Word: fedayeen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That modest gift-no strings attached-was in addition to the $25 million that the Saudis annually fork over to fedayeen organizations. Depending on their oil wealth, other Arab states chip in with similar but smaller tokens of support, while such ideological allies of the Palestinians as the Soviet Union and China contribute arms and other materiel. In fact, despite the much publicized poverty and squalor of the refugee camps that provide the fedayeen with a power base and a manpower pool, the Palestinians have what is probably the richest, best-financed revolutionary terrorist organization in history...
Since accounting procedures are haphazard at best, a few Palestinians have succumbed to the tempting rewards of open-collar crime. Two months ago, three P.L.O. officials were tossed into a fedayeen jail for gambling away $250,000 of the organization's money at the gaming tables of Cairo. But as even critics of the P.L.O. concede, most of the Palestinian leaders emulate the ascetic style of Arafat who, despite international renown, dresses in baggy battle fatigues, operates out of a spartan office in a Beirut slum, and indulges in neither whisky, cigarettes nor women...
Expanding Bureaucracy. The largest chunk of the money is still spent on training and terrorist operations; last week a Palestinian bomb went off near Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding 26. One of the smaller and poorer fedayeen groups, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, took credit for the incident. But an increasing percentage of the revenues pay for a rapidly expanding bureaucracy. The P.L.O. has opened offices-in effect, quasi embassies-in about 100 nations. Heads of the larger offices in Europe and North America receive around $1,500 a month along with "representation" allowances...
...continue to receive $75 a month, parents $25, brothers or sisters $10 and children $5 each. Since the war, the P.L.O. has founded Samed (Arabic for steadfast), a kind of poor man's conglomerate of 24 factories and workshops in Lebanon that provide jobs for 2,300 disabled fedayeen and Palestinian women. They work at such diverse operations as handicrafts, ready-to-wear clothing, furniture building and film making...
...federation, Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat is expected to fly this week to Amman for talks with King Hussein. For Arafat, such a trip will be not quite a journey to Canossa, but very close to it. An organizer of the Al Fatah guerrilla movement, who once directed fedayeen operations against Israel from Jordanian caves, he has not seen Amman since the Black September of 1970, when Hussein's army took bloody action because the Palestinians had become so independent in their assaults on Israeli territory that they were defying the King's sovereignty. The army kicked...