06-Oct-15: They're shocked! Associated Press discovers the Palestinian Arab reward-for-terror payments scheme

Money being supplied in vast quantities to the Palestinian Authority leadership and it ends up in the hands of terrorists? Why, we had absolutely no idea. We're shocked. Shocked.

If you are an unemployed Palestinian Arab with ambitions, a course of action has been open to you for years that's violent, dangerous, deadly and immoral - but brings with it certain benefits. And if you're also a believer who is taught to embrace death when it involves murdering certain others, it comes down to win/win: the money or the box.

Associated Press, several years too late, has the fresh breaking news today that the Mahmoud Abbas Palestinian Authority regime pays killers and other imprisoned terrorists a financial reward, and that it's substantial. The information comes from reliable sources:

Israel Radio says it has obtained official Palestinian government documents confirming hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to prisoners convicted in some of the deadliest attacks on Israelis. Tuesday's report comes after days of violent clashes and repeated Israeli accusations of Palestinian incitement to violence. Palestinians have long acknowledged paying support to the families of prisoners held by Israel, but payments personally to prisoners convicted in deadly attacks have never been made public. Israel Radio claims the documents show the hefty sums given to those serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prisons. They include Hamas militants behind suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis. Ashraf al-Ajrami, a former Palestinian minister for prisoners, confirmed the report, saying the prisoners are "heroes" and the money is for their families.

There's so much to say about this painful subject, and so many questions with answers that keep getting ignored, that the only real puzzle on our minds is: why is this getting media attention now? And what do these words actually mean?

Palestinians have long acknowledged paying support to the families of prisoners held by Israel, but payments personally to prisoners convicted in deadly attacks have never been made public.

Anyone - any public figure, any media commentator, any reform-minded politician, any whistle-blower on the funding side of the transactions that made all of this possible - who wanted to find out how and why this was going on had endless ways of uncovering the facts. You just had to want to. Most people don't.

Here is a selection - just a selection - of posts we have written in the past four years (alone) that deal with the Palestinian Authority reward-for-terror payments scheme (not its official name, but an accurate one).

• 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
• 26-Oct-12: Ordinary Europeans and their politicians fund Palestinian Arab terror. How do they respond when confronted with the evidence?
• 13-Jun-13: Little-known sides to the post-Shalit careers of unjustly released killers
• 21-Jul-13: In the debate over whether Israel should free convicted terrorists, one key argument is mostly ignored
• 13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!
• 10-Dec-13: EU may have located the billions it "lost" in Palestine. Or not.
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 9-Apr-14: Straight talk, crooked dealings: is the role of foreign aid in financing Palestinian Arab terror about to change?
• 30-Jul-14: Is Europe's uncritical funding connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?
• 08-Feb-15: Foreign money and the Palestinian Arab terror it buys
• 10-Mar-15: The not-so-moderate Palestinian Authority and the terrorism it enables
• 31-May-15: Lights, camera, action, terror
• 02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists
• 16-Jul-15: Abbas' expensive PA reward-for-terror funding scheme pays dividend yet again

And earlier still, we wrote about things we learned from meetings with several of the key people [see "6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen"], a depressing experience that brought home to us how lies and duplicity by people in the highest of public places were the secret to the constant access to money which the Arafat and Abbas cliques have enjoyed throughout the past 15 years.

The impact of the AP report, echoing a defect in the Israel Radio source news item, concerns the scale of the cash being washed through the PA's payment scheme. It was on the order of $140 million last year (2014), That's a sizable piece of the budget of a government that claims to be perpetually out of funds.

In the April 9, 2014 post you see in the list above, we described the scale of things based on what we learned from Israeli government data at the time:

A document produced by the Israel Government Prime Minister's Office in January and publicized just today [according to the Jerusalem Post] reiterates the extent to which the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas finances terrorism, making monkeys out of the foreign governments whose aid money makes this possible. Some key points:

• In 2012, the PA's overall budget was $3.1 Billion of which $786 Million came from foreign aid.

• The impoverished (by its own description) PA channeled no less than $153.5 Million to terrorists imprisoned in Israel, to their families, and to the families of deceased terrorists including human bombs during that year. 

• That's 16% of the foreign aid received by the PA in that period.

• It's also 5% of the PA's annual total budget.

The painful absence of interest in the answers to the questions about this torrent of cash for killing and hatred is the real story.