Obama Funds Terrorists

Obama Funds Terrorists

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On April 23^rd, Obama stopped by the Holocaust Memorial Museum where he mouthed the words, “Never Again” and two days later he issued a memorandum waiving restrictions on funding to the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority, which routinely calls for the murder of Jews, and for its president who has described the Holocaust as a “fantastic lie.”
It took Obama a day to disavow his commitment to a united Jerusalem. It took him a little longer to disavow his commitment to “Never Again.”
In his memorandum, Obama certified the 192 million dollar aid package as “important to the national security interests of the United States” and White House spokesman Tommy Vietor claimed that it would ensure “the continued viability of the moderate PA government.” That same moderate government which has tried to form a pact with Hamas and whose high ranking officials have repeatedly engaged in terrorism.

The Palestinian Accountability Act, which Obama waived with a flourish of the pen, was one in a series of attempts to stem the flow of taxpayer money to the terrorist corruptocracy in Ramallah. The Act mandated that no funds may be made available to the Palestinian Authority until it ends its terrorist activities and an independent audit is conducted of its finances. Rather than complying with the bill, Obama dismissed it by resorting to the transparently fraudulent claim of national security.
So where is that money really going?
According to the Palestinian Authority, its budget crisis was caused by the funding that it provides to Hamas run Gaza at a rate of 120 million dollars a month. If we take these figures as actual, then its 1.3 billion dollar budget deficit is almost entirely composed of Gaza expenditures.
Another 60 million dollars a year is paid out to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Obama’s generous waiver would cover a month’s worth of expenses for Hamas run Gaza and a year’s worth of salaries for the imprisoned murderers and bombers. Including members of Hamas. Then there are the infrastructure projects, like homes for released terrorists built by the Palestinian Investment Fund.
Nearly 1.8 billion dollars of the PA budget for 2012 consists of government salaries. With above 20 percent unemployment, those in the West Bank and Gaza who don’t work in Israel, work directly or indirectly for the Palestinian Authority or the UNRWA, both funded by foreign donors, including the United States. The World Bank found that the Palestinian Authority’s government employment rates are more than twice the average for the region with around 150,000 employees.  About 65,000 of those are in Hamas run Gaza.
For all the talk about the needs of the Palestinian people, the Authority is in the guns, not butter business. Security spending is its single largest sector expenditure. Within the governance sector, which American aid heavily focuses on, 43 percent of funds goes to security. Its projections for the next three years call for 234 million dollars in security spending.
The Palestinian Authority’s National Development Plan projected a 30 percent increase in security spending for 2012. While it cut the number of health care workers, it did manage to add another 1,122 security employees in the West Bank and 203 in Gaza. These employees are for the most part members of allied militias who are involved in terrorist operations.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

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Strip away all the niceties and this is the core of the Palestinian Authority, a collection of militias funded by the United States and the European Union. Social services for supporters of the militias, construction contracts for friends of the militias and finally incitement and hate in its media apparatus. The only practical difference between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is that the former is directly funded by the United States and the latter is only indirectly funded.
Obama’s 192 million dollar payout is only the beginning. 88.6 million dollars had already been released in March and we haven’t seen the last of the waivers either. This isn’t the first time that Obama has used a national security waiver to bypass certification procedures in order to extract American taxpayer money for the Palestinian Authority. Since 2009 waivers have been used every year to sideline Congress and direct money without accountability to the Palestinian Authority.
The 192 million is just a piece of a larger puzzle. The United States is the single largest donor to the UNRWA, a United Nations agency concerned with only one group, Palestinian Arabs. And under Obama the amount of money that the United States plows into the UNRWA has increased dramatically. In 2007 the United States contributed 154 million dollars to the UNRWA. By 2009 the contribution had shot up to 268 million dollars. This year it’s projected to be around 232 million, but will likely be higher than that.

While Obama rushed to deliver the money to the Palestinian Authority, Arab League donors are as usual slow to pay up their own pledges. When American diplomats stop by Riyadh or Cairo, they immediately receive the usual formal lectures on how compellingly vital the Palestinian cause is to the Arab World, but it’s not compelling enough to get them to provide the aid that they promised. Hardly a year goes by when the Palestinian Authority doesn’t whine that its “Arab brothers” aren’t fulfilling their pledges.
But why should they? Let the infidels cover the salaries of the terrorist militias who keep the unelected leaders of the Authority in power with millions diverted into their international bank accounts. They aren’t interested in the people living in Gaza and the West Bank except as a means of destroying Israel. Under Bush, Arab donations picked up as American donations dropped off, but under Obama, they dropped off again, secure in the knowledge that the White House will generously see to the needs of the Authority and its murderous terror state.
At the Holocaust Museum, Obama said, “We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen — because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts, and because so many others stood silent.”
But Palestinian Authority television had another message for the children. “Our children are our glory and honor, they were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine, and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood.”
That is what Obama’s 192 million dollars is truly funding, the perpetuation of a culture of hate, a celebration of death and the pursuit of genocide.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.