New York's Chrysler Building Bought by Abu Dhabi Fund

Via: NY Sun , By DAVID M. LEVITT, Bloomberg News | July 10, 2008

New York's Chrysler Building, the Art Deco icon that helps define the New York skyline, was bought by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the second purchase of a Manhattan landmark by Middle Eastern investors in as many months.

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Rick Maiman

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The skyscraper at 405 Lexington Ave., the world's tallest building until 1931, was acquired tuesday by the Abu Dhabi Investment Council for an undisclosed price. Last month a Dubai fund, Boston Properties Inc., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. paid $2.8 billion for the General Motors Building.
Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and other Persian Gulf countries flush with oil revenue have taken advantage of falling prices to invest in real estate and financial companies around the world. Middle Eastern investors have spent $1.8 billion this year on commercial property in America, more than other international buyers, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based property research firm.

"We're sending our money their way" to purchase oil, "and that money is coming back and buying our assets," a market analysis director at Real Capital, Dan Fasulo, said.

Abu Dhabi Investment Council acquired the Chrysler Building from a fund managed by Prudential Financial Inc., a spokeswoman for the Newark, N.J.-based insurer, Theresa Miller, said. A spokesman for Tishman Speyer Properties LP, Rick Matthews, which owns a minority stake in the tower, declined to comment. Abu Dhabi Investment Council is prohibited by law from discussing its investments, an official said when contacted by telephone yesterday.

The Abu Dhabi fund was set to pay about $800 million for the Chrysler Building, said a person with knowledge of the transaction on June 11. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates.

The 77-story tower, designed by William Van Alen, was completed in 1930 on behalf of then-owner Chrysler Corp. and its founder Walter Chrysler. At 1,046 feet, the Chrysler Building was the world's tallest skyscraper before it was surpassed by the Empire State Building a year later.
Much of the Chrysler Building's façade is made of metal and its tower has a tapered stainless-steel crown that supports a 185-foot spire. The building is decorated with silver-colored hood ornaments that jut out from its setbacks.
TMW Real Estate Group, an Atlanta-based investment company acquired by Prudential, bought the Chrysler Building stake in 2001 for $300 million. It was the final property sold by Prudential from a series of funds managed for German investors, mainly insurance companies, Ms. Miller said.
Prudential has been selling New York buildings it owned with Tishman to take advantage of gains in property values. Last year it sold 666 Fifth Ave., a 1.5 million square-foot skyscraper for $1.8 billion. It also divested the Lipstick Building, an elliptical East Side tower designed by Philip Johnson, for about $649 million.
While New York office building prices have dropped between 10% and 15% from last year's market peak, Ms. Miller said Prudential's clients are pleased with the price. "Our clients got annual returns of about 20% after taxes," she said.
Japanese investors spent $78 billion on American properties between the late 1980s and 1995. Many of these transactions, including Mitsubishi Estate's 1989 purchase of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center for $895 million, came just before an American recession sent real estate values plummeting. As a result, the Japanese investors lost an estimated 50% to 80% of their money during the period.

The deadly tentacles of the Arab lobby

In October of 2001, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a CAIR financier, offered New York City a check for $10 million dollars to go towards relief efforts in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With great integrity and righteousness, the check was rejected by the Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, on the grounds that the money was attached to anti-American political statements made earlier by Bin Talal, concerning America’s relationship to the Middle East. Since 2005, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center. The Islamic terrorist-apologist lobby CAIR just passed off $5,000 to the Catholic church. Now Fox News is being eaten alive from within by the Arab prince who has been involved in despicable causes. Excerpts from Fox Guarding the Wolf House:

Fox News has long been considered a beacon to those that distrust televised liberal media, meaning every channel other than Fox. One of the indicators of the station’s right-leaning bent is that it has, for the most part, gotten the ‘War on Terrorism’ correct. However, with the undue influence of a Saudi Prince related to militant causes and with this month’s acquisition of Beliefnet, a religious resource website that proudly promotes radical Islam, signs show that the war coverage may soon be taking a turn for the worse.

In September of 2005, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal purchased 5.46 per cent of Class B voting shares in News Corp, the company that owns Fox News and a number of other media and entertainment entities. This had replaced the three per cent stake in Class A non-voting shares bin Talal had previously held through his investment corporation, Kingdom Holding Company (KHC).

With his newfound voting rights, bin Talal stated his intention of supporting Rupert Murdoch, the principal owner of News Corp, helping Murdoch to stay in power and avoid hostile takeover by other interested investors. Some have said that this was like making a deal with the devil, as Murdoch has been left vulnerable to the whims of an individual that has been involved in despicable causes.

