11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money

Taylor Force was murdered by an Arab assailant while he jogged on Tel Aviv's foreshore on March 8, 2016. He was 29 and a student at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management. He is pictured here with his sister Kirsten [Image Source]

The US Senate is due to hold hearings tomorrow (Wednesday) on the Taylor Force Act which, if passed, is likely to substantially cut US funding to the Palestinian Authority:

The Taylor Force Act is a legislative bill co-sponsored in the United States Senate in 2016 by U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Dan Coats (R-Indiana), and Roy Blunt (R-Missouri). The legislation proposes to stop American economic aid to the Palestinian Authority until the PA changes its laws to cease paying stipends funneled through the Palestinian Authority Martyr's Fund to individuals who commit acts of terrorism and to the families of deceased terrorists. [Wikipedia]

Palestinian Media Watch - an Israel-based nongovernmental organization and media watchdog group founded in 1996 by Itamar Marcus documents cases of incitement in Palestinian media - yesterday released a transcript (translated from the original Arabic) of an Israeli Police interrogation of a Palestinian Arab terrorist, one Khaled Rajoub, caught after an unsuccessful attempt to murder Israelis.

In the course of Rajoub's interrogation on February 2, 2014, he gave the police a stunningly candid rationalization for his deeds: so that he would be killed by the Israelis and his wife and children would become entitled to monthly payments from the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme.

It's material that ought to get the widest publicity. But, things being what they are, probably will not.

The text extracted below is based on a longer PMW online version ["Interrogation of Palestinian terrorist proves: PA payments motivate terror", Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch, July 10, 2017] and an earlier version of that same report here.

Had this Rajoub died in the course of carrying out an Arab-on-Israeli terror attack, the PA would have certified him as a "martyr" (in Arabic: shaheed). His family would have become entitled to a monthly allowance of 2,800 New Israeli Shekels per month based on NIS 1,400 base pay, NIS 400 for the wife (for her life) and NIS 200 for each of the five children (for their lives). It's a good, family-sized salary in their society's terms. It would have brought honour on the head of the dead-ender who made it possible by attacking Israelis.

As PMW has reported, it's not only “martyr” families who receive monthly payments; under PA law, every terrorist prisoner is granted a monthly PA salary while in jail, ranging from 1,400 shekels to NIS 12,000 a month based on the time spent in prison. For Khaled Rajoub, the PA's Rewards for Terror and its financial rewards were all the incentive he needed. The scheme works.

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "I am a man with a family of seven, including me and my wife. I don't work. I have accumulated large debts and am unable to pay them off. I reached a point where, if my son wants a shekel, I have nothing to give him. Therefore I decided to die. It didn't matter how, by hanging, any way, [just] to die. I thought about it and said to myself that if I die by hanging, or any other way, I won't get anything out of it, so I decided to do something serious such as committing murder, something in which I will both kill and die and then my family will get money [meaning from what we call the Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror scheme] and will live comfortably. In other words, something will come out of my death. In the end I decided to kill Israeli soldiers. I got in a car and drove to Al-Fawwar, to the junction because there's always a military post there, and I said [to myself] that I'll run [the soldiers] over in my car and kill as many as I can and they'll shoot me and kill me. However, I didn't find a military post in Al-Fawwar. I continued to drive to a second post, to the gate of [the Israeli community of Beit] Hagai because I know there are always soldiers standing there... I did not find [any soldiers] there either. I had no other hope or way, so I broke through the gate of the settlement [meaning Beit Haggai]... I broke in with my car and smashed it and rammed into the second gate. But I couldn't smash it and the guards were behind the second gate. I tried to smash it in order to bring it down on them but it didn't come down and they didn't shoot me, but captured me instead. I was injured during the incident and they took me to a hospital..."
Interrogator: "Do you have a gun?"

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "I've never carried [a gun]."

Interrogator: "Did you consider bringing a gun?"

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "I have nothing to eat. How can I buy a gun?" 

