The Jerusalem Post is always slow on this kind of news.

Carl, on the Israel Matzav blog, summed it up last Tuesday, here.

Posted by: Shy Guy at February 17, 2008 8:05 AM

sometimes I think the State Department is still living out there in Lala land, and does not realize who they are there to serve and assuredly not the Palestine Liberation Organization. But then a lot of senior people have been taken in by the retirement scam that Saudi Arabia has for senior civil servants

Posted by: doglover at February 17, 2008 8:17 AM

"But then a lot of senior people have been taken in by the retirement scam that Saudi Arabia has for senior civil servants."
-- from a posting above

It's much worse than that, and not limited to what the Saudis can provide. There are those in the State Department, past and present, who have a direct financial interest in making sure that American aid to the "Palestinians" is increased, and that nothing -- including judgments in American courts arrived at through the workings of the American legal system -- is done to diminish those amounts.

This can be called the Abington Arrangement, after Edward Abington, who served as the American consul in the Arab-occupied parts of Jerusalem, and who became well-known not for representing the United States to the local Arabs, but for representing the local Arabs (i.e., "Palestinians") to the American government. He, Edward Abington, worked to get an extra $400 million in aid for the "Palestinians" (that aid disappeared, along with other billions, when Arafat died), just before he, Abiington, suddenly retired and then re-appeared, as a foreign agent, working for the same "Palestinians" and being paid $700,000 a year for five years -- not a bad salary increase for someone who had never even risen to the rank of Ambassador.

The Abington Arrangement:

1. Work in secret to increase the sums of American money made available, by bureacrats in the State Department, far from prying taxpayer eyes, to an unsavory group or state that would not, if the public been properly informed and ever had a say in the matter, have been granted such amounts of aid.

2. Make sure that that aid is not decreased to satisfy judgments against victims of terrorism, judgments that are the result of the workings of the American judicial system, whose decisions must not be allowed to interfere with the sums allotted to that unsavory group or state.

3. Retire, take job as "consultant" or lobbyist or founder of some group with a nice-sounding name (e.g., Council on the National Interest) and end up just as Edward Abington did, with $700,000 a year for five years, with not a person in offical Washington doing a thing about it.

Posted by: Hugh at February 17, 2008 8:30 AM

I think a US military invasion of the State Department and the subsequent shipping of everyone therin to Gitmo would be a major first step in securing America's borders.

Posted by: Shy Guy at February 17, 2008 8:49 AM

The idea has its points. But remember, inside the very same State Department there are people, especially those who deal with Europe and its current tribulations, who may not be quite in synch with some of those who are traditionally described as "State Department Arabists" or their helpful adjuncts, those peace-processing Indyks and Hasses and Rosses and Millers, all of whom have spent their professional lives dedicated to the proposition that Islam hardly matters, or can be safely ignored, not least in "finding a solution" to the "Arab-Israeli" "conflict" --- that is, the Lesser Jihad against Israel, for a while (roughly, fromo 1967-2001), presented successfully as a "nationalist struggle" of the "Palestinian people" etc. etc.

Those whose task it is, for example, to follow events in Denmark or The Netherlands, those who know about what is happening in France, or Italy, or Spain, or the United Kingdom, may be as alarmed -- to the degree that they are informed --about what is happeningn in Western Europe, and may have begun to recognize instruments of Jihad other than qitaal, or combat, combined with terrorism, in southern Thailand and southern Philippines and southern Sudan and southern Nigeria, such as the well-financed carefully-targetted campaigns of Da'wa conducted in British, French, and American prisons (and among the psychically and economically marginal outside of prison), and to the demophgraic conquest, that some believe, for some reason, they can do nothing to halt or diminish, all over Western Europe.

There is not "one" State Department. There are people who are wise, and people who are fools. Charles Bohlen, David K. E. Bruce, George Kennan -- these were no fools. On the other hand, too many of those who have made the Arab world their specialty either did so because they had a predisposition toward certain mental pathologies, or they were children of missionaries (the "Arabists" in the book by Robert Kaplan), and too many, in the last four decades, have seen how much money could be made after they left government service if, while still in it, they did nothing to offend, and everything to curry favor with, future Arab employers and subsidizers.

I'll let you decide which, among the possibilities I have just listed, best help explain the careers of Edward Abington, John C. West, James Akins, Eugene Bird, and such former C.I.A. agents as Edwin Wilson and Raymond Close.

Posted by: Hugh at February 17, 2008 9:15 AM

Why do we allow State to be openly hostile to the USA's interests?

Posted by: interestinconundrum at February 17, 2008 11:18 AM

maybe obama will CHANGE all that , my a@#$ss.

Posted by: OLD SARGE at February 17, 2008 2:22 PM

Why do we allow State to be openly hostile to the USA's interests?

Posted by: interestinconundrum at February 17, 2008 11:18 AM

Sorry to burst your bubble but you do not have the choice to "allow" State anything. Your right is limited to a single vote. Once you cast your vote, you have no control over anything in the Govt., except to protest non-violently, which fall on deaf political ears and thick political hide. White House, State Dept and all elected officials know this little secret and once elected, they exploit it to the maximum. State officials are no different.

Posted by: Alert at February 17, 2008 4:28 PM

State is a rogue department, filled with Clinton holdovers. Congress has the power to see that State follows the President's policy, but congress is now filled with liberals who actually agree with State.

If you don't like how State is operating, write your representative.

Posted by: Lil Green Lizard at February 17, 2008 5:21 PM

What! Give money to the victims of Palestinian terrorism! The State department has always believed that the Palestinians were the "victims".

Posted by: tanstaafl at February 17, 2008 5:50 PM