On This Day — June 7, 2002
As billions in international aid — including your taxpayer dollars — continued pouring into the Palestinian Authority, a Kuwaiti newspaper dropped a bombshell.
On this day in 2002, Al-Watan reported that Yasser Arafat had siphoned $5.1 million in Arab donor money, explicitly earmarked for the Palestinian people, and deposited it directly into his personal bank account.
This was Arafat’s standard operating procedure:
- Arafat’s personal fortune was estimated between $1 billion and $3 billion (some intelligence assessments reached $6.5 billion), stashed in secret accounts in Switzerland, France, and offshore havens.
- A leaked 1997 Palestinian Legislative Council investigation found that 40% of the entire annual budget — $326 million that year alone — had disappeared into corruption and mismanagement. Arafat suppressed the report.
- His economic advisor Mohammed Rashid took stolen funds and invested them in the Jordan Cement Company to personally profit from the reconstruction boom caused by the Intifada.
- Arafat and his inner circle ran monopolies on cement, fuel, cigarettes, flour, gravel, and cars — squeezing huge profits from ordinary goods.
While his wife Suha Arafat (pictured below) lived lavishly in Paris (spending over $100,000 per month on designer clothes, shoes, and luxury living), Arafat treated EU, US, Arab, and UNRWA aid as his personal ATM.
Billions flowed in after Oslo. Very little went to building real institutions or prosperity.
Arafat died one of the richest men in the world — having turned a "national liberation movement" into a criminal empire.
The man who posed as the humble revolutionary in a keffiyeh was, in reality, one of the most successful kleptocrats of the modern era.
This was betrayal on an industrial scale; theft to a degree that would make Daniel Ocean blush.
Simple questions:
Why do 5 million Palestinians have the "right" to a state, but not 40-60 million freedom-seeking #Kurds?
Why are there endless marches & protests for Palestinians, but not Kurds?
Why is the UN obsessed with Palestinians, but doesn't give a damn about Kurds?