Interrogator: "Why did you decide to kill soldiers, and not someone else?"

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "The best is to kill soldiers. That way they have guns and they'll shoot me and kill me. But if I'm not able to kill soldiers, I'll try settlers, guards - in other words any Israeli target - the important thing is that I will die and they will kill me, so that my children will receive a [PA] allowance and live happily."

Interrogator: "What did you want to achieve by killing soldiers or settlers, or any Israeli target?" 

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "So they'd shoot me and I'd die, and my children would receive an allowance."

Interrogator: "Are you still determined to do that?" 

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "Of course, 100%. I'm telling you: if you'll set me free, I'll do it again as soon as possible. I'll bring another car, and I'll run over [soldiers] at the first military post I see. I'll kill as many as possible, and they'll shoot me, and I'll die. There is no other solution... I say to you again - I don't regret what I did, and if I have the opportunity, I'll do it again, and I'll kill soldiers or any Israeli I come across."
Interrogator: "If you have the opportunity to kill soldiers or an Israeli [civilian] in another way - shooting, stabbing, or any other way - will you do it?"

Rajoub to his Israeli interrogators: "I don't know. Something like that requires checking. Why? Because someone like me, small and disabled in his leg - I barely walk - needs a thorough plan to kill in a different way. The easiest way for someone like me is to run over [someone] with a car."

(We're still trying to track down details of the circumstances of the terror attack.)

For what it's worth, let the record show we're strongly in favour of the Taylor Force Act and urge the US Congress to bring it into law as soon as possible. Can there be any doubt, after you read open and candid admissions like Rajoub's, that defunding the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme will save lives - on the Palestinian Arab side as well as on ours?

Are Europe and the UK listening?

04-May-17: When Mahmoud met Donald: Thinking about the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme

In the White House yesterday [Image Source]

We had a welcome opportunity yesterday to publicly express some things about the Palestinian Authority's blood-soaked Rewards for Terror scheme. That's not its official name but it does describe what actually goes on.

The occasion was a formal visit by PA president Mahmoud Abbas to the White House, and a perceptive article by Ben Cohen: "As Trump Meets Abbas, Victim Families Press Issue of Financial Rewards for Palestinian Terrorists" [Ben Cohen | The Algemeiner | May 3, 2017]

Some excerpts (and Arnold Roth is quoted):

The PA currently spends $300 million annually on the payments – close to 8 percent of its budget. Critics say that the PA actively incentivizes terrorism, by promising financial rewards and national glory for those who participate...
“There are some small indications that ‘concern’ was expressed in the name of the United States during the Trump/Abbas encounter concerning the ongoing PA payments scheme that rewards Palestinian Arabs for engaging in terror,” noted Arnold Roth, whose 15 year old daughter, Malki, was murdered in the suicide bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizza restaurant in August 2001.
“The passions that the prisoner payments scheme arouses in Palestinian Arab society seem never to be adequately captured in mainstream news reports – I worry that they are not well-enough understood by the people now exercising power in Washington,” Roth told The Algemeiner.
Roth argued that western governments enjoy leverage over the PA which they are reluctant to exercise.  “Mahmoud Abbas’ perpetually insolvent administration stays in business only because of massive hand-outs of foreign aid,” he stated. “In a sane world, the providers of those donations – the US and the European Union in particular – would be attaching real conditions to them. But mystifyingly they don’t.”
Stephen Flatow, whose 20 year old daughter Alisa was murdered in the 1995 suicide bombing of an Israeli bus by Islamic Jihad, asserted that “raising the issue for discussion is just not enough.”
...Neither Trump nor Abbas mentioned the issue of the prisoner payments at their joint appearance on Wednesday. “If the issue is not raised, I wouldn’t understand the rationale for the US position and I’d be extremely disappointed,” Flatow said. “The PA’s payments to terrorists –on  a sliding scale no less, based on the number of Jews killed or injured – serves to encourage others to commit terror.” [Read the whole article here]

It's worth noting that Wednesday's Abbas state visit came as the US Congress is weighing legislation (described here: "Senators introduce Taylor Force Act to cut Palestinian funding over terror rewards", JNS, September 30, 2016)

to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if they continue their policy of paying monetary rewards for terrorism. U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC.), Dan Coats (R-IN.) and Roy Blunt (R-MO.) introduced the Taylor Force Act, which would require the U.S. secretary of state to certify the Palestinian Authority has ended its policy of paying monetary rewards to terrorist and their surviving family members. The bill also calls on the PA to publicly condemn terror attacks and to take steps to bring the perpetrators to justice.