In April of 2002, bin Talal had donated $27 million during a Saudi telethon that was raising money for the families of suicide bombers. As well, he had given $500,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to be used towards the distribution and propagation of a set of Islamist books for American libraries. The set included Jamal Badawi’s Gender Equity in Islam, which sanctions the beating of women by their husbands, and a version of the Quran, Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Meaning of The Holy Koran, which has been banned by the Los Angeles school system.

Utilizing his position of power within Fox News (today, he is the second largest shareholder), bin Talal has worked to influence programming at the station. An infamous example of this was reported in a December 2005 article found in WorldNetDaily, stating:

During the violent street protests in France one month ago, the prince said, Fox News ran a banner at the bottom of the screen that said “Muslim riots.”“I picked up the phone and called Murdoch ... [and told him] these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty,” al-Walid said. “Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots.”

Read the rest of the article here. Read more about Alwaleed Bin Talal here, here, here and here.

The Arab Lobby's scope and influence

The Arab Lobby's scope and influence, another excellent resource from Discover The Network:

Arab Lobby (Groups)

The Arab lobby consists of those groups and individuals that directly and indirectly seek to influence American policy to support Arab interests both in the U.S. and abroad. While focusing on Arab concerns, by no means is this lobby composed exclusively of Arabs. The lobby is defined by its ideology, not the ethnicity of its active constituents. That ideology tends to be pro-Arab on the one hand, and anti-Israel on the other. The Arab lobby in America generally seeks to promote its agendas by characterizing them as beneficial to U.S. national interests; conversely, it depicts pro-Israel policies as harmful to those interests.

The roots of the Arab lobby in America can be traced back to 1951, when King Saud of Saudi Arabia asked U.S. diplomats to finance a pro-Arab lobby to serve as a counterweight to the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC).

While the pace of the Arab lobby's growth was initially slow, there were nonetheless signs of increased assertiveness. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) set up a fund to present the Arab perspective on the conflict. In May 1970, ARAMCO representatives warned Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco that American military sales to Israel would harm U.S.-Arab relations and jeopardize American oil supplies.

Driven by oil revenues, the Arab lobby's leverage in affecting American policy was demonstrated in early 1973 when Mobil published a pro-Arab advertorial in The New York Times. In July of that year, the chairman of Standard Oil of California (now called Chevron) distributed a letter asking the company's 40,000 employees and 262,000 stockholders to pressure their elected representatives to support "the aspirations of the Arab people." In a similar spirit, the chairman of Texaco urged the U.S. to reassess its Middle East policy.

When another Arab-Israeli war broke out in October 1973, the chairmen of the ARAMCO partners issued a memorandum warning the White House against increasing its military aid to Israel. Shortly thereafter, the OPEC oil embargo (enacted in retribution for Western support of Israel) ushered in an era where the Arab lobby became much more prominent and visible than ever before. "The day of the Arab-American is here," declared National Association of Arab Americans founder Richard Shadyac. "The reason is oil." Prior to October 1973 the price of oil had stood at $2.60 per barrel; within three months the price quadrupled to about $12 per barrel. Since then, it has risen to more than $60 -- for a commodity whose production costs are, at present, only $1.50 per barrel.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter noted, in his diary, that the Arab lobby had pressured him mightily while he was involved in the peace negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "They [Arab Americans] have given all the staff, Brzezinski, Warren Christopher, and others, a hard time," wrote Carter.

Among the more notable individual members of the Arab lobby in recent decades was the late Clark Clifford (died October 1998), who The New York Times described as a key adviser to four U.S. presidents, and as an influential paid lobbyist for Arab sources. In his memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford wrote that he advised his clients: "What we can offer you is an extensive knowledge of how to deal with the government on your problems. We will be able to give you advice on how best to present your position to the appropriate departments and agencies of the government."

Another key figure in the Arab lobby has been Fred Dutton, former Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. On July 19, 2005, The Hill, a newspaper about the U.S. Congress, reported that Dutton (a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia) had worked assiduously to persuade Congress to approve two major arms sales to that nation.

Axis Information and Analysis (AIA), which specializes in information about Asia and Eastern Europe, rated Prince Bandar Bin Sultan -- a Saudi ambassador to the U.S. from 1983 to 2005 -- as the single most influential foreigner in America. With links to high-ranking officials in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA, Sultan was a key participant in many clandestine negotiations pertaining to U.S. interests in the Middle East. According to AIA, in 1990-91 it was Sultan who pushed President George H.W. Bush to launch the military campaign to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Moreover, his father -- Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz al Saud -- was a leading figure in the ruling Saudi dynasty. As such, he helped determine the extent of his nation's military cooperation with the U.S. in the Persian Gulf.

