Israel Matzav

Arab Bank: Killing Jews for fun and profit

Two days before Lag BaOmer 2001, 14-year old American immigrant Koby Mandell (pictured) and his friend Yossi Ish Ram skipped school to go hiking near their village Tekoa, in the Judean Hills. Mandell and Ish Ram entered a cave that they thought would be a neat place to hold a bonfire for Lag BaOmer. There were 'Palestinian' terrorists waiting in the cave. Mandell and Ish Ram were so brutally beaten with stones that when they were found, they were beyond recognition.

That attack and many others were allegedly financed by the Amman, Jordan-based Arab Bank. Now, Mandell's parents and the families of other terror victims are suing Arab Bank in a Brooklyn Federal courtroom. The outcome could put the bank - which has $50 billion on its balance sheet and nearly $800 million in profits last year - out of business (Hat Tip: Instapundit).

The complaints allege that Arab Bank played a key role in what could be termed “The bureaucracy of terror.” Specifically, that the bank’s maintenance of at least seven separate accounts for Hamas-linked so-called charitable foundations facilitated the rapid transfer of donations (given by Arabs as zakat, a mandatory charitable tithe) between valid and efficient social-service groups and their sister organizations, the armed units that carry out the bombing attacks.

Just as importantly, Arab Bank allegedly also maintained the accounts that Hamas and PIJ used to pay out the families of the killed, wounded and captured operatives and leaders. The $5316 payments to the so-called martyrs (known as Shahid) were, according to the suits, remarkable recruiting mechanisms in that they represented more than a year’s wages in the poverty-racked Gaza Strip and West Bank. Indeed, the Bank used Hamas and PIJ-issued Martyrs Kits to administer payments to the families of suicide bombers.

Arab Bank also lent a material amount of prestige and gravity to the fund-raising efforts of Palestinian relief efforts. In 2002, as Saudi-led telethons raised more than $100-million for the Support of the Intifada Al Quds, the presence of Arab Bank assured donors wary of the endemic corruption of the Yassir Arafat Fatah regime that the money would at least get to a well-capitalized, professionally-run institution.

These aren’t merely the assertions of trial lawyers seeking a payday.

They largely port onto the claims the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network made in a sharply worded 2005 release that accused the bank of failing to adequately control suspicious activity and for not maintaining proper anti-money laundering programs.

...

Last Wednesday, matters took a turn south for Arab Bank when Judge Gershon delivered an unsparing rebuke of Arab Bank and its efforts to avoid discovery in the Linde case. Rejecting the bank’s claim that it could not produce documents and account information about the activity in the Hamas and PIJ accounts for fear of violating privacy laws in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, Gershon noted that Lebanon and Jordan’s rules make clear that in matters of terror financing, any such privacy rules are void.

In a devastating blow, Gershon said that when and if the case gets to trial, the jury can presume “Adverse inference,” or more plainly, that Arab Bank–per the lawsuit claims–continued to knowingly provide key financial services to groups like Hamas and its leaders long after they had been designated terrorist groups in the U.S. and Europe.

This puts Arab Bank in a Morton’s Fork, caught between two very, very unpleasant choices.

On the one hand, Arab Bank can go into court in front of 12 people who have been instructed that they are hiding evidence that greatly supports their opponent’s cases in a courthouse a few miles from Ground Zero. Their ultimate liability in such a case could conceivably begin well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the Judge’s ruling, even settling out of court becomes an expensive proposition.

On the other, they walk away from it all, shut their U.S. branch at 520 Madison Avenue in Manhattan and cease doing dollar-denominated business. At that point though, they are largely shut out of the global economy in that they cannot offer their corporate customers throughout the Middle-East an ability to move money into or out of the U.S. or its currency. It is, in a sense, choosing professional suicide.

There is, of course, a third choice–Arab Bank could produce the documents and, given the repeated public and legal claims of innocence, press its interests in court.

But this is the one option they appear to have ruled out even though they have the possibility of suffering a brutal legal judgement or even a body-blow to their 80-year old banking franchise. In short, it is a curious state of affairs when disobeying the plainly written demands of a Federal Judge becomes a legal tactic.

Read it all. It's one of the most fascinating stories I've read in a long time, and the outcome could mean an awful lot of terror victims and their children getting to go to Camp Koby.

Let's go to the videotape.



The campers in the video are all terror victims or their children.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:11 AM