Blog by Shimon Samuels posted on The Times of Israel
4 September 2017
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/all-links-along-the-terror-chain-must-pay-the-penalty-not-granted-awards/
In 1998, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was called to the German Labour Ministry in Bonn. Since reunification in 1990, followed by the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the number of war pensions had mushroomed among Wehrmacht veterans and widows, frozen for some 45 years in Communist East Germany, the Baltics, the Balkans and Ukraine.
While the Justice Ministry had cooperated with Simon Wiesenthal regarding the ID’s of war criminals, just down the road the Labour Ministry was sending cheques to their families in the Federal Republic. The Government, now eager to save revenue, asked the Centre’s help. Our expert, Efraim Zuroff was able to identify those military units responsible for war crimes to automatically strip their members of pension rights.
In 2007, the Centre promoted a draft convention, in the same spirit, to prosecute the instigators and accomplices of suicide terrorism. The intent was to criminalize all along the chain of terror from recruitment (especially online and now social media) to ideological radicalization, financing, arming, hosting and glorifying. The convention might have legally prevented the families of Jihadist “martyrs” from receiving “life insurance” benefits and blocked spurious “pension” grants to surviving perpetrators in jail.
The convention received the blessing of the late Pope John Paul II and passed as motions in the Australian Parliament and the PARLATINO (Latin American Parliament).
Last week, Swiss Rundschau television and the Tages Anzeiger daily of Zurich reported on Abu Ramadan, a Libyan Imam who preaches hate from his mosque in Biel: “Oh Allah, I beg you to destroy the enemies of our religion. Destroy the Jews, Christians, Hindus, Russians and Shi’a!”
Apparently, this Imam has resided in Switzerland for the last 13 years and – without learning Swiss German or French or displaying, even hypocritically, any empathy for his host country – has received over $600,000 in unemployment relief over that period. As Tour escort for the Geneva-based Arab Excellence agency, he also has the opportunity to share his hatemongering with Muslim tourists to Mecca.
Ramadan is as much a link in the food chain of terror as those recipients of European largesse via the Palestinian Authority, languishing in Israeli and possibly other jails.
Such European and other donors, whether governments or NGOs, should be viewed for what they are: complicit facilitator links along the chain… and penalized as such.
From the Bonn identification of criminal Nazi military and auxiliary units to the treatment of contemporary terrorism as a consortium product, requires a broad definition of the perpetrator, that goes well beyond the bomber, shooter, stabber or rammer.
He who plants and nourishes the seeds of hate and violence, must pay the penalty – not receive awards!