The announcement from the Nobel Peace Prize Committee on October 11, 2002 that Jimmy Carter would receive this year’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize will be received with great enthusiasm by Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority dictatorship and received with equal dissapointment by human rights circles among the Palestinian Arab people.

Carter was the US observer and facilitator of the Januray 1996 elections that catapulted Arafat to be the “democratically elected” leader of the Palestinian Arab people.

Our news agency worked with a Palestinian Arab TV crew to cover those elections.

However, Arafat manipulated these elections with rules that forbid anyone from running against him without his express approval, as reported by the UN election observer team.

Indeed Dr. Haider Abdul Shefi, who had led the PLO delegation at the Madrid negotiations in 1991, offered his candidacy, only to be rejected by Arafat.

When Dr. Shefi said that he was going to run anyway, a bomb explosion in Dr. Shefi’s home convinced him otherwise.

More discrepancies in Arafat’s “democratic” elections were docmented by Mr. Daniel Polisar, the head of the PEACE WATCH observer team to the PA elections, in his article, “How Arafat Rigged the 1996 PA Elections” republished on the June 28th 2002 issue of Israel Resource Review.

Jummy Carter, who purports to symbolize a commitment to peace and justice, had nothing to say in criticism of the lack of “democracy” in the PA elections.

Instead, Carter takes credit for the “democratic” nature of the PA elections, in numerous articles that Carter has written and numerous speeches that Carter has given.

When I asked Carter immediately after the PA elections about the fact that Arafat had rigged the elections, Carter responded with a chuckle and said that “We have problems like that in Chicago too”.

Jimmy Carter now shares the notoriety of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize with Yassir Arafat.

You might call Carter the father of Palestinian Autocracy.

[Satirist Tom Lehrer once remarked that he left the field of satire when US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize at the height of the Vietnam War. Lehrer said that “now there is nothing more to satirize”.]

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David Bedein
David Bedein
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.

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