08-Oct-19: Again: Jordan's inscrutable US relationship

The Jordanian government harbors and safeguards within its borders the Sbarro pizzeria bomber, Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas jihad agent.

It has been doing this since at least March 2017, days after the US Department of Justice unveiled terrorism charges against her and announced that it had called on Jordan to extradite her under their 1995 treaty.

Since then, and despite repeated efforts by us - Frimet and Arnold Roth whose daughter Malki was murdered in the terror attack masterminded by Tamimi - the US government has not once stated publicly in any form or any language that it views Jordan's unstated failure to extradite as being in clear breach of the 1995 Extradition Treaty signed by the two countries.

(But there's this: In correspondence addressed to us specifically and said to be official and quotable, a spokesperson for the US government made clear that the US "continue to dispute the Jordanian government’s claim [namely] that the bilateral extradition treaty we signed in 1995 is null... as we exchanged instruments of ratification, bringing the treaty into force on July 29, 1995, and the treaty has not been terminated.")

From US law enforcement services, we have learned that they are ready to take Tamimi into custody. That's been the case since March 2017 at least ["14-Mar-17: Sbarro massacre mastermind is now formally charged and extradition is sought"].

The problem, and it's a stunning one given how dependent Jordan is on its American allies, Jordan won't allow it.

We have written polite and carefully drafted letters to a variety of senior officials in the Department of Justice, to officials in the State Department, to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to a variety of US diplomats posted in the Middle East.

Not one of these has produced a satisfactory response, no matter how generously "satisfactory" is defined.

Image Source: Jordan Times, a newspaper controlled by
the Jordanian government. It blocks us on Twitter. So does
Jordan's ambassador to Washington.

Jordan continues, despite the outrageous finger-in-the-American-eye, to be treated by the United States as if nothing had happened. Our objections, as the parents of a child, a US citizen, murdered in the Sbarro massacre, are for all practical purposes ignored.

The government-controlled Jordan Times (a newspaper that blocks us on Twitter) has just produced the next chapter in this ongoing process of US self-debasement.

King receives US congressional delegation

Meeting focuses on Jordanian-US cooperation, strategic partnership, latest regional developments
Jordan Times | October 6, 2019
AMMAN — His Majesty King Abdullah, accompanied by HRH Crown Prince Hussein, at Al Husseiniya Palace on Sunday, received a US congressional delegation headed by US House of Representatives member Jason Crow.
The meeting, attended by HRH Prince Feisal, focused on Jordanian-US cooperation and strategic partnership, in addition to the latest regional developments, according to a Royal Court statement.
King Abdullah expressed Jordan's appreciation for the support provided by the United States in development and defence, emphasising the important role of Congress in this regard, the statement said.
Discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, His Majesty stressed the need to step up international efforts to end the conflict based on the two-state solution, which guarantees the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The King also stressed the need to de-escalate and resolve regional crises through dialogue.
Discussing the Syrian crisis, His Majesty called for a political solution that preserves Syria's territorial integrity, the unity of its people, and the voluntary, safe return of refugees, underscoring the importance of maintaining stability, especially in southern Syria.
The meeting also covered regional and international efforts to counter terrorism within a holistic approach.
For their part, the US lawmakers highlighted the deep-rooted US-Jordan relations, commending Jordan’s role, under the leadership of His Majesty, in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East.
Adviser to His Majesty for Communication and Coordination Bisher Al Khasawneh and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maj. Gen. Yousef Huneiti attended the meeting.
Also on Sunday, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi discussed with the US delegation regional developments, with a focus on the Palestinian cause and the challenges facing the two-state solution, the Syrian crisis and the war against terror.
Safadi highlighted the deep Amman-Washington relations and expressed appreciation for the US’ support to the Kingdom, according to a ministry statement.
Members of the delegation lauded King Abdullah’s role and his efforts to achieve regional security and stability reiterating continued support to Jordan as a strategic partner to the US, according to the statement.

