16-Feb-13: How the money paid as taxes by ordinary people ends up bankrolling the terrorists

Unrepentant mass murderer; who do you imagine is paying for
the monthly salary that is sent to his family? Answer at
the bottom of this post [Image Source]

An official of the American Islamic Congress has a strongly-expressed op ed in tomorrow's New York Times entitled "How Europe Bankrolls Terror". His central thesis:

Over the past decade, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands have paid more than $130 million to terrorist groups, mostly through mediators, to free European hostages... The so-called global war on terror has been hobbled by these payoffs. [NY Times]

He makes a reasonable point. But if this hobbled the fight against the terrorists, then what about the far larger sums shoveled into the maw of the Palestinian Arab terror machine throughout the past decade? And continuing. It's a theme we have addressed here numerous times. Some examples:

• 6-Oct-06: Crying Poor: The Terror-Laden Rise and Rise of the Palestinian National Payroll
• 1-Mar-11: Finally, some sanity on European funding of Palestinian Arab terror
• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name
• 7-Jun-11: International terror victims group asks EC to intervene against PA's promotion of terror  
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.
• 26-Oct-12: Ordinary Europeans and their politicians fund Palestinian Arab terror. How do they respond when confronted with the evidence?
• 7-Jan-13: Ongoing European funding of terrorism continues despite laws, rules and policies prohibiting it

What we have written in those posts and keep repeating is that European tax-payers are the major source of the money that is used by terrorism-addicted regimes - in particular the Palestinian Authority or as it now prefers to call itself, "The State of Palestine" - to reward and encourage the people who have already murdered and who aspire to murder in the near future the children of the people whom their religious and secular leaders teach them to hate. Refer to the excellent, though sadly not-up-date, EU Funding site for more background.

In a recent post, we quoted Douglas Murray, associate director at the London-based Henry Jackson Society think-tank, who wrote about this under the headline "Palestinian Terrorists on the Payroll" [online at the WSJE site]. Here's a reminder of a small part of what he writes there:

...Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East... 

Most of the politicians and civil servants who facilitate this disgraceful funding process with the money of ordinary citizens know they are doing it. So do many in the news media. And when ordinary folks have it explained to them, they become furious.

So why is it that the scandal continues with so little rational intervention? It's not a new issue. We published an article about this in a major European newspaper more than nine years ago. See the Wall Street Journal Europe, September 26, 2003 edition: "Blood, Money and Education" [online here]. It has some very critical things to say about a certain British politician who we believe was up to his eyebrows in involvement with covering up the EU funding of Palestinian terrorism at the time. Today he is the UK government's man in charge of the BBC.

The portrait at the top of this post is of Abdullah Barghouti. He manufactured the bomb-in-a-guitar-case for the Hamas operation that targeted the Sbarro restaurant in central Jerusalem; the explosion killed 15 people, left a 16th unconscious until today, and injured more than 130. A large proportion of the casualties were Jewish children, one of them our daughter. Barghouti's monthly salary, amounting to thousands of shekels and growing, is paid to his family by the "moderate" PA, largely funded by unwitting taxpayers in the UK, India, Norway, Ireland, France, Japan and the United States, as well as from the European Union aid budget.