by Steven Shamrak

At the opening of the Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy emphasized the urgency of creating a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. International donors eagerly pledged $7.4 billion, pretending that it will boost the Palestinian economy.

The list of fake friends of the fictitious Palestinian nation is long: the United States pledged $555 million for 2008, though about $400 million has not been approved by Congress; Britain, $500 million; Norway, $420 million; Spain, $360 million; France and Sweden, $300 million each; Germany, $290; Belgium, €86 million; the new Australian government pledged $39 million, almost doubling the intended pledge; and the European Union, €440 million ($650 million) in grants to the Palestinians in 2008.

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By Barry Rubin

Ring, ring, goes the telephone. And of course I answer it.

The voice on the other end says that he is “Joseph” of Reuters. I get many calls from journalists and wire services but never has someone I don’t know introduced himself by first name only. Since he has an obvious Arabic accent it is quite clear that he thinks I am either so biased as to care what his family name is or so stupid not to guess why he isn’t giving it.

So the effect is to achieve the exact opposite of what he wants. It puts me on my guard.

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by P. R. Kumaraswamy*

As the U.S.-Iranian dispute escalates, both Washington and Tehran seek friends and allies. New Delhi is caught in the middle. While the U.S.-Indian partnership has grown closer in recent years, New Delhi’s approach toward Iran’s suspected nuclear program causes concern in Washington. Overshadowing the debate is India’s own nuclear program. With the July 2005 U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear deal yet to win U.S. Senate ratification, is India seeking to strengthen its energy security through Iran? Or is New Delhi pursuing the civilian nuclear deal without being sensitive to Washington’s concerns vis-à-vis Iran?

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By Steven A. Camarota

The debate over immigration has become one of America’s most heated. In a new report published by the Center for Immigration Studies, we provide a detailed picture of the nation’s immigrant population. Our conclusions will probably not surprise most Californians: First, legal and illegal immigration is at record levels. Second, immigrants are generally hardworking, yet they create enormous strains on social services. Why? Put simply, many are uneducated.

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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 Andrew L. Jaffee

Fareed Zakaria this week claimed that foreign tourists “are filled with horror stories about the inconvenience and indignity of traveling to America.” Really? Maybe Zakaria should’ve waited to see Black Friday in New York today before making such sweeping pronouncements. From CNNMoney.com:

… Walking around midtown Manhattan on Black Friday, you heard shoppers speaking in a smorgasbord of languages.

With the U.S. dollar as weak as it is - the greenback hit a new low against the euro on Friday - it appears that many Europeans flocked to the Big Apple to go bargain hunting, to the delight of retailers.

Sarah T., who works at the information booth in the Manhattan Mall, which includes stores such as Aeropostale (Charts), Radio Shack (Charts, Fortune 500) and Charlotte Russe (Charts), said that overall traffic during the morning of Black Friday was about the same as last year but that there were far more many tourists at the mall than a year ago. And she said many of them were leaving with armfuls of bags. …

“We are definitely seeing an influx of European, Canadian and South American consumers,” said Terry Lundgren, the chairman and CEO of Macy’s Inc (Charts, Fortune 500). “These economies view the dollar as being on sale.”

Lundgren said that, in addition to the company’s flagship Macy’s, the Bloomingdale’s stores on 59th Street and in SoHo in Manhattan were both experiencing a boost from tourists, as were Macy’s locations in Chicago and San Francisco. …

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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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New Study Looks at Agricultural Labor Force

By CIS

WASHINGTON (November 2007) — A new Backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies challenges assertions by farmers and the media that crops are rotting in the fields for lack of workers. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, examines workers’ wages, farmers’ earnings, and the prospects of mechanization.

The full report, entitled Farm Labor Shortages: How Real? What Response?, is available at:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back907.html

Among the findings:

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

“The making of profits is impossible,” wrote Eleanor Marx, summarizing one of her father’s key economic concepts as set forth in his rather long-winded Das Kapital. I then wonder how my left-wing friends would explain the fact that, “China will soon overtake Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy behind the US and Japan.” We’re talking 100’s of billions in “communist” profits; so much so that the politburo has had to “curb the pace of growth” with “five interest rate increases in 2007 and limits on spending on factories and property:”

China’s economy grew at an annual pace of 11.5% in the three months to the end of September, official figures show.

The figure was ahead of economists’ predictions but slightly slower than the 11.9% seen in the previous quarter. …

Growth slowed to 11.5%! Still no contradictions? China is the “world’s second largest emitter” of carbon and, “Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.” And these left-wingers still think of China as some kind of nirvana…

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By The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)*

DALLAS - The nation’s largest terror-support trial ended in a mistrial Monday after jurors were unable to reach unanimous decisions on most counts. In a bizarre twist, three jurors told U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish that they disagreed with acquittals announced against at least two defendants, prompting the judge not to accept those outcomes.

A second trial appears likely for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). It and five former officials were accused of illegally funneling more than $12 million to Palestinian charity committees controlled by Hamas. Prosecutors relied on secretly recorded conversations and a mountain of bank and other financial records to show that flow of money.

It wasn’t enough.

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By Douglas Farah*

In an ending worthy of a thriller, a Dallas judge today declared a mistrial in the case of the Holy Land Foundation. The government said it would retry the case. One person, Mohammed El-Mezain, was found not guilty of most of the charges against him.

The outcome in the complicated and high-stakes trial, which for the first time publicly laid bare the clandestine inner workings of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, was not unexpected. The NEFA Foundation has a complete, annotated list of the exhibits for viewing.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Here’s the latest from the IPT on the terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). Even though the jury is still deliberating, evidence was introduced clearly demonstrating the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) involvement with the HLF in financing the terrorist group Hamas:

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by Daniel Pipes*

While the outside world hardly noticed, a significant and rapidly growing amount of money is now being managed in accord with Islamic law, the Shari’a. According to one study, “by the end of 2005, more than 300 institutions in over 65 jurisdictions were managing assets worth around US$700 billion to US$1 trillion in a Shari’ah-compatible manner.”

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By The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)*

DALLAS – The fate of five men accused of running the nation’s largest terrorist-financing front is in the hands of a jury.

The men, officers and employees at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) are charged with conspiracy and with providing material support to Hamas through their charitable donations. Prosecutors say HLF funneled more than $12 million to Hamas, mostly through a network of social welfare charities in the West Bank and Gaza.

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By Barry Rubin

The big picture can be found in the little details. Here’s a great example. Iran recently held a summit meeting bringing together Palestinian leaders. Hamas was there, of course, and Islamic Jihad, too. No surprise that. But there was someone else participating in the gathering: Farouq Qaddumi.

Qaddumi is a veteran Fatah and PLO bureaucrat who now heads the former group. He is one of three men–the other two were Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas–who represented Fatah on the PLO Executive Committee. He has never accepted even the 1993 Oslo agreement. In most ways, he is more representative of Fatah leadership than the Palestinian Authority’s relatively moderate two heads, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad.

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