Strategy Page reports:
[The] latest terror campaign against Israelis is fundamentally a side effect of the struggle between Hamas and Fatah for control over all Palestinians. These two groups keep score by how many Israelis they can kill as does mass media in Moslem nations.
. . .
Palestinian leaders don’t even try to hide what they are doing as Palestinian media regularly runs stories encouraging Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to use whatever kind of violence they can to attack and kill or injure Israeli Jews. Palestinian leaders get on TV and tell teenagers that throwing rocks and fire bombs at Israelis, especially those in cars or busses, is a patriotic obligation and is justified resistance to Israeli repression. The Palestinian politicians further encourage the teenagers by pointing out that if Israel uses force against rock throwers and kills or injures any of them it is the Israelis who will be guilty of war crimes. Naturally this encourages a lot more Palestinian teenagers to throw rocks. There are rewards as those that manage to injure or kill Israelis are considered heroes in Palestinian media and throughout the Moslem world (and in some Western media as well).
Palestinians are also attracted to the financial rewards, which are considerable for many impoverished (by Fatah corruption) young residents of the West Bank. Palestinians who are jailed, injured or killed (martyred) while trying to hurt Israelis receive large payments from Fatah. For example families of dead terrorists get an immediate payment of $1,700 from Fatah plus monthly payments for the life of immediate family. These monthly payments ($400 to over $1,000 depending on the number of wives and children) can make a family relatively affluent and open new opportunities, like enough cash to afford a people smuggler who can get one or more family members to the West.
There is also a bonus ($86 a month) if you are a legal resident of Israel and a similar monthly bonus if you were a resident of Jerusalem. Fatah is currently paying about $200 million a year to the families of over 26,000 martyrs as well as smaller payments to 6,000 badly injured while trying to kill Israelis. Monthly payments to jailed Palestinians vary according to how long they have been in jail, how many dependents they have and if they are from Israel or Jerusalem. There are also bonuses for how many Israelis the prisoner killed or injured. Some of these convicts get over $50,000 a year. Fatah currently spends about $160 million a year to reward over 6,000 jailed terrorists. Fatah considers this payment program a success even though fifty Palestinians have died in the Fatah-promoted violence this year. These attacks have left a dozen Israelis dead and for Fatah that is political gold as far as Arab language media is concerned.
With this approach Fatah and Hamas together currently spend over $400 million a year to make murder economically attractive to many young Palestinians. Most of it comes from Fatah although Hamas is trying to make more payments to Palestinians in the West Bank who support Hamas and attack Israelis in the name of Hamas. The Arab language media throughout the Middle East take for granted that these payments are just and necessary for the war against Israel. Until recently Western donors, who contribute most of the aid that keeps Fatah and Hamas going, generally refused to believe that much of their money went to reward terrorism. That is changing as a growing number of Western foreign aid donors are trying to prevent their aid from being diverted to this terrorism financial incentive program.
There's more at the link.
In December last year, the Congressional Research Service reported (link is to an Adobe Acrobat document in .PDF format):
Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed more than $5 billion in bilateral economic and non-lethal security assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid ... In addition to bilateral aid, the United States is the largest single-state donor to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
According to the New York Post, just a few days ago:
Your tax dollars at work: The Palestinian Authority is now using half of its foreign aid to reward terrorism.
The new PA budget boosts support to terrorists in prison by 13 percent and aid for the families of those killed “in the struggle against Zion” 4 percent, reports the Institute for Contemporary Affairs.
The total, $344 million, equals 49.6 percent of all foreign aid to the PA. In other words, cash from Uncle Sam, Europe and even Israel is subsidizing “welfare for terrorists.”
Again, more at the link.
As a prison chaplain, I was familiar with more than one case where a prisoner in US custody received a monthly check or money transfer "from his family in Palestine", with no further details provided. It was known to US authorities that the funds came direct from the Palestinian Authority - and all the recipients of whom I was aware, without exception, were terrorists convicted of crimes in, or directed against, the United States. In other words, our aid to Palestine was supporting terrorists who had conspired and/or acted against us.