We're speechless.

UPDATE October 21, 2019Another high-level US Congressional delegation has gone to Jordan to pay homage to the king ["19-Oct-19: House Speaker Pelosi led an official visit today to the chief protector of our child's killer"]. And once again, there's not a word about any US official or representative even raising, let alone tackling in a meaningful way, the issue of Jordan harboring a fugitive from US justice.

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.

01-Mar-17: Washington may be launching a long-overdue assault on Abbas' lethal Rewards for Terror scheme

Abbas' Rewards for Terror scheme, chiefly and lavishly funded by the United States and the European Union, is said to hold a "sacred" position in today's Palestinian Arab public opinion. Time that changed. [Image Source: AP]

Money has always played an under-appreciated enabling role in the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, even as those doing the actual channeling to the terrorists have doggedly denied the connection.

Channeled is the right word because the actual money for this sort of funding is never coming from the facilitators' pockets. It always originates with ordinary, unwitting taxpayers. Those doing the allocating and delivering are invariably paid functionaries in a publicly-funded European, Australian or North American government office.

This is infuriating. We have been writing about it since before we started our blog. See for instance this June 2004 contribution by Arnold Roth to the website of EU Funding (mission: "An Independent Look at the Role of European Funding in the Middle East") in which he addresses the British political figure who headed the EU's foreign ministry at the time, Christopher Patten [for background, see our post "9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs"].

A news article had appeared earlier that day, providing what Roth called:

the clearest possible indication that Arafat and his regime have at all relevant times funded the Palestinian Arab militants. Not to mince words about it, this - for those who actually need such things - is "the smoking gun". It connects the PA to terrorism, and by extension, implicates the European Commission which has continued to shovel vast amounts of money into the very same PA pipeline against reams of evidence that to do so is to fund murder. Depending on how one looks at it, today's story is either a revelation, or a very, very good reason for you and your staff to pick up the phone and make some urgent calls.

Brussels, May 2001: Patten in the company of Yasser Arafat, 
Romano Prodi and Nabil Shaath [Image Source]

Naturally Christopher Patten (honored these days to be called Baron Patten of Barnes) never made that call.

Nor was he moved by an op-ed in Wall Street Journal that had appeared in September 2003 under the title "Blood, Money and Education", also written by Arnold Roth. (It's behind a WSJ paywall. Another version is archived here.) Or by an open letter delivered to Patten that same month and published here.

We began blogging here in 2006. About a hundred of our posts in the years since then are key-worded "Funding". It's continued to be one of major preoccupations.

Having lost a dearly-loved child to the satanic work of Hamas, and then watching in horror as the mastermind of the plot that took her life and the lives of fifteen other innocents walked free with a phenomenally fat pension made possible by US and European funding of the unspeakable Palestinian Authority, we more than most understand the extent of the evil that aggressively imbecilic management of so-called foreign aid funds can wreak on the lives of innocent people.

So no one should be surprised that we are delighting to learn today of new developments in the US government that, if carried through, will significantly reduce the evil, the imbecility and the lethal amorality exemplified by the Christopher Pattens of international relations and governance.

An Adam Kredo report in Washington Free Beacon yesterday says legislators in the House and Senate of the US Congress met yesterday (Tuesday) to introduce legislation

that would cut all U.S. funding to the Palestinian government, which has been criticized for providing financial incentives to terrorists who kill American and Israeli civilians. The White House signaled its support for the legislation in a vast departure from the Obama administration, which worked against similar efforts when in power... "The Palestinian Authority's use of its resources to provide material support for terrorism—indiscriminately targeted at American and Israeli civilians—is a grotesque example of how well-intentioned U.S. generosity can be turned against us," a senior White House official told the Free Beacon... "This legislation highlights practical steps the PA can take to demonstrate a real commitment to ending the vicious cycle of hatred and violence that has prevented the Palestinian people from the prosperity and security they could otherwise be enjoying," the official said... [WFB, February 28, 2017]

The effort is entirely led by Republicans: Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton in the Senate; Doug Lamborn and Lee Zeldin in the House of Representatives. A , R-N.Y., are carrying the companion legislation in the House. A CBS News report added that it is cosponsored in the Senate by Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, John Boozman, Ted Cruz, Richard Burr and John Thune: again all republicans.