We wrote about Taylor Allen Force [here] about 14 months ago. An American visitor to Israel as part of a Vanderbilt University school trip and a graduate of West Point Military Academy, he was stabbed to death by a Palestinian Arab terrorist who also injured 10 others in an attack on the seashore at Jaffa.

Poster at a British protest against the incitement of the PA
[Image Source]

The legislation that bears his name is not yet US law. It was referred to the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs in February [source] and is currently working its way through the system.

Whatever the outcome, the name of the murdered young US veteran will get considerably more respect there than it did when the "moderate" Arab-operated-but-European-financed Ma'an News Agency turned its attention, so to speak, to what was done to him:

Ma'an says the attacker is a 22-year-old from a village, al-Zawiya, near Qalqiliya. It gives his name as Bashar Masalha. What does Ma'an tell its readers about the man who was murdered by the villager? Not his name, not his age, not his background or anything about his life; just that he was "an American tourist". Nor do they mention how an Israeli musician, sitting near the beach and strumming on his guitar, gave the fleeing knife-man a massive whack on the head, destroying his musical instrument but slowing the murderer down so that the armed security people in pursuit could catch up with him and eventually stop him,
Not surprisingly, the Arabic version of the Ma'an report, the one which the editors assume will not be read by people outside the Arab world, honors the knife-man in a sub-heading as "shaheed", or "martyr". Mr Force is not mentioned at all. Hamas, whether because it's true or because they wish it were, issued a Tweet [here] saying the killer came from its ranks. The American man he murdered is dismissed as "a Zionist"... ["09-Mar-16: News reporting and how it ensures more terror"]

(By the way, people concerned with the pursuit of peace and a much better future for children on our side and on the Arab side as well certainly ought to know more about Ma'an and the hideous values it disseminates. We try to do our bit.) 

Ben Cohen's Algemeiner article ends with a quote worth emphasizing from Grant Rumley, a Palestinian affairs expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noting 

the centrality of the prisoner payments issue to Palestinian internal politics. “Any change on the payments policy will cost Abbas dearly at home,” Rumley said.

Yes, changing the Rewards for Terror scheme will be expensive for Abbas.

But we think the question for non-Palestinian Arabs is: so what? Should we be worrying about the political future of this 82 year-old kleptocrat, this inveterate inciter to hatred, this career politician now in the thirteenth year of his four-year term as president and continuing to hold tight for more?

No.

Abbas parading with freshly-freed terrorists, all of them killers,
in 2014. In the days after this rally took place, very one of the ex-prisoners
enjoyed a Rewards for Terror payday beyond anything of which they
dreamed - all of it funded by the foreign aid budgets of EU states and the US. 

We should care instead whether the payments - funded mainly by ordinary and unwitting taxpayers in the United States and Europe under the guise of international foreign aid - that serve to perpetuate a culture of lethal bigotry and the weaponizing of Palestinian Arab children can be stopped as a matter of urgency.

We should care about what it will take to cultivate a new and completely different kind of leadership among the Palestinian Arabs, one that will focus on reshuffling the core values of their own people so that building them a better future takes precedence over stealing ours.

It could be that Abbas agrees. In yesterday's meeting, he said (according this source):

We are coming into a new opportunity a new horizon that would enable us to bring about peace... [Associated Press, May 3, 2017]

Can someone urgently show him and his entourage the way to the exit? That new horizon is needed desperately.

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.