Analyst's note: American taxpayers are footing the bill for over $400 million annually to the the Palestinian Authority. Where is our Congress who controls our national purse and has the power to declare war? Who's side are they really on?
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The United States government is funding the radical Islamic terrorist group Hamas. That’s the conclusion of a Wall Street Journal report that looks into the formation of a new interim coalition government that brings Hamas and the Palestinian Authority back together after several years of conflict.
The United States supports the Palestinian Authority with over $400 million annually, even though U.S. law forbids taxpayer support of any group heavily influenced by Hamas, which the State Department designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. It is difficult to believe–impossible, really–that not a penny of that money will get into the hands of the radical militants currently firing rockets at civilians in Israel from behind human shields in Gaza.
Moreover, the Hamas Charter explicitly calls for the destruction of both Israel and the Jewish people, a cause that not only fails to win the backing of Americans–it horrifies them, and rightly so.
Nonetheless, President Barack Obama has refused to cut off funding to the Palestinians, because Hamas has installed into its government supporters from Gaza who, though agreed-upon by the terrorist organization, have “no obvious links” to it, according to the report. It’s incredible that the Obama State Department would fall for this, but it has.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki claims that the Palestinians have “formed an interim technocratic government that does not include ministers affiliated with Hamas,” says the Journal.
That statement is essentially a joke, and the world is seeing its ramifications playing out in the Gaza Strip right now. International treaties require the Palestinian Authority to police its territory for illegal weapons, but the bulk of those weapons belong to Hamas. If the ministers are not “affiliated with Hamas,” where is their assistance–or even a verbal commitment–to demilitarizing Gaza? Why has that task been left to the Israel Defense Forces?
Clearly, President Obama has no intention of recognizing the Palestinian Authority as the terrorist-supporting organization that it is or of cutting off funding that is no doubt supporting terror attacks. If he had, he would certainly have said so by now.
Instead, his failure to act has turned the United States into a terror-supporting nation and we now supply rockets to Hamas so that they can fire them at Israel and we supply the anti-rocket missiles Israel uses to shoot them down.
If America were being paid for these weapons, this would be a scam, or perhaps the plot of B movie starring Bruce Campbell. As it is, it’s just another symptom of all that is wrong with the thinking of the Obama administration.