Israel's Education Minister, Limor Livnat, disclosed at a press conference yesterday in Washington that Saudia Arabia has funneled $135 million over the last 16 months to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and the families of suicide bombers and other dead terrorists.

Hey, it pays to be a Palestinian murderer: the Palestinian terrorists believe they will find 72 virgins when they get to heaven. This can only be acomplished if they kill as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible, and now they have the extra bonus of knowing their families will be taken care of. Kind of like a "life insurance" for homicide / suicide bombers and other Palestinian terrorists, directly funded by Saudi Arabia.

I copy the full article below:

Livnat puts Saudis on defensive
By HERB KEINON
http://www.jpost.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/Full&cid=1020670669761

The US press corps pummeled Education Minister Limor Livnat at a press conference at the Israeli Embassy in Washington on Monday over the disclosure of documents showing Saudi Arabia funneled $135 million over the last 16 months to Hamas and the families of dead terrorists.

Are you saying, one reporter continuously asked Livnat, that Saudi Arabia is funding terror against Israel?

Livnat would not answer directly, saying only that the "facts speak for themselves."

So the reporter asked again. When Livnat balked again, he asked a third time. Then another reporter rephrased the question, then another, and another.

Livnat stuck to her guns. "The documents speak for themselves," she said.

On the face of it, it looked like another PR disaster, putting information out there, but not drawing the necessary political conclusions. If you present documents showing Saudi Arabia funnels money to Hamas and suicide bombers' families, why not say directly Riyadh is funding terror against Israel?

The awkward balancing act was the result of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desire to get the information into the public domain, but not ram it down anyone's throat – particularly President George W. Bush's.

Israel was careful that its no-holds barred offensive be directed against the Saudis, not against the administration. Livnat and other government spokesmen took pains to refrain from saying the US should take this information into account when coordinating Mideast policies with the Saudis.

Sharon, at a meeting with Livnat, Interior Minister Eli Yishai, and their staffers on Sunday evening in Washington, stressed half a dozen times that nothing should be done to embarrass the Bush administration, and that no one should say that the administration needs to draw the conclusions and press the Saudis. Yet he wanted the information out there.

In this he succeeded. Information is not only having an articulate spokesman with good English out-debate Hanan Ashrawi on Fox News, it is also setting the agenda. And both the release of the Saudi dossier and Minister-without-Portfolio Dan Naveh's report on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's direct link to terror released a day earlier have succeed to a certain degree in setting the agenda.

For example, the Naveh document figured prominently on The Washington Post's front page on Monday. News anchors now regularly ask Palestinians they interview about the disclosures of Arafat's direct link to the violence.

And the same is now true of the Saudi story. Although the Post buried the information at the bottom of its front page curtain-raiser on Sharon's meeting with Bush yesterday, it was the lead article in The Washington Times.

Moreover, on NBC's morning news show, Abud al-Jubeir, a Saudi Arabian foreign policy adviser, was trotted out to refute the charges.

Asked how he responds to the Israeli claims, Jubeir replied, "Absolute nonsense, not credible at all, totally baseless, fabrications, not true. It is an attempt to try to shift the attention away from moving toward the peace process, and trying to deflect and not come up with a serious offer for peace."

In other words, he denied it. But the anchor was not put off and asked a follow-up question, and then another question in which he said Israelis "also say they have evidence connecting Arafat to the violence against the Israeli people."

All of this does not add up to a knockout punch. But it does plant seeds to disabuse anyone of the notion the Saudis, with their diplomatic plan and increased coziness with the administration, are riding into a central role in the Mideast diplomatic process on a pure white steed.

The information Livnat and Military Intelligence Col. Miriam Eisin produced Monday was undoubtedly shared with the Bush administration beforehand. But now it is in the public domain. The hope is that it will resonate, that the public, the media, and members of Congress will now begin to ask how the US, in its war on terror, can cozy up to a regime that, in the words of the Military Intelligence report, "transferred large sums of money in a systematic and ongoing manner to families of suicide terrorists, to the Hamas organization (on the US list of terror organizations), and to persons and entities identified with the Hamas."

http://www.jpost.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/Full&cid=1020670669761

Posted by David Melle
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