Strikingly (at least to us), the Washington Examiner said yesterday that

only Republican lawmakers attended the press conference...

Kredo, quoting that unnamed White House official, writes that the new law seeks

to tighten the financial noose on the Palestinian government and force it to abandon its practice of paying terrorists, is a first step to reforming the notoriously corrupt government, the official said. "The new legislative effort... cuts off all U.S. aid to the Palestinians as a direct response to its longstanding policy of paying salaries to terrorists and supporting those imprisoned for terrorist attacks" "...We shouldn't allow killers and ruthless attackers to become recognized as martyrs in a system that we're part of," Blunt added... "Most Americans have no idea this is a problem," Graham said. "Not only are Israelis victims of this practice, Americans are victims of this practice. We're going to change this. We're going to get the Palestinian Authority's attention by withholding their money."

Did we mention that not a single Democrat attended the Congressional
press conference yesterday? [Image Source]

It's a scheme we have for years termed "Rewards for Terror".

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who has long backed similar efforts, told the Free Beacon it is long past due for Congress to take the lead on this effort now that Obama administration officials can no longer lead efforts to block it. "After eight years of the Obama administration, the U.S. must take long overdue action to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for incentivizing and rewarding acts of terrorism," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "Roughly $300 million annually is provided in monthly salaries and benefits to terrorists jailed in Israel, their families, and the families of those who died committing such horrific atrocities against Israeli and American citizens, including Taylor Force [we wrote about what was done to him here.] Enough is enough. We must stand up for victims of Palestinian terrorism. No more U.S. taxpayer dollars should be provided until the Palestinian leadership stops engaging in this heinous practice. The incitement and glorification of terrorism must end." ["Trump Admin, Congress Behind Effort to Cut U.S. Aid to Palestinians", Washington Free Beacon, February 28, 2017]

No one working the halls of power in Washington can honestly claim to be unaware. David Feith one of the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers [quoted in our post], wrote last year ["Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror", August 11, 2016] that none of this could happen but for the willful blindness of governments, foremost among them the United States. What's needed, he wrote, is

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... [since] the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016]

A fine op ed in the Wall Street Journal five weeks ago [and quoted in our post "29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?"] stated bluntly how US funding is central to the PA's loathsome scheming which an Arab source quoted in the same post called "sacred in Palestinian politics":

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Efforts are underway in Europe - including the UK, Norway and possibly via the EC's own auditors - to curb the European Commission's ongoing funding of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme. But in terms of lives blighted and destroyed, such efforts and those of the Americans will be meaningless if they fail to block the blood lust of the Palestinian Authority's inner circle of enthusiastic murderers. Only stemming the flow of tax-payers' funds into their malevolent clutches can do that.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Waszyngton może rozpocząć atak na zabójczy system “Nagród za Terror” Abbasa – co należało dawno zrobić") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look

Shell Game: Back in February 2013, the man on the left was
the PA's then Minister of Prisoners Affairs. He's boasting 
of the huge number of prisoners receiving guaranteed 
monthly salaries from the PA. [Source Video: PMW]

Eli Lake, writing for Bloomberg last week ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", July 1, 2016] says

Whoever said crime doesn't pay hasn't talked to the family of a Palestinian terrorist. For the Palestine Liberation Organization and the related Palestinian Authority, the killers of Jewish Israelis are considered "martyrs." And as such, their families are paid for the service these murderers have done for the Palestinian cause. [Bloomberg - Eli Lake]

A few days later, and in the wake of several especially shocking Arab-on-Israeli terrorist murders, the US Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted hearings into how that works. We're not claiming to be objective by-standers in the discussion: we know that all the members of the Hamas gang who bombed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 have been, and some still are, major takers of those payments.

