Mistaking Kindness For Weakness

Tuesday May 9, 2006

According to Yahoo news, The United States bowed to pressure from its allies on Tuesday and agreed to support a new program to temporarily funnel additional humanitarian aid directly to the Palestinian people. The agreement seemed to underscore a concern that months of withholding most aid from the Palestinians, part of an effort to pressure the new Hamas-led government toward a more accommodating stance with Israel, was harming the Palestinian people. 

Also On Tuesday. 

While deep in long, fruitless talks with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya, Palestinian Authority chairman Abu Mazen over the weekend issued secret directives for mobilizing recruits to his private army and the release of cash from the “Arafat Fund” to pay their wages. This is reported by DEBKAfile’s exclusive sources. Fatah and Hamas are organizing their forces for the armed showdown building up between them over the top spot in Palestinian government. Abu Mazen controls the Arafat Fund, whose capital is estimated at $ billions – certainly enough to cover the public sector payroll and ease humanitarian distress in the Palestinian territories.

Instead, his Fatah released $25,000 to each of the 15 or 16 terrorist groups under its aegis, thereby following in the footsteps of the late Arafat, who used this secret nest-egg to finance his war campaign against Israel. The total remitted by Abbas to these groups runs to around $9 million. Hamas correspondingly distributed to each member of its armed Ezz e-Din al-Qassam force, a large food package to keep him and his family supplied for two weeks plus the sum of NIS250.

Hamas leaders now threaten that should it be toppled or starved out of office by the international funding boycott, it will launch a “super-intifada” against Israel in the first stage and across the entire Middle East in the next stage, implying its ability to harness fraternal wings of the Muslim Brotherhood. (Source:DEBKAfile)

But Wait There's More. 

While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was busy presenting his new government, DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal Hamas executed the biggest arms transaction in its history. It was accomplished with the help of the Sinai smuggling gangs, some of whom also serve the al Qaeda network in the Peninsula. 

The terrorist arm of Abu Mazan’s Fatah is another good customer of the Sinai smuggling gangs. Indeed, the last ten days have seen al Aqsa Brigades and Hamas buyers competing for massive purchases of explosives, ammunition and weapons, and racing one other to smuggle them into the Gaza Strip. (Source:DEBKAfile)

After years of Western subsidies totaling billions of dollars, it's doubtful that either of the official Palestinian parties even feels responsible for meeting their government's payrolls anymore, even though the funds are readily available.  It's the job of the West.

And if we don't pony up, Hamas will simply start blowing up Jews until we do.   And if that doesn't work they'll just expand their little tantrum until it includes the entire Middle East. They have plenty of money with which to do this because they aren't paying their employees or suppliers.  (That's our job, remember?  They need their money to buy guns and explosives to kill Jews.)  Today their only fuel supplier cut them off because they haven't paid for $26 million worth of fuel they bought.

When you continually give people something they haven't earned and don't deserve, you earn their contempt, not their respect.  We think we're being kind, but they just think we're weak.  Why can't we see the contempt they have for us?  They don't even bother to lie or do things in secret anymore.  Just about every provision of the Gaza security agreement brokered by Sec'y of State Rice has been ignored or thwarted.  Millions of dollars worth of arms have been openly carried across the border between Sinai and Gaza.  To make sure things worked smoothly, Hamas put the head Sinai smuggler, Jemal Sema Dana, in charge of Palestinian Security. (I keep confusing him with Roseanne Rosannadanna because her appointment to the position would make as much sense.)

Milton Friedman once said, "Whatever you subsidize, you get more of."  With Lyndon Johnson's Great Society we subsidized poverty and got more of it. It should be crystal clear that in the Gaza and on the West Bank we're subsidizing terrorism.  And because we are we're subject to daily threats of more. As Ms. Rosannadanna herself so aptly put it, "It's enough to make you sick."