During a January 1998 U.S. Congressional Delegation briefing in Damascus, Syria, Congressman Nick J. Rahall (D - West Virginia), who is of Lebanese descent, said: "Our [Arab] lobby in the United States is growing in its influence and its participation in political campaigns across the spectrum. Our trip [was] sponsored by the Arab American Institute -- one of those most effective lobbying groups of the Arab groups in Washington -- and a relatively new group, the National Arab American Businessmen's Association. [Through] these groups … we are increasing our influence, and we are increasing our participation."

Some members of the Arab lobby in America are heavily financed with money from the Arab world. Before his death in 2005, for instance, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd made several large donations to the Center, including a 1993 gift of $7.6 million. As of 2005, the king's nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, had given at least $5 million to the Carter Center. In 2001 the United Arab Emirates (UAE) gave the Center $500,000. The previous year, ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers had jointly pledged $1 million, as did Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman in 1998. The Saudi Fund for Development has been another major contributor, as has the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. And Morocco's Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah has collaborated with the Carter Center on various initiatives.

It should be noted that the Arab lobby does not, by any means, speak for all Arab Americans. According to the Arab American Institute, there are approximately 3.5 million people of Arab heritage in the U.S. today, about half of them concentrated in five states -- California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. Nearly 40 percent of these Arab Americans are Lebanese, mostly Christians, who tend to be unsympathetic to the Arab lobby's anti-Israel perspectives. By contrast, only about 70,000Palestinian Americans reside in the United States -- a small percentage of the Arab American population. But because of their high level of political activism, their views and concerns have received hugely disproportionate attention from political leaders and the media alike. Indeed, the Palestinian cause heads the Arab lobby's list of concerns.

Because Arab Americans do not constitute a numerically large voting bloc, the Arab lobby has focused considerable effort on cultivating sympathies among the general public as a means of influencing U.S. policy. To further maximize its influence, the Arab lobby has also formed alliances with many anti-war, civil rights, civil liberties, and social justice organizations of the political left. The aforementioned Carter Center is but one of these.

For the reader interested in learning about the Arab lobby, a couple of definitions are in order. A lobby, strictly defined, is a group of persons -- be they volunteers or paid professionals -- engaged in an effort to persuade public officials to pass laws or implement programs that promote the lobbyists' goals. Lobbyists pursue their objectives in different ways: some (direct lobbyists) privately cajole legislators via telephone calls or face-to-face visits; others (grassroots lobbyists) urge the general public to contact their legislators; still others organize or participate in public actions such as mass demonstrations; and some employ a combination of all these approaches. In cases where a particular issue is to be decided through a ballot initiative or referendum, appeals to the public are technically classified as direct lobbying, because in those instances the public acts as the legislature.

Lobbyists are not necessarily members of groups or organized campaigns; they can also be independent individuals who feel strongly about the passage or the defeat of certain pieces of proposed legislation. Some are on the payroll of foreign governments.

There is technically a distinction between advocacy and lobbying. The former aims to influence some aspect of society, be it individual behavior (e.g., campaigns to discourage smoking or to encourage vegetarianism), employment policy (e.g., affirmative action in hirings and promotions), or legislation passed by elected government officials. Lobbying refers specifically to those advocacy efforts that attempt to convince legislators and public policy-makers to vote in a certain way.

This section of Discover The Networks profiles not only those pro-Arab organizations (both in the U.S. and abroad) that lobby to affect specific legislation, but also groups that engage in what might be defined, more precisely, as advocacy on behalf of Arab interests anywhere in the world. Through their press releases, official statements, publications, and direct actions, these organizations seek to shape public opinion as a means of influencing voter decisions and thereby indirectly affecting legislation passed by elected representatives.

According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, "Assessing the influence and breadth of the Arab/Muslim lobby would be a difficult thing to do, since the metrics for assessing such things are not easily available. The lobby's real strength is felt on the local level, where its members receive community awards, participate in human relations councils, change the local educational curricula, persuade school districts to give them holidays off, and get local police and statewide officials to attend their events. Nationally, their influence is felt at the State Department in terms of their being invited to briefings, sponsored on road trips abroad, etc. The one recent time where they actually exacted an influence on President Bush was in persuading him to drop the use of the term 'Islamo-fascism.'"

While the Arab lobby has a few friends in Congress today, its effect is felt mainly as a result of its joint efforts with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union to dilute anti-terror measures. The lobby, says Emerson, "is mainly in the process of building up a grassroots network around the United States, with the anticipation that, abetted by growing demographics, it will be in a position of political influence in the future."