The Committee was told on Wednesday that the Palestinian Arab government spends about a tenth of its annual budget

"paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families... [T]he Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violation of the Oslo peace accords with Israel."

Describing how the payments to Palestinian Arabs who have carried out murderous assaults on frequently-unarmed Israeli civilians are made - it's a process we call the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme - in recent months, Dr Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] told committee members that

the PA transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by [Palestinian Arab] law. Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release. ["Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year", Morgan Chalfant in Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

This is relevant to the stabbing, ramming and/or shooting attacks on Israelis by non-uniformed, seemingly random Palestinian Arabs that have come to be frequently termed in parts of the news media as the work of "lone-wolf" attackers. It's become a currently fashionable term. The chairman of the House committee turned his attention to that aspects and argued (as we have repeatedly done in this blog):

“These terrorists are not, in fact, lone rangers. They are not lone wolves,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), who chairs the committee, in opening remarks during the hearing. “Instead, these terrorists are the product of the programming done by the PA’s perverted culture that glorifies the willingness to die or to spend time in prison in pursuit of killing or maiming Israelis.” [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

Roughly 250 such Arab-on-Israeli attacks have been carried out or attempted since the outbreak of the latest wave of extreme violence in October 2015. More than 30 Israeli lives have been lost, and dozens of Palestinian Arabs have been killed by Israeli police and security actions during and after them.

How does that "perverted culture" stay funded? It's a non-trivial question. Dr. Carmon, in the written testimony he filed in conjunction with his appearance before the committee, includes a revelation which is, not surprisingly, consistent with those we have published here in the past year. Let's call it the mechanics of the shell game, the one that the Abbas regime, and Mahmoud Abbas himself, use to hide the true nature of the PA payments:

[Mahmoud] Abbas issued a presidential order according to which the payments to prisoners would no longer be made by the PA's Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs. Instead, they would be disbursed by a PLO Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. The aim of this deliberately misleading move was to alleviate pressure on the PA by donor countries that do not wish their money to be channeled to support terrorism. However, the offices remained the same and the official in charge remained the same under a new job title. The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA. [Quoted in "Is U.S. Foreign Aid Funding Terrorists?", Josh Luckenbaugh for MRCTV, July 7, 2016]

What that reporter could have said but did not - and we will - is that this transparent blood-soaked fraud is fully understood and known to officials throughout the foreign ministries, and other parts of the governments, of all the Western nations who provide the funding. 

The United States and the European Union are the major sources of that cash, but Norway is prominent in the list as well and so are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany in their own right. We have written a stream of background pieces about it - for instance (and the list is much longer than these pieces) "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad"; "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in"; "28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?"; "31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme"; "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"; "04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self"; "13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme"; "25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak"; and "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers". 

As we said, there are many others.

In his appearance before Congress, Carmon called the PA scheme a “deliberately misleading move” to assuage concerns from donor countries worried about their money being funneled to terrorists.

“The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA,” Carmon told lawmakers. He said that countries who provide aid to Palestine, including the United States, are “complicit” in inciting terrorism because the Palestinian Authority uses foreign donations to subsidize terrorists and their families. By providing this support, the PA is encouraging terrorism in violation of its Oslo commitment. Furthermore, the PA has been using money granted by donor countries for this purpose, and by doing so, has made [the funders] complicit in encouraging terrorism as well,” Carmon said. [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

We're not sure Dr Carmon's term "encouraging terrorism" is the best way to look at this. Numerous public opinion polls taken of their view on violence and terror and their utility consistently suggest that not much encouragement of the Palestinian Arabs is needed.