Five-billion-plus dollars in US aid to Palestine since the mid-1990's? $215 million in US aid budgeted for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 2017 - on top of $221 million released to the Palestinians on President Obama's last day in office? I don't know about you, dear reader, but I object strongly to my tax dollars being used to subsidize and encourage terrorists!
Isn't it time the US reconsidered its aid to Palestine?
Peter
8 comments:
long years ago my husband, accustomed to travelling in mexico and central america, told me that foreign aid was not aiding anyone but the corrupt.
one central american country, in one year, had received enough usa cash to make everyone there a millionaire.
and every year the same aid was received.
this aid never made its way to the people or to the infrastructure.
i imagine that these payments are garnisheed by corrupt americans as a prerequisite to be fulfilled by the receiving countries' politicians, in order to get the cash.
that was decades ago and nothing has changed.
meanwhile our infrastructure is decaying and our people go without health care.
where in the Constitution is it written that foreign aid is required to be given by us to the corrupt? or to anyone?
our soldiers go to some of these places and are killed or disabled for no reason, as you can see that the foreign aid dollars are spent on war against those who give the aid.
our enemies probably laugh uncontrollably when they think about how stupid we are and how we deserve whatever they dish out.
How about becoming energy self-sufficient, then eliminating all aid to the entire Middle East? Let THEM sort it out.
Of course we'll keep giving them money, because if we stop, the overpaid vacuous talking heads on TV will call us racist.
PA is nothing. BHO gave Iran $1.3 billion in hard currency.
Gerry
Wow. I had no idea.
Man, do I feel clueless!
Stop foreign aid to the Arabs and the Jewish state. Neither one needs a damn dime of US taxpayer dollars. The Arabs are swimming in oil wealth and the Jewish State and the Jewish Diaspora are arguably the most wealthy and influential people on the planet. Hence the unrivaled power of AIPAC in Washington DC. The same AIPAC with their bought and paid for members of congress of both left and right who are in the process of ramming a bill through congress,S.720, which circumvents the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution and seeks to imprison American citizens for the exercise of their God given Liberty. An absolutely abhorrent piece of legislation written by AIPAC and dutifully submitted and approved by their DC lapdogs.
Between Muslim and Arab lobbying and Israeli and Jewish lobbying one wonders if anyone is lobbying for, you know, actual Americans and the American Nation.
Deborah, I'm not sure where your husband is getting his numbers from but they're laughably wrong. Belize is by far the smallest country in Central America with about 347,000 people (the rest are all above 4 mil). Simple math tells us that to make everyone there a millionaire in one year would take a million times that number, AKA roughly a tenth of the current federal budget.
Several decades ago in 1980 the ratio was roughly the same (and Belize was still the smallest Central American country).
As of 2015 less than 1% of the budget went for aid to all countries combined.
Our largest single aid expenditure is about 4.5 billion to Afghanistan, equivalent to ~$150 per person. The second largest is Israel at ~$370 per person (3 billion).
My Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, despite seeing images of the killings of civilians like the Salomons, Ariel Haddad, the Fogels, etc. - slaughtered in their homes - still maintains that aid should flow.
As a Jew, I also want aid cut and eventually eliminated to Israel (as do many Israelis). Not because I want to push Israel away, but so that tinfoil hat conspiracy people can finally get off their "Talmudic influence on America" crap.
Lastly, as to the anti-BDS legislation: nobody is stopping anyone from speaking out. Anti-BDS legislation is simply stopping states from doing business with companies that support BDS, whose openly-stated goal is the elimination of Israel, and another Shoah (Holocaust). You want to write, petition, boycott? Feel free, nobody's stopping you. But don't expect government contracts to companies that support groups that call for genocide.
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