- WASHINGTON (IPS) -- While
U.S. Treasury officials scour financial records worldwide to stop funds
donated by wealthy Arabs from flowing to radical Islamist groups, a small
group of U.S. citizens is trying to shut down a major source of funding
for Jewish extremists in Israel and the occupied territories.
-
- Its target is a gambling casino located half a world
away in a tiny low-income, mostly Latino town called Hawaiian Gardens,
tucked into the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles.
-
- The Hawaiian Gardens Casino has made tens of millions
of dollars for its owner, Irving Moskowitz, a 75-year-old doctor and businessman
who moved to Florida more than 20 years ago.
-
- His Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, which operates a
bingo parlour next door, has also produced tens of millions of dollars
over the years, most of which it passed to other charities or foundations
that support the most extreme elements in the Jewish settlement movement
in Israel and the occupied territories, according to records the foundation
is required to file with U.S. tax authorities.
-
- The foundation has also provided hundreds of thousands
of dollars to right-wing U.S. Zionist groups, particularly the Zionist
Organisation of America (ZOA) and Americans for a Safe Israel (ASI), as
well as neo-conservative think tanks -- among them the Centre for Security
Policy (CSP) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- that were in
the forefront of the drive to war in Iraq.
-
- Its contribution to AEI, for example, funded the work
of David Wurmser, whose 1999 AEI book, 'Tyranny's Ally', argued that the
ouster of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was the key to remaking
the Arab Middle East.
-
- Wurmser, who was hired as Middle East advisor to Vice
President Dick Cheney in September, acknowledged Moskowitz as his benefactor
in the book, which was prefaced by the powerful former chairman of the
Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle.
-
- "If you asked most people who Moskowitz is, they
would not have any idea," CSP director Frank Gaffney declared once
at a testimonial dinner for the man whose foundation gave CSP close to
half a million dollars between 1987 and 2001. "His influence is a
function of his financial support."
-
- It is precisely that influence that the Coalition for
Justice in Hawaiian Gardens and Jerusalem will try to curb at a hearing
in Los Angeles on Dec. 18 of California's Gambling Control Commission.
It is slated to decide whether Moskowitz should be granted a permanent
license to run his casino, which has reportedly grossed about 180 million
dollars a year since it began operating several years ago.
-
- Because the casino is owned directly by Moskowitz, and
not, like the bingo hall, by a non-profit foundation, information on the
destination of its revenue is not publicly available, although his attorney
has suggested in the past that much of it goes to the same causes.
-
- While most license hearings are pro forma affairs, this
one is likely to be contentious, as coalition members and supporters, who
include Jewish, peace and Latino groups, are lining up to testify why they
believe Moskowitz's activities, both in Hawaiian Gardens and in the Middle
East, should make him ineligible for a license.
-
- Local activists, including former city officials, charge
that Moskowitz has essentially "hijacked" the municipal government
to build the casino and enrich his business interests at the expense of
an impoverished, gang-ridden community, in ways that violate both the letter
and the spirit of California's strict gambling laws.
-
- Moskowitz's foes -- who include some two dozen rabbis
on the coalition's advisory committee and the predominantly Jewish peace
group Americans for Peace Now -- also intend to cite his philanthropic
activities for the same basic reasons that the Bush administration is trying
to persuade Arab governments to shut down charities that fund radical Islamists.
-
- "Knowing how he has used the bingo money to foster
extremism and violence, how can you turn around and give him a casino licence?"
said coalition co-director Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, in an interview.
-
- "When you give someone a licence to run a casino,
you're effectively giving him a licence to print money."
-
- Beliak, who serves two conservative Jewish congregations
close to Hawaiian Gardens, referred specifically to several Moskowitz-funded
initiatives in Israel and the West Bank, the most deadly of which -- the
excavation and 1996 opening of a subterranean tunnel into East Jerusalem's
Muslim quarter -- sparked three days of rioting that killed more than 70
people, most of them Palestinian.
-
- Moskowitz and foundations controlled by him have since
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war secretly purchased -- often at highly inflated
prices -- Arab homes in and around East Jerusalem with the apparent intent
of eventually moving in the most militant factions of the settler movement.
Similarly, he has bought tracts of property in key zones around the city
to cut off its links with Arab areas nearby.
-
- And he has often arranged to move in settlers or begin
construction on his properties at particularly sensitive moments in Israeli-Palestinian
peace efforts, precisely in order to inflame tensions between the two peoples,
according to his critics.
