From Daniel Pipes in FrontPage, with thanks to EPG. The FP article has many links.
Yasser Arafat died last month. This month, his death is prompting plans for a foreign aid bounty of $500 million to $1 billion a year for the Palestinians.
That’s the scoop Steven R. Weisman published in the New York Times on Dec. 17. He revealed that Western, Arab, and other governments plan to add a 50 to 100 percent bonus to the $1 billion a year they already direct to 3.5 million Palestinians in the territories, contingent upon a crackdown on terrorist groups and the holding of credible elections in January 2005.
(Asked about Weisman’s report, White House spokesman Scott McClellan neither confirmed nor denied it. But President George W. Bush did subsequently make some hugely ambitious statements about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: “I am convinced that, during this term, I will manage to bring peace”; and “Next year is very important, as it will bring peace.”)
Aid-wise, residents of the West Bank and Gaza have hardly been neglected until now. They receive about $300 per person, making them, per capita, the world’s greatest beneficiaries of foreign aid. Strangely, their efforts to destroy Israel have not inspired efforts to crush this hideous ambition but rather to subsidize it. Money being fungible, foreign aid effectively funds the Palestinians” bellicose propaganda machine, their arsenal, their army, and their suicide bombers.
This, however, does not faze international aid types. Nigel Roberts, the World Bank’s director for the West Bank and Gaza, blows off past failures. Addressing himself to donors, he says, “Maybe your $1 billion a year hasn’t produced much, but we think there’s a case for doing even more in the next three or four years.”
Roberts is saying, in effect: Yes, your money enabled Arafat’s corruption, jihad ideology, and suicide factories, but those are yesterday”s problems; now, let’s hope the new leadership uses donations for better purposes. Please lavish more funds on it to enhance its prestige and power, then hope for the best.
Read it all.