Over the past two weeks, no one can deny that there have been widespread televised reports that have shown mass Palestinian Arab demonstrations for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, with daily Palestinian chants that call for Saddam Hussein to reign missiles again on Tel Aviv, while marchers burn American and Israeli flags.

The question that many people have raised concerns whether or not Arafat and the PLO, now operating the Palestine Authority, gives official “sanction” to these demonstrations.

No one forgets that in 1991, the PLO gave full support to Saddam Hussein, when the Palestinian Arab population, which then lived fully under the sovereignty of the state of Israel, also conducted mass demonstrations under Saddam Hussein.

Today, however, the PLO’s Palestine Authority rules over most of the Palestinian Arab population, with a legislative council and a strong police force, things are different.

This time, the marches for Saddam Hussein emanate from the Palestine Authority headquarters in Ramallah.

On February 13, 1998, Danny Rubenstein, the Arab affairs correpondent for the daily Israeli newspaper, HaAretz, published a short investigative piece in which he documented that the Palestinian demonstrations for Saddam Hussein were indeed organized by the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Rubenstein traces the funding of the PFLP to Iraq.

To paraphrase Rubenstein, it would therefore be natural to expect that the PFLP would demonstrate for Saddam.

Meanwhile, the PFLP is categorized by the US state department as one of the thirty organizations placed on the official list of groups that have been officially designated by the US as terrorist organizations.

Yet the PFLP remains an integral part of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Authority and the Palestine Liberation Army police force, all of which are funded in part by grants from US AID, the Agency for International Development.

In other words, the US knowingly funds an entity that openly incorporates an organization that the US defines as a terror group in supports of the current regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Does the Palestine Authority support Saddam Hussein?

The answer remains that the whole is the sum of its parts.

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David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.