-
- In addition to any personal money he might have used
to acquire these properties, his foundation funnelled some four million
dollars between 1993 and 2001 for such purchases to the Miami-based American
Friends of Everest Foundation, which Moskowitz also controls, according
to summaries of tax documents obtained by the coalition and posted on its
website.
-
- Over the same period, he contributed nearly six million
dollars from his foundation to the New York-based American Friends of Ateret
Cohanim, a particularly militant group that believes Jews should have exclusive
control of Jerusalem to rebuild the Old Temple on the site of one of Islam's
holiest mosques and perform animal sacrifices there, and also secretly
buys and then occupies homes in the Arab quarter.
-
- Moskowitz has also provided millions of dollars to other
radical elements of the settler movement that continue to expand their
holdings in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
-
- Among them is settlement Beit Hadassah, located in the
middle of the West Bank city of Hebron. Its 500 mostly youthful settlers
have repeatedly clashed with the Palestinian residents and even the Israeli
Army when it has tried to restrain them.
-
- Beit Hadassah is itself closely linked to a much larger
settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, Kiryat Arba, the residence of Baruch
Goldstein, the U.S.-born settler who massacred 29 Palestinian worshipers
at Hebron's mosque in 1994 before being overcome and killed. His grave
at Kiryat Arba became a movement shrine.
-
- The residents of another settlement, Beit El, located
in a densely populated Palestinian area near Jerusalem, also have a history
of clashes with their Arab neighbours, and are led by the current government's
minister of tourism, Benny Elon.
-
- Elon, a rabbi who frequently speaks before Christian
Right audiences in the United States, is a long-time associate of Moskowitz
and one of Israel's most outspoken proponents of "transfer" --
moving all Palestinians in "Greater Israel" to Jordan and denying
citizenship to all those who resist moving.
-
- Most of the millions of dollars that Moskowitz has contributed
to the settlement movement have been earmarked for religious schools that
are at the centre of community life.
-
- In many ways, a yeshiva, or beit midrash, is the counterpart
of the madrassas in the Islamic world that have served as recruitment centres
for radical Islamist movements like the Taliban in Afghanistan -- or even
al-Qaeda and its offshoots -- in recent years, according to Beliak, who
was trained in Israel.
-
- As in the Islamic world, most schools teach a moderate
and reflective form of Judaism, while others instruct a far more radical
and political vision. Those are the ones that Moskowitz funds, Beliak said.
-
- "Students are taught that the land of Israel belongs
to the Jewish people; that it won't be fertile until Jews are in full control
of it, at which point it will respond miraculously to the presence of Jews."
-
- "Moskowitz is not supporting the people who sit
and study; he funds those that are ideologically mobilised, whose students
are prepared at any moment to take part in protests and demonstrations,
and who think it is their right to uproot olive trees on Arab land, overturn
vegetable stands in Arab markets and wreak havoc," added Beliak.
-
- To these groups, the Oslo peace process -- indeed, any
negotiation that envisages the surrender of territory to the Palestinians
-- has been anathema. And it was from one of them that Yigal Amir, the
man who assassinated former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, emerged.
-
- Amir was a law student at Bar Ilan University, whose
religious studies programme has been funded by Moskowitz.
-
- Moskowitz, who had compared Rabin's policies to European
appeasement of the Nazis before World War II, condemned the assassination
as "not good for peace or the Jewish nation", but reportedly
was more ambiguous in a private conversation with a close childhood friend.
-
- Remarkably, in February 2000 Israel's 'Yedioth Aharanot'
newspaper traced an Internet assassination "game" that invited
visitors to "destroy" then prime minister Ehud Bartak and other
pro-peace Israeli political leaders, to Cherna Moskowitz, Irving's wife
and business partner, who also serves as an officer in his foundations.
-
- The game, which was quickly removed after complaints
were received, encouraged visitors to click on a leader's picture, which
would "explode" on the screen, accompanied by the sound of screaming.
-
- To the coalition -- which saved a copy of the game --
and its supporters, such incitement offers further ammunition for their
case that the Moskowitzes do not meet California's character requirements.
Indeed, they believe the Bush administration should back up their effort.
-
- "If the administration wants to be credible in demanding
that Arabs close down charities that fund radical madrassas," says
Jane Hunter, the coalition's co-director, "then it should also cut
the flow of tax-free U.S. dollars to their Jewish equivalents, the yeshivas
that Moskowitz funds".
-
- Copyright © 2003 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights
reserved.
-
- http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21429
|
