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Newsletter : 9fax1208.txt
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>JN Dec. 8, 1999, Vol. 7, No. 227
Bodies of Israeli Soldiers Discovered in Egypt
By IsraelWire
The bodies of two Israel Defense Force soldiers missing since the October 1973 Yom Kippur War were found in the Sinai Desert in Egypt. According to an IDF statement, the bodies of corporals Leon Cohen and Mordehai Nadiv were uncovered 10 feet beneath sand dunes near the Suez Canal. "Twenty-six years after the battles we are bringing the dead to a grave in Israel," Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement.
The two disappeared after their tank was hit by Egyptian fire on day two of the war. According to Israeli reports, the two were immediately killed as a result. Using advanced techniques and aerial photos, the IDF's unit responsible for searching for MIAs managed to locate the two bodies. To date, 16 Israeli soldiers remain missing from the war and about 300 missing since the 1948 War of Independence.
Cohen will be interred this afternoon in the Ramle Military Cemetery and Nadiv will be laid to rest in the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem Thursday afternoon.
Arafat Challenges Poet to "Shoot Him"
By IsraelWire
PLO Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat, in a dramatic attempt Sunday to deflect stinging criticism of corruption in the PA, challenged a poet in the PA autonomous city of Bethlehem to shoot him if he betrays his people.
During the pledge, which reportedly stunned onlookers, Arafat gave the poet his guard's pistol. The incident was taped by PA television cameras and then confiscated by Arafat's security personnel.
The bizarre incident comes just days after Arafat arrested 11 lawmakers, academic and professionals who signed a leaflet last week charging Arafat and the PA with graft and pervasive corruption.
The poet, Samih Qassem, had received a literature award from Arafat. He reportedly warned the PA leader, according to eyewitnesses, that he would continue to use his pen to correct any of Arafat's "mistakes."
"Not only with your pen," Arafat is said to have responded, reaching for a pistol from his hip. Remembering that he no longer carried a gun, Arafat then took a pistol from his bodyguard and handed it to Qassem. "You can also correct me with this," the PA leader said.
Ironically, the incident coincided with the start of International Human Rights Week. December 10 marks the anniversary of the 1948 UN General Assembly's universal declaration of human rights.
Special Report: Corruption in the PLO's Financial Empire
By ICEJ's MIDDLE EAST DIGEST
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat, combining a ruthless leadership style with business sense gained from operating a successful construction company in the Gulf states, took over as chairman of the PLO in 1969 and built it into the world's largest, richest international terrorist group. Some analysts attribute the key to his longevity as head of such a violent, fractious organization to his strict control over the PLO's purse-strings.
In 1970, the PLO set up a front company named SAMED as a commercial and manufacturing entity serving as the economic arm of the PLO's fighting forces. By 1989 it was a global operation with revenues of $70 million per year. SAMED first used cheap labor from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and expanded into Arab and African states and communist Eastern Europe with a diverse portfolio of factories, oil refineries and other businesses.
Once the PLO was entrenched in Lebanon in the 1970s, Arafat eyed the tremendous profits available from illicit drugs produced in the Beka'a valley, and began exploiting the narcotics trade. Although it is difficult to assess the amounts earned through the PLO's narco-terrorism activities, it is safely estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
During years of PLO-bred anarchy in what was once the banking hub of the Arab world, Lebanon was looted. In one bank heist alone, the PLO stole more than $600 million in gold from a Lebanese bank by blasting a hole through the back of a church and hiring Sicilian safe-crackers to open the bank's vault.
Much of this ill-gotten gain was funneled to secret Swiss bank accounts kept under Arafat's control. When Arafat was missing and presumed dead following an airplane crash in Libya in April 1992, many in the PLO's hierarchy publicly voiced fears over how his death could affect the whole organization. According to knowledgeable sources in Congress, the real concern within the PLO at that time was whether anyone besides Arafat had been entrusted with the access codes to these private Swiss accounts. Apparently, Arafat kept the codes in a notebook which he carried in the top-left pocket of his trademark military uniform, and the only set of codes was feared to have been irrecoverably lost in the rumored inferno somewhere in the vast Libyan desert.
With the Oslo breakthrough in September 1993, the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority began receiving billions of dollars in funds from a number of previously reluctant Western donor countries, including a pledge of $500 million per year from the United States. Since any recipient of US foreign aid must open their books to the US Congress, Ben Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, asked the General Accounting Office to provide a report on PLO assets and sources of income.
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