28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.

Palestinian children: European and American return on investment 

Governments who take their citizens' tax money and send it to the Palestinian regimes - both of them - have steadfastly refused to answer for the evil that this funding enables.

The issue is not new. Arnold Roth (one of this blog's two authors) wrote about this under the title "Blood, Money and Education" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal eight years ago [the article is reproduced here].

And the issue was by no means new or unknown then.

The years go by. Some people get smarter. Some get stupider. Some just don't want to know.

Palestinian Media Watch, a courageous and intellectually-honest Israel-based organization that monitors Palestinian Arab culture and media, presented a study to members of the US Congress this week. It focuses on money that starts out in Washington and ends up in the hands of the families of people who have carried out some of the most barbaric terrorist attacks the world has known.

To state the findings briefly:

• More than 5,500 Palestinians serving time in Israeli prisons for terrorism are getting salaries from the Palestinian Authority [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 14, 2011] 
• Those payments do not go to Palestinian car thieves. They do go to every terrorist - including hundreds of murderers - serving time in Israeli prisons. 
• We do not plan to check into this, but it's almost certain such payments also go to the murderers of our daughter Malki.
• We already know via the official PA daily that the man who built the bomb that killed our child, a man called Barghouti, is a "heroic prisoner". [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 13, 2011, via this week's PMW report]. There's simply no room for doubting the lionization of such monsters by every official level of Palestinian Arab society.
• The money payments go either to the terrorist himself/herself or to the terrorist's family and are retrospective to the day of arrest. [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 15, 2011] 
• To be clear about this: Palestinians charged with terrorism have long received such stipends from the PA. It's part of the general, systematic government-level support for terrorism by both Palestinian regimes that is methodically ignored or hidden by complicit Western governments abetted by large parts of the news media.
• What's new is these payments became formalized in April 2011 under a new PA law. We wrote about this here ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"] 
• The United States gives more than $600 million to the Palestinians annually. $225 million of it goes directly to the PA.
• The 2010 law that approved aid to the PA required the US State Department to “take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the Secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity.”
• It's self-evident that this law has been breached. The requirement imposed on the State Department is a bad joke.
• The payment of salaries to convicted terrorists currently runs at $5.2 million per month [May 2011 figures - source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 19, 2011], and is a clear violation of this law.
• The PMW analysis shows that these terrorism-supporting payments are larger, on average, than the salaries paid to Palestinian civil servants and military personnel. This makes it clear to every Palestinian Arab family which career path the Abbas/Faayad regime seeks to encourage.

Something might now happen in the US Congress, though it's a long shot. 

But when it comes to European government support for the identical double-dealing, the encouragement of terror, and the opaque fund transfers to both of the pro-terror Palestinian Arab regimes, there's no reason to expect anything will change. Unless Itamar Marcus and his research staff at PMW can manage to bring their presentation in front of European politicians.

And even then...