I am waiting for when I meet President Mahmoud Abbas in order to present him with a strange picture as a gift. In this picture, which I had printed last Friday from the New York Times website, several detainees accused of corruption in New York and New Jersey were being led into the police bus. The prisoners had their hands shackled and chained behind their backs, and at the end of the human column that they formed, there was a police officer manhandling them and pushing them forward. This police officer looked like Abu Mazen with his white hair, with two of the detained rabbis in front of him at the other end of the suspects' column. Thus, what the Palestinian president had not been able to achieve in his country, was made possible by the U.S. law enforcement agencies, specifically the Federal Bureau of Investigation: The FBI was the agency behind the original plan to hunt down corruption and the corrupt, with the result that the bureau's agents have succeeded well beyond their expectations, arresting 44 people, including mayors from New Jersey, and two members of the local councils, in addition to five rabbis. In details, the FBI had put two intertwining schemes in place: one involving money laundering that led to the rabbis and to members of the Syrian Jewish community, most of whom residing in Brooklyn and in the town of Deal in New Jersey. The other involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, who took bribes in cash, no less. Behind the two schemes was an informant. He was named as Mr. Solomon Dwek, a Jewish American millionaire of Syrian origin. He had amassed his fortune by trading in real estate and then went bankrupt. He was arrested when he deposited two checks each worth 25 million dollars, and then immediately withdrew 22 million dollars. The bank refused to accept one of the checks, while the other check bounced. Dwek seems to have taken the fall a while before he became an informant for the police, with the result being a huge scandal that engulfed the American Jewish community of Syrian descent, affecting senior rabbis such as Saul Kassin. He headed 50 Sephardic synagogues, the largest group of synagogues of the kind in the United States. However, neither his position nor his age (87) seems to have thwarted him from being involved in money laundering. Dwek offered the rabbis to donate money to their schools and charities, provided that they return his contributions after they deduct their commissions from the amounts contributed. He also gave public officials cash as contributions to their campaigns, or to facilitate his real estate deals. The result was something I knew very well about American politics. Only a few days ago, by sheer coincidence, I wrote in this column an article about how the U.S. elections is an industry that goes on every day, and not just once every two years or four years. I also said that this industry is based on money. In this vein, Barack Obama himself would have never won the presidency had he not raised a record amount of money for his campaign, in an election that has also set the record for spending, estimated at six billion dollars. Moreover, the Rabbis took a 3 to 5 percent commission on Dwek's contributions, while the public officials received bribes ranging from 5 to 10 thousand dollars, which had the most important aspect of being in cash, and subsequently of being undeclared. There were also those who dealt in human organs such as kidneys, through both the purchase and the sale of organs. All of these events occurred within the Syrian Jewish community in America, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. In fact, the Syrian Jews have an entire neighbourhood in Brooklyn that is almost exclusive to them, as they do not welcome strangers there, not even Jews belonging to other communities. Also, real estate prices in their areas are many times more expensive than the places surrounding their neighbourhoods. It should be mentioned here that the Syrian Jews were impoverished when they left Syria, and that their exodus was sporadic. Perhaps their poverty can be explained by the fact that the entire country is made of merchants, and that Damascene merchants - or even the ones from Aleppo and Homs – are the only ones in the world who can claim to be better than Jews in trade and in the accumulation of wealth. Then the Syrian Jews achieved in the U.S what they failed to do in their original countries. Perhaps the world would have never heard of them, however, had it not been for this scandal that will completely uncover them once it reaches the court. On a different but related note, I was trying to lease an apartment for my son in Damascus, after his British university decided to send him to an Arab country to learn Arabic. I negotiated with the help of my old colleague Ibrahim Hamidi with an old veiled Damascene landlady for her small apartment, but she was more persistent than ten lawyers put together. Ibrahim then said to me at the end: Do you see why the Jews left Syria broke and poor? I indeed saw that, and today, I have a picture of the Palestinian President, or his look-alike, arresting rabbis in New York. Now, this is quite uncanny.
