During my Residency training in Psychiatry at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital I treated a great many patients suffering from Schizophrenia during acute psychotic episodes. The most restrictive diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia (in order to differentiate the episode from other psychotic disorders) involved the concept of a Thought Disorder, also referred to as Loosening of Associations. A patient exhibited such a thought disorder when the connections between their thoughts were based on idiosyncratic use of language; in other words their language served not to communicate but to express their own distorted, misperception of the world. When the patient had a Paranoid Delusional System, which defined their weltanschauung, it informed every thought that they had. In other words, their paranoid delusion contaminated their thinking, often to such a degree that they were unable to navigate through the world of consensus reality.
In my series on The Ancient Scourge Revived, (part of my writings on Anti-Semitism) I described anti-Semitism, like paranoid delusions, as serving a defensive purpose, allowing the holder of the ideas to use them to avoid awareness of unpleasant and unacceptable reality. Anti-Semitism also functions in a manner similar to a Paranoid Delusion by contaminating the thinking of the holder.
This morning, Roddy Boyd, who runs the The Financial Investigator such contamination is on display in an unlikely place: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]
Killing Jews For Fun and For Profit: The Continuing American Adventures of Arab Bank
According to a 2004 civil complaint now winding its way to trial, the bank’s purported customers got ahold of Jacob “Kobi” Mandell when he and a buddy skipped school in May of 2001 to hike near the Mandell’s place in Tokoa,Israel. The professional rescuers found the pair two-days later with skulls caved in and bodies mutilated.
He was an eighth-grader.
Palestinian Hezbollah claimed those pair of victories, but according to the claim, the Popular Resistance Committees are broadly understood to have been behind the attack.
The bank’s customers also managed to reroute the currents of Gloria Kushner’s life on May 19, 2002 as she shopped in an open-air market. A suicide bomber detonated a vest full of nails, screws and bolts and Kushner caught a fair amount of them; she was among the 50 lucky ones who took the flak in their spines, jaws, eyes and knees. Three weren’t as fortunate as she was: They took in their skulls and chests and died.
Oddly, both Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed credit.
In a 2005 complaint, a 23-year old Hamas suicide bomber named Shadi Toubasi walked into the Arab-owned Matza restaurant in Haifa and detonated a bomb surrounded by nails and bolts into the late lunch crowd, leaving 15 dead and 40 wounded.
Toubasi was also a customer of the bank, according to the claim.
The bank in question is Arab Bank, an Amman, Jordan-based bank with about $50.6-billion in assets and more than $780-million in profit last year. 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.
Roddy Boyd notes that the Bank is refusing to supply requested documents to the court and faces a difficult choice:
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.
Here we have an international bank, whose mission is to make money, facing the destruction of its business; why would it take such a risk and how has it come to this?
Read the rest of Roddy Boyd's article and note how a conservative organization, a bank that operated under sound, rational, financial practices allowed itself to go from supporting the reasonable aspirations of its people (there is no point in re-arguing here the basis of Palestinian nationalism, a late 20th century construct) to covert support of the worst forms of terrorism. The bank's thinking became contaminated by its anti-Semitism. The "evils" of the Jews grew out of all human proportions and enabled the Bank's personnel to imagine they were helping combat terrible injustice, so terrible as to justify the most despicable atrocities, as long as they were directed at the Jews. Their actions and rationalizations were ultimately self destructive and now verge on the suicidal.
Allow me to offer the Arab Bank and any other interested parties some free Psychiatric advice: If your practices and thinking allow you to support people who believe that mutilating and murdering children is the height of courageous resistance, you have a serious psychiatric disorder and should seek help immediately.
According to the paranoid, anti-Semitic ravings that are ubiquitous in the Arab and Muslim world, the Jews are far worse than Hitler; they are worse than all evils that have come before. It is worth noting that even as the Jews are seen as superhuman Genocidal villains, the worst in human history, they are certainly also the least effective Genocidaires in human history. Thus does Jew hatred metastasize to destroy the rational thought of its holders.
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