the poor terrorists…

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The Economist on how Putin and his goons are destroying Russia’s future:

…[They] have shown they can squash opposition, suborn the courts and stay in charge. But, as in all autocracies, they are acutely nervous about the future. Mr Putin’s popularity will not easily transfer even to a hand-picked successor. More generally, as ordinary Russians get richer, they may grow dissatisfied with their present masters, especially when they see them stealing and mismanaging the economy. Russia has huge problems: crime, poor infrastructure, secessionism and chaos in the north Caucasus, appalling human-rights abuses and a looming demographic catastrophe. To counterbalance these woes, the new elite may resort to even wilder forms of nationalism; and that nationalism could turn into a monster that even its creators cannot control.

In truth, the biggest threats to Russia’s future stem not from its “enemies” but from internal weaknesses, some of them self-inflicted. For a Russian ruler, or ruling class, to accept that truth would take real courage–and real patriotism.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

How many times are we going to go through this? This time: a real estate bubble; last time: a stock bubble. Our financial markets are supposed to be transparent. And they are… generally. Most of the time, all the information is out there, but some information is more easily accessed than other information, and investors make certain assumptions about the quality of the information. Many investors depend on financial ratings services. Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings are supposed to investigate and assess the risk/reward of investing in companies’ stocks, bonds, and other types of securities.

But it turns out that the ratings firms had the same type of incestuous relationships with lenders as did the investment banks with the crappy dot-com companies of the 1990s. This time around, it is banks, investors, and would-be, sub-prime homeowners that will end up losing up to $150 billion — and that number may grow. Note that there is no excuse, as home buyers with bad credit shouldn’t have been borrowing, lenders shouldn’t have been lending to people with bad credit, and the ratings services shouldn’t have been putting lipstick on risky mortgage-backed securities so brokers could hock them to unwary investors. But the concept of systemic transparency (openness, truthfulness) has again taken a back seat to greed. Here’s how the real estate shell-game worked:

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