17-Feb-14: Money and the business of sustaining a culture of terror

Photo illustrating a Telegraph UK article
about how the terrorists control and subdue Gaza's population
via the handing out of cash [Image Source].
It's clear that money plays a grossly undervalued role
in international terror. 

From experience, most people, seeing the word "terror" or "terrorism" or "jihad" in an article, will skip it and go on to something more relevant. It's hard to argue with them. Almost every aspect of their culture tells them that jihadism and terrorists belong to far-off regions beset with age-old blood feuds. Nothing relevant here. Nothing to do with me. And it's unpleasant to know about.

But the reality is that most people in most countries of Europe, North America, Australasia, South-east Asia are actually contributors to the unchecked scourge of terror without even knowing it. We think they ought to know it since the information is out there for anyone to see. But that's not how things work. If you don't want to see what's there, the politics and the news media and the general set of things that "everyone knows" will ensure you don't have to know it or see it or face up to it.

Today, the excellent Palestinian Media Watch organization went public with the case of a Palestinian Arab of no particular significance, Husni Najjar. He is an already convicted terrorist who was frank enough to tell his interrogators from the Israel Police that he got involved in the planning of a second terrorist attack for the money.

The 2012 Doha emergency conference of donors for the Palestinians
[Image Source: Reuters] 

Husni had a problem, it appears, in that

the money he received from the PA as salary during his first prison term amounted to only 45,000 shekels. However, the salary he would receive following his second prison term and subsequent release would leave him with "135,000 shekels." "And thus I would cover my debts," the terrorist explained his motive for planning the attack.

He wanted, in other words, to be captured by the Israelis for a second time. He was short of cash and needed to be paid some of what the Palestinian Authority routinely, as a matter of its own laws, pays to terrorists while in jail and following their release.

The 2009 Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, emergency conference of
donors for the Palestinians [Image Source]

The facts are all set out today, with corroborating documents, in "Terrorist planned attack in order to be imprisoned and receive PA salary" on the Palestinian Media Watch website. The conclusion an open-minded reader will reach is, as PMW puts it, 

the PA's policy of paying high salaries to terrorists during their imprisonment in Israel and after their release not only rewards terror, but also constitutes a motivation for terror.

Husni Najjar is now in an Israeli prison awaiting trial. As an imprisoned alleged terrorist, he is already today being paid a PA salary. A PA law enacted nearly three years ago specifies that this "will be paid to the prisoner from the date of his arrest".

This is truly sickening stuff. And many of the most admirable states on earth share a large part of the blame. In September 2012, we asked:

Who makes available the funding that allows the PA to conduct its unconscionable, terror-encouraging financial policies? Well, quite a number of people, if you're asking. And some that may be quite close to where you live.

• "Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip receive one of the highest levels of aid in the world..." [Wikipedia] 

• In the last five years, the U.S. government has poured at least $4 billion in aid to the Palestinians, with very little to show in return – except more terror and corruption...  Since 2008, annual U.S. bilateral assistance to the PA has averaged over $600 million, including $513 million for the current budgetary year... Time has now long come to ask whether the U.S. should continue funding at all. Last week [April 2012], in a virtually unprecedented move, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overruled a House Foreign Affairs Committee hold on $59 million in funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA), thus blatantly disregarding the integrity of Congress. The money was ‘held’ by request of Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl), largely out of concern it may reach the hands of Hamas and be used to commit acts of terror against Israel and the United States. According to a State Department official, Secretary Clinton released the funds, because they were viewed as providing “critical support to the Palestinian people and those leaders seeking to combat extremism within their society and build a more stable future.” [Source: Time for the U.S. to Stop Funding the Palestinian Authority, April 20, 2012. Author: Arsen Ostrovsky]

• In the 2008 Paris Conference [source], 11% of the pledges for the PA came from the US and Canada, 53% from Europe... and a mere 20% from the Arab countries - much of which was never delivered.

• "The majority of aid to the Palestinian Authority comes from the United States and European Union. According to figures released by the PA, only 22 percent of the $530,000,000 received since the beginning of 2010 came from Arab donors. The remainder came from Western donors and organizations. The total amount of foreign aid received directly by the PA was $1.4 billion in 2009 and $1.8 billion in 2008. [Source]"

These are things people ought to know when the role of money as a driver of terrorism is understood. The fact is that Palestinians charged with terrorism have long received absurdly generous stipends from the PA. Quoting ourselves again: 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 many parts of the news media. 

The 2007 Paris conference of donors for the Palestinians
[Image Source]

The United States gives more than $600 million to the Palestinians annually. $225 million of it goes directly to the PA. Can anyone seriously claim that US funding is not central to the disgusting things the Mahmoud Abbas regime is doing in promoting, rewarding and actively encouraging terror? Perhaps Husni ought to be asked.

Can we offer these three sources of information (from our blog) that we wish people took more seriously? Please help us get them out and into public discussion:

• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.
• 4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought

We are grateful to Małgorzata Koraszewska for rendering this post into the Polish language. It's posted here.