Sources: Discover The Network, Arab Lobby (Groups), The Arab Lobby's scope and influence

CAIR’s Catholic Blood Money

Folks, in October of 2001, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a CAIR financier, offered New York City a check for $10 million dollars to go towards relief efforts in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With great integrity and righteousness, the check was rejected by the Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, on the grounds that the money was attached to anti-American political statements made earlier by Bin Talal, concerning America’s relationship to the Middle East. Now, the D.C. based Islamic terrorist-apologist lobby CAIR just passed off $5,000 to the Catholic church. An excerpt from CAIR’s Catholic Blood Money:

On Sunday, September 24, 2006, Ahmed Bedier led a delegation of Muslims from his organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in a visit to the St. Paul’s Catholic Church of St. Petersburg, Florida. At the end of the visit, Bedier handed a check for $5000 to the pastor of St. Paul’s for the repair of churches that had been damaged recently in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, over one sentence spoken by the Pope. The money was for a good cause, but accepting the money came with a price.

Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech he gave during a trip to Germany on September 12, quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor as saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” This set off a firestorm across the Muslim world, resulting in violence. Enraged crowds took their frustrations out on symbols of Christianity. This included the murder of an Italian nun and the firebombing of churches located in the West Bank and Gaza.

Taking advantage of this sensitive situation was CAIR, an organization that pawns itself off as a “civil liberties” group, while having numerous ties to Islamic extremism, including links to individuals convicted for terrorist crimes. At a press conference, on Thursday, September 21, Ahmed Bedier, the Director of CAIR’s Tampa office, and Rev. Robert Gibbons, the Vicar General of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg, held aloft a large poster-board check for $5000 bearing CAIR’s insignia. The money was said to be for the half-dozen churches that had been attacked, five of which were firebombed and shot at, the other doused with gasoline and set aflame.

It was a disquieting scene as Ahmed Bedier stood side by side with a high-ranking Diocese official. Exactly two months prior to the event, Bedier hosted a radio show where all three of his guests lauded Hezbollah, a group that is found on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. One of the guests went as far as to label the group “heroic.” One must question if Rev. Gibbons was aware of this fact.

The check, which CAIR described as “seed money,” was made out to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), a humanitarian relief program run by the Catholic Church, based in New York City. Additionally, a CNEWA fund was created in CAIR’s name, to raise further monies.

In order to make a donation to the fund, people have been asked to forward their checks to the CNEWA office under the title, “CAIR Palestine Damaged Churches.” The term “Palestine” denotes statehood and seems to have been injected into the fund’s address purely for political purposes. If that is the case, the Catholic Church is being used for nothing more than to make a political statement, and being as such and the fact that the church accepted the money, the implication is that the church is in full agreement with the statement.

Please pass this information on to your Catholic friends. No church anywhere should accept blood money from any group who knowlingly or unknowingly parades "Palestine" as a legitimate nation. "Palestine" is a manufactured entity. It was a region where both Jews and Muslims lived but it was never a nation and it was never singularly Islamic.

Never.

If it were, then please provide evidence for the existence of three of these Jewish archaeological sites: Joseph's Tomb, Rachel's tomb and the Holiest site in all of Judaism, the remnant Western Wall of our Holy Temple. Don't be fooled. Just because a mosque appears where our Holiest of Holies is, means nothing. If Muslims had their choice, mosques would replace St. Patricks Cathedral on New York's Fifth Avenue. Usurping synagogues and churches and supplanting them with mosques is all part of the Islamic warlord tradition. It is a telling example of Islam's iconoclasty. Islam thrives on symbols and symbolism and reinventing history. "Palestine" has a fabricated neo-history and the use of the word is part of Palestinianism. It only became injected into America's lexicon in 1964 when the detestable Yasser Arafat reinvented and revised the history of the Middle East and the rest of the world, which was already being gobbled up by hippies, communists, Jane Fonda-types, and Black Panthers, all of whom fell for The Big Lie.

Don't be misled by wolves in sheep's clothing. Click here to learn the facts about Jewish and Arab claims to the Holy Land of Israel.

Saudi Prince gives millions to Harvard and Georgetown

Harvard University and Georgetown University each announced Monday that they had received $20 million donations from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, a Saudi businessman and member of the Saudi royal family, to finance Islamic studies. The prince was fifth on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy people this year, with a fortune of $23.7 billion.

In October 2001, then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani returned a $10 million check from the prince after a news release quoted the prince as calling on the American government to "re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause."

Being the intelligent man that he is, Giuliani refused the check and told the arab to shove it where the koran don't shine.