RUTHFULLY YOURS

Roger Franklin :Holding the Man in Dubai

Given the discriminatory intent of the AFL’s programme to favour Muslim back-office recruits, it is difficult to imagine a more blatant hypocrisy. Not after this weekend’s Rainbow Round, which will see the League promote homosexuality while taking money from desert kingdoms that persecute gays.
The world’s greatest sport, Australian Rules football, has some problems at the moment. The recently re-vamped rules regulating when the ball has been forced out of bounds on purpose prompt much booing and bafflement in the stands. Likewise the high-tackle. Did the nippy rover duck into the knee that knocked him silly, or was flattened by an adversary’s contemptuous disregard for his safety? While these matters are moot, another aspect of the homegrown game is beyond dispute: its executives’ galloping hypocrisy.

Tonight (Friday, August 12) will see the first game of this weekend’s so-called Pride Game, which Chief Executive Gillon McLachlan is presenting as something akin to a manifestation of the AFL’s moral obligation to promote acceptance of the gay lifestyle. Just why a sporting code feels obliged to push alternate forms of human affection remains a mystery, one explained not at all by McLachlan’s conceit that the popularity of his code imposes an obligation “to lead” on this and other social issues. As Tim Blair points out, this agenda also includes preferential scholarships for Muslims, but adherents of no other creed. If you’re a devout Calathumpian who can slot six-pointers from the intersection of the boundary line and fifty, bad luck.

Given the bare-faced and discriminatory intent of that programme, it might be difficult to imagine a more blatant example of hypocrisy. Yet, as is so often the case with the AFL, it strives to exceed even its own worst standards.

Of around 850 Britons believed by authorities to have made their way to Syria and Iraq, more than 50 are women, say police.

LONDON—A British schoolgirl who ran away to Syria to join Islamic State is believed to have died in an airstrike, her family’s lawyer said Thursday.

Seventeen-year-old Kadiza Sultana made headlines last spring when she and two of her friends from an east London high school left their homes to marry fighters for the extremist group in Raqqa, the Syrian city that it controls.

Ms. Sultana’s family were told of her death “weeks ago,” by their own sources, said Tasnime Akunjee, the family’s lawyer.

“Her body was pulled from the rubble of a building hit by a bomb dropped from a Russian plane,” said Mr. Akunjee in a telephone interview.

It hadn’t been possible to verify whether she had died, he added. The family had informed authorities, he said, but they haven’t received any information on Ms. Sultana’s status in response, said Mr. Akunjee.

The U.K. Foreign Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

World Vision officials have professed to be “shocked” by the arrest in Israel last week of Mohammed El-Halabi, the head of the megacharity’s Gaza operations. Mr. Halabi is accused of repurposing over the course of 10 years up to $7.2 million a year, in cash and materials, to Hamas. That’s approximately 60% of World Vision’s total aid to Gaza. In addition to money allegedly used for deadly weapons and the construction of terror tunnels, the charge sheet includes diverting unemployment payments, “2,500 food packages worth $100 each” and “3,300 packages of cleaning supplies and personal hygiene products worth $80 each . . . to Hamas units.”

According to the Israeli security agency that conducted the investigation into World Vision, Mr. Halabi admitted his role as a Hamas agent during interrogation, though his lawyer has since rejected this account and denied the allegations. World Vision has also denied the charges, claiming that the budget for its Gaza operations was smaller than the amount of the funds allegedly diverted. However, the annual reports of the Jerusalem-West Bank-Gaza (JWG) branch of World Vision fail to specify a separate budget for operations in Gaza alone, making it impossible to independently verify these assertions.

But it is impossible not to see in Gaza the massive construction of terrorist infrastructure everywhere, with humanitarian aid as the primary source of funds and materials. Terror is the territory’s only major industry, and if Hamas wasn’t stealing the aid, where were the sacks of cement, beams, pipes and other materials, as well as the cash to pay for the work, coming from?

Instead, World Vision leaders such as Tim Costello of the charity’s Australian branch, which provided a significant portion of World Vision JWG’s 2014 budget of more than $20 million, took refuge in distant accounting firms. “We have PricewaterhouseCoopers that audit us each year,” Mr. Costello said. CONTINUE AT SITE

With an indictment unsealed last week, Israeli investigators have sounded an alarm over the illicit use of global aid money to fund Palestinian terrorism. Prosecutors in the city of Beersheba allege that Mohammed El-Halabi, Gaza Strip director of the California-based charity World Vision, transferred tens of millions of dollars to Hamas to buy weapons and build underground attack tunnels. Although World Vision denies fault, the governments of Australia and Germany have halted donations pending investigations.

This revelation should spur a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government. For two decades the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy.

Recall that 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel was murdered in her bed by a knife-wielding Palestinian in June. She was a dual Israeli-American citizen, making her the 11th American killed by Palestinians since 2014. Other victims include 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, a student from Sharon, Mass., and 28-year-old Taylor Force, a West Point graduate and two-tour U.S. Army veteran from Lubbock, Texas. The families of the killers now receive regular payments from Palestinian leaders—funded partly by U.S. taxpayers.

No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. A Palestinian from Israel with a wife and children who kills many people and dies in the act, or is captured and sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, earns the most. Single, childless attackers from the West Bank or Gaza earn less. The incentives are clear.

Palestinian leaders once tried to obscure their payments by characterizing them as “assistance” rather than “salaries.” They also shifted nominal responsibility from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which takes donations from foreign governments, to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which doesn’t. But this was a sham, as both bodies are run by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party.

In 2014 Israel estimated the terror payments at $75 million, or a sum equal to 16% of all aid sent to Palestine from overseas. This year the figure is nearly $140 million, says Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

How do U.S. aid transfers square with laws against funding terrorism? Willful blindness helps. “I think that they plan to phase it out,” State Department official Anne Patterson said in 2014 after the meaningless PA-to-PLO two-step. This year’s State Department report on terrorism praised Palestinian leaders for “many improvements,” including making “terrorism financing a criminal offense.” It said nothing about official payments to terrorists. CONTINUE AT SITE

Vladimir Putin is a master at pressing his geopolitical advantage when he senses complacency in the West. That’s the meaning of his latest tantrum over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow invaded and illegally annexed in 2014.

The Russian strongman on Wednesday accused Kiev of sending special forces to Crimea to destabilize the occupied Ukrainian territory ahead of Russian parliamentary elections next month. His spy agency, the FSB, said one of its men and a Russian regular had been killed in clashes with the Ukrainians over the weekend. The Kremlin also claims to have arrested several Ukrainian would-be infiltrators, including an intelligence officer.

The Russian leader then used the episode as an excuse to pull out of peace talks aimed at de-escalating the Russia-instigated conflict in eastern Ukraine. A fresh round had been proposed for the sidelines of next month’s G-20 meeting in China, but on Wednesday Mr. Putin declared such diplomacy “meaningless.”

Kiev denies the allegations, which bear the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, not least because there is no plausible evidence. A senior Western diplomat says Mr. Putin’s accusations represent an attempt at “sabotaging the diplomacy around Minsk,” the 2015 cease-fire accord that ended the worst of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.