Bowling for Arafat

The forensic accounting details are starting to come in. It turns out that Yasser Arafat invested nearly a billion dollars of the money he raised for the Palestinian cause over the years in companies that ranged from venture capital funds to my neighborhood bowling alley.

At a time when the [Palestinian] authority was starved for funds, Arafat's money managers placed bets from Tel Aviv to Silicon Valley on venture capital funds, software startups and telecommunications companies.

[...]

Arafat made the investments abroad with tax money that he "diverted" from the Palestinian finance ministry, according to a September 2003 International Monetary Fund report on the Palestinian economy. Israel collected import taxes for goods destined for the territories and then passed the funds to the authority.