28-Mar-17: The US can end the Palestinian Arab bureaucracy of terror

Each one a convicted murderer, the Tamimi couple (photographed last week
in their home) live in comfort and style today in Amman, Jordan, a lifestyle
funded to a significant extent by the Palestinian Authority's Pay-to-Slay
(Rewards for Terror) payment scheme. Though most don't realize it, a large
percentage of our blog's readers finance this through their taxes.
[Image Source: Al Jazeera]

An editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal mentions the obscenely fat payments ("several times the average Palestinian wage") made monthly by the Mahmoud Abbas regime to the family of a now-deceased Palestinian Arab terrorist thug.

The circumstances behind those payments ought to be better known than they are: the money flows specifically because the knife-man murdered a young US vet who happened to be jogging on Tel Aviv's sea shore a year ago ["09-Mar-16: News reporting and how it ensures more terror"].

There are thousands of similar such recipients. Every single month. Eight percent of the entire PA budget is devoted to the payment of what the PA insists be called "salaries", not welfare payments. The Abbas regime is chronically unable to meet its financial obligations but reiterates over and again [source] that the payments we're talking about will not be cut back. Who says they have no principles?

Two key points:

• The money that enables this sick and provocative payments arrangement (we have long referred to it here as the PA Rewards for Terror scheme) comes from Western countries who donate foreign aid to the Abbas/Fatah/PLO regime. The United States figures prominently among the scheme's financiers. So does the European Union.
• The same scheme provided our daughter's murderer with a huge payday when she was prematurely released from Israeli prison where she had been sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment. The man she married some months later ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"], also a convicted murderer sentenced to a life term and also her cousin, gets a no-less-generous pension from the same appalling PA source.

Pay for Slay in Palestine | U.S. aid becomes a transfer payment for terrorists.
Wall Street Journal Editorial | March 27, 2017 | 6:26 p.m. ET

Republicans in Congress want to stop the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in U.S. aid to a state sponsor of terrorism: the Palestinian Authority. That’s the same PA that the U.S. and Israel have long supported as a partner for peace. But the PA is no such thing, so this is a chance to bring policy into line with moral and strategic realities.

The effort highlights a scandal hiding in plain sight: PA officials tell foreign audiences that they oppose terrorism, yet they pay generous rewards to Palestinians who carry out bombings, stabbings and other attacks against innocents in Israel. These payments are codified in Palestinian law, which dictates that the deadlier an attack, the richer the reward. Payments equaled $315 million last year, or 8% of the PA budget.

Beneficiaries include the family of Bashar Masalha, who last year stabbed 11 people near Tel Aviv and killed 28-year-old Taylor Force, a U.S. Army veteran visiting Israel on a break from business school. Police killed Masalha, but his relatives now receive monthly payments equal to several times the average Palestinian wage. With special offices and more than 500 civil servants dedicated to disbursing these funds, the PA’s message is clear: Terrorism pays.

The U.S. has effectively endorsed this message by sending billions of dollars to the PA while overlooking its pay-for-slay policy. But now the Taylor Force Act promises to cut more than $200 million in annual economic aid to the PA unless it stops paying terrorists. “We’re not going to invest in a group of people that have laws like this. It’s just not a good investment,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, a co-sponsor.

The legislation faces hurdles because some Democrats and Israelis argue that cutting aid could cause the PA to collapse, inviting chaos and a possible takeover of the West Bank by Hamas, which already controls the Gaza Strip. By this logic the PA is the devil we know, and its support for small-scale terrorism must be balanced against its cooperation with Israel in combating threats from Hamas and Islamic State.

These are real concerns, but the PA and its defenders have a long history of threatening collapse to avoid reform. This is one reason 81-year-old PA President Mahmoud Abbas is in the 13th year of a four-year term, still rewarding terrorism. It’s also why Israeli security veterans increasingly support action against the PA.

“Pressuring the PA to end its ‘murder for hire’ policy is accompanied by political and security risks, but moral rectitude often entails facing dangers,” former Israeli army chief Moshe Ya’alon and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin wrote this month. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman recently designated the Palestinian National Fund, which disburses the PA’s blood money, as a terrorist organization.

President Trump hasn’t commented on the Taylor Force Act, but Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats co-sponsored the original bill in the Senate last year. A White House endorsement would be timely as Mr. Trump has invited Mr. Abbas to Washington “in the near future.”

Whenever that meeting happens, ending the PA’s bureaucracy of terror should be atop the agenda.