Eli Lake, in the article we mentioned above, describes efforts made by the US and Israel in particular to disincentivize Abbas' PA regime from continuing its Rewards for Terror Scheme. He writes:

One problem is that the payments to terrorists' families are exceedingly popular these days. Ziad Asali, the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, told me that in recent years the media and politicians have elevated these payments to something "sacred in Palestinian politics." Asali said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and others are too weak to stop it. "This is where we find ourselves now. The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way," Asali said. "But I think nobody really has the stature and clout to confront these issues publicly."

Really? How great it would be if a statement like "The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way" were true.

But if Ziad Asali is referring to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs (which he seems to be doing), the numbers show he has it back to front. And we mean Arab numbers compiled by Arab pollsters. We explained that in a recent blog post:

In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks... We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. ["15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

So in the face of this, and the overwhelming support that lethal violence gets among the people we call our neighbors, what legal and financial steps make sense? And what does the Obama administration (as distinct from the Congress) say? And how about the Europeans?

It's a big subject. We will come back to it in the next few days.

02-Feb-16: Testifying at a Congressional committee hearing

Arnold Roth will be giving testimony today (Tuesday) before the US Congress in Washington DC at a hearing of the Subcommittee on National Security of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Some details, and live video streaming, here.

02-Sep-15: Plans of action and how Iran thinks like some Washington lobbyists do

Senator Mikulski looks on as President Obama signs an important document
that is certainly not an agreement with Iran since that has not been
signed by anyone [Archive photo source]

There are distinct whoops of triumph emanating from Washington today as Barbara Ann Mikulski, the senior Senator from Maryland, a member of the Democratic Party, steps forward to express support for the intentionally-unsigned pact ["29-Jul-15: Built not on trust but on... verification"] that the Islamic Republic of Iran entered into with the United States and some other countries a little over a month ago.

The significance of today's news:

The announcement means that at least 34 senators -- the number required by the Constitution to sustain a veto -- will back Obama's expected veto of a Republican resolution to disapprove of the deal. Mikulski is retiring at the end of her term. [CNN, September 2, 2015]

Now that a third of the Senate have told the news services how they are going to vote on probably the most important US foreign policy undertaking in living memory, the very carefully named JCPOA (not an agreement, not a treaty, just a plan of action) is being treated by everyone as a done deal, some sort of democratic achievement (or is it Democratic achievement?)

Everyone, we assume, thinks that having committed themselves publicly, none of these politicians will back down when the vote is taken in Congress in a few weeks' time, no matter what facts or additional secret side-deals may get revealed or brought to their attention in the meantime. Politics.

The head of a high-profile political lobbying group closely identified with the Obama administration emailed several friends of ours in the past couple of hours with a victory letter that includes this puzzling assertion:

Extract from a letter sent by this lobbying organization to supporters earlier today

It's clear that Jeremy Ben Ami, the author of those stirring words and the leader of the J Street people, is speaking of the Middle East. But even when you take account that he is sitting in far off, well-protected Washington DC, which part of the Middle East does he have in mind? He knows of some corner that has been transformed, presumably far from people's attention and news media enquiries, into a place where conflicts are being settled "through negotiations and diplomacy"? Does he mean Syria? Maybe Yemen? Libya? Iraq? Lebanon? We really do want to know.

Could he have composed this right after the celebratory toasts were drunk?

As it happens, Iran believes in plans of action, including the one the US Senate appears to have just pushed over the top. A report published today by the oddly-named PressTV, one of the Islamic Republic's numerous official, semi-official and regime-controlled mouthpieces, shows (see it below) that the Iranians actually think very similarly to some Americans. 

Or at least to Mr Ben Ami and his J Street crowd.

Iranian mouthpiece leads with this report today [Source]

But much, much more significantly, here's how some other Iranians see things. This is also from today.

