Fitzgerald: No to "humanitarian aid"

Hugh Fitzgerald explains why the "Palestinians" deserve not a penny of humanitarian aid:

The "Quartet" of Middle East peace brokers have agreed on a plan to resume aid for Palestinians, frozen since the Hamas government took power.

The scheme aims to release more than $120m of EU funds to support local health services and cater for the basic needs of poor Palestinians.

But funds will bypass the government, which refuses to recognise Israel.

Many Palestinians have been suffering severe economic hardship following the suspension of international aid.

The EU and US cut off funding after Hamas came to power earlier this year, accusing it of being a terrorist group.

But the aid freeze has prompted fears of a humanitarian crisis. -- from this news item

Just as the ranks of UNRWA steadily swelled over the years, as the "Arab refugees" (as they were called then, before they magically metamorphosed into the "Palestinian" refugees) were joined by all kinds of local Arabs, happy to receive money from UNRWA, and none of those "refugees" ever seemed to die, so that the numbers swelled and swelled (and why not, since over time the people running the organization were the local "refugees" themselves and their U.N. sympathizers and apologists), so the "Palestinian" territories consist almost entirely of people on the dole -- the government dole.

These are the hundreds of thousands, in the various and competing (save when it comes to killing Israelis) "security" services, of which there may be a dozen or so, and the "officials" in charge of nothing, of an empty state, a phony state, a state or administration that can never be economically viable because its population does not work, will not work, has no oil like the other Arabs, and yet thinks the world owes it a living because it lives cheek-by-jowl with the industrious, enterprising, hardworking and determined Israelis, and the comparison in living standards rankles.

No future "state" of "Palestine" (as in that self-evidently absurd phrase "two-state solution") will be, or can possibly be, economically viable. It will always depend on aid. That aid is not owed to this or any other set of Muslim Arabs by any Infidels anywhere.

The phrase "humanitarian aid" is deceptive and wrong in this case. Humanitarian aid is ordinarily given when some large group of people have suffered, through no fault of their own, a sudden calamity -- a tsunami, a hurricane. It can also be given when those who are suffering, say, famine or drought which is only partly the result of rainfall (i.e., beyond their control) but also by the incompetence of the local government (i.e., famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, or under the Derg in Ethiopia); if aid is extended, it is because we recognize that such aid is given because the local population is, in a certain sense, innocent of what it now suffers from.

But the phrase "humanitarian aid" is not applicable to a population that has time and money to spend on making war, and has had the making of war as its preoccupation, its obsession, for the entire period of its existence. The Palestinian Authority is essentially the terrorist group the PLO; Abbas and company merely have come to the conclusion that at this point, softly-softly and the offer of a hudna furthers the Slow Jihad. That is the only difference with the more truthful and more impatient Hamas, which favors the Fast Jihad.

And what of the people, the local Arabs who are the shock troops of the larger Arab and Muslim war on the Infidel state of Israel? Westerners may prate, out of ignorance or malevolence, about a "two-state solution." For the Arab Muslims that is all silliness that must, for some (e.g., Abbas and the PLO), be temporarily endured; for others, even the pretense of that temporary endurance is not possible.

The local Arabs, with their Qassem rockets, and their marches in black balaklavas, and their car swarms after every Israeli strike, have created a world of pure Hobbesian man. This world, in little, is what, without the manna of unmerited wealth from oil, or without the Jizyah of foreign aid, Muslim polities naturally tend to.

Let it descend, without help ("humanitarian aid") from the Infidels, either the Americans, or the Europeans, or still more absurd, the Israelis (the immediate target of this particular local, or Lesser, Jihad). Let them stew and stew --- or, alternatively, let them get money from Saudi Arabia, now taking in the cash at the rate of close to a billion dollars a day, every cent of it unearned and undeserved.

Posted by Robert at June 18, 2006 4:46 PM
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