Escalating Iran’s rhetoric against Israel, a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps vowed Wednesday that the regime would boost its military capabilities relentlessly until Israel was destroyed. “The Islamic Revolution will continue enhancing its preparedness until it overthrows Israel and liberates Palestine,” the IRGC’s Tehran province commander, Brigadier General Mohsen Kazzemeini, said in an address in Tehran, the semi-state Fars news agency reported. He also vowed that Iran would maintain its aid to those who fight Israel. "We will continue defending not just our own country, but also all the oppressed people of the world, specially those countries that are standing on the forefront of confrontation with the Zionists..."
In its report on Gen. Kazzemeini’s speech Wednesday, Fars recalled that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an address to Tehran students last year, called for the “full annihilation and destruction of the Zionist regime.” On Tuesday, the commander of IRGC, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, threatened Israel, saying “its security will not be preserved” and asserting that the dangers posed to Israel were “growing greater by the day.”

The FARS source article ["Commander: Iran Continues Military Enhancement Until Collapse of Israel"] went online a couple of hours ago, just after the Mikulski announcement, by coincidence. Or not.

We think that neither a J Street response, nor any other meaningful plan of action emanating from Washington to address the naked threats of mass destruction by the nuclear-thirsting Iranians ought to be expected anytime soon. Or ever.

28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.

Palestinian children: European and American return on investment 

Governments who take their citizens' tax money and send it to the Palestinian regimes - both of them - have steadfastly refused to answer for the evil that this funding enables.

The issue is not new. Arnold Roth (one of this blog's two authors) wrote about this under the title "Blood, Money and Education" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal eight years ago [the article is reproduced here].

And the issue was by no means new or unknown then.

The years go by. Some people get smarter. Some get stupider. Some just don't want to know.

Palestinian Media Watch, a courageous and intellectually-honest Israel-based organization that monitors Palestinian Arab culture and media, presented a study to members of the US Congress this week. It focuses on money that starts out in Washington and ends up in the hands of the families of people who have carried out some of the most barbaric terrorist attacks the world has known.

To state the findings briefly:

• More than 5,500 Palestinians serving time in Israeli prisons for terrorism are getting salaries from the Palestinian Authority [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 14, 2011] 
• Those payments do not go to Palestinian car thieves. They do go to every terrorist - including hundreds of murderers - serving time in Israeli prisons. 
• We do not plan to check into this, but it's almost certain such payments also go to the murderers of our daughter Malki.
• We already know via the official PA daily that the man who built the bomb that killed our child, a man called Barghouti, is a "heroic prisoner". [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 13, 2011, via this week's PMW report]. There's simply no room for doubting the lionization of such monsters by every official level of Palestinian Arab society.
• The money payments go either to the terrorist himself/herself or to the terrorist's family and are retrospective to the day of arrest. [Source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 15, 2011] 
• To be clear about this: Palestinians charged with terrorism have long received such stipends from the PA. 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 large parts of the news media.
• What's new is these payments became formalized in April 2011 under a new PA law. We wrote about this here ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"] 
• The United States gives more than $600 million to the Palestinians annually. $225 million of it goes directly to the PA.
• The 2010 law that approved aid to the PA required the US State Department to “take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the Secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity.”
• It's self-evident that this law has been breached. The requirement imposed on the State Department is a bad joke.
• The payment of salaries to convicted terrorists currently runs at $5.2 million per month [May 2011 figures - source: Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 19, 2011], and is a clear violation of this law.
• The PMW analysis shows that these terrorism-supporting payments are larger, on average, than the salaries paid to Palestinian civil servants and military personnel. This makes it clear to every Palestinian Arab family which career path the Abbas/Faayad regime seeks to encourage.

Something might now happen in the US Congress, though it's a long shot. 

But when it comes to European government support for the identical double-dealing, the encouragement of terror, and the opaque fund transfers to both of the pro-terror Palestinian Arab regimes, there's no reason to expect anything will change. Unless Itamar Marcus and his research staff at PMW can manage to bring their presentation in front of European politicians.

And even then...