UNM Israel Alliance

(IsraelNN.com) Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler, a Liberal party representative, has stated that the Palestinian Authority, including its Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, is guilty of purveying hatred of Jews. He also lamented that the official PA incitement is being ignored by Western governments and media outlets.
He also met with PA officials and told them that “hate breeds hate.”

Saying that Hamas, with their charter’s “genocidal objective, anti-Semitic ideology and terrorist instrumentality,” is not alone in its incitement in the PA public sphere. “I’m talking about the Palestinian Authority,” said the Mount-Royal MP at a press conference this week. He added that the “culture of incitement” harms not only Israel, the PA Arabs themselves.

Cotler recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Israel, where he also met with PA officials and told them that “hate breeds hate. If you have a culture of incitement and hate, you’re going to create a culture of hate that is pervasive in a Palestinian society itself.”

Cotler cited several examples of anti-Jewish incitement in the PA. Among the most egregious offenses, he noted, were those promoted by official PA government outlets and officials, as well as by Arab academics.

“People don’t realize that Abbas signed a law, on the very day there was a suicide terrorist attack in December 2005 against Israel, providing monthly stipends for the families of suicide bombers. In January 2007, Abbas addressed a large crowd that was estimated as being over 100,000, in which he said ‘the sons of Israel are mentioned in the Koran as those who are corrupting humanity on Earth.’”

According to the Canadian MP, “Abbas has never recognized Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.” The official PA media, meanwhile promotes anti-Israeli libels and “breeds hatred and contempt for Jews.”

The PA leader’s anti-Israel statements and the hatred promoted by his official outlets, Cotler charged, has been judiciously ignored by the West and those involved in promoting Middle East peace. Yet, that incitement, Cotler concluded, is “the greatest threat to a just and lasting peace.”

MP Cotler also noted in passing that other parts of the Arab world have bred a similar hatred. The recent ransom agreement between Israel and the Hizbullah, in which the Lebanese terror organization released the bodies of two
MP Cotler also noted in passing that other parts of the Arab world have bred a similar hatred.
IDF soldiers it had kidnapped in 2006 in exchange for several terrorists held in Israeli jails, was greeted in Lebanon joyously. In Cotler’s view, “Knowing that Israel was in mourning was, tragically, a national day of celebration in Lebanon.”

MP Cotler, a former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General, is currently official Opposition Critic for Human Rights, a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Human Rights, and a member of the House of Commons Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

He is also a well-known advocate for the rights of Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries in the years following Israel’s establishment.

Earlier this month, Cotler said that he was working on a draft legal indictment of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which he’d like to present to the United Nations on September 22 of this year. He would like to see Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, France and Israel, among others, work together to bring Ahmadinejad to an international court for Iran’s domestic human rights abuses, support of international terrorism, and incitement to genocide against Israel.

The following article by Daniel Pipes gives statistical backing to the claims frequently made and daily supported by facts on the ground: that Palestinian leadership is violent and corrupt, and money given to it goes not for the public good, but for murder and carnage against both Israelis and Arabs.

How can the delusion persist that giving Mahmud Abbas billions of dollars will bring peace? He is a career terrorist, head of a network of violent and gangster-like factions. When has feeding money to criminals, terrorists and racists ever made them into humane, tolerant peaceful people? It never has and never will, and to persist in such a belief is a sign of serious imbalance.

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.

Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.

The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it “supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace.” At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.

Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a “U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership” on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, “projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact.”

One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.

Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the “Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian Authority” attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas won pledges for an astonishing $7.4 billion (or over $1,800 per capita per year) at the donors’ conference.

Well, it’s a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict – it’s actually a steal.

But innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). Graphed together, the two figures show an uncanny echo:

The correlation is even clearer when the aid of one year is superimposed on the homicides of a year later:

In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, “These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism.”

The Palestinian record fits a broader pattern, as noted by Jean-Paul Azam and Alexandra Delacroix in a 2006 article, “Aid and the Delegated Fight Against Terrorism.” They found “a pretty robust empirical result showing that the supply of terrorist activity by any country is positively correlated with the amount of foreign aid received by that country” – i.e., the more foreign aid, the more terrorism.

If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, “occupation,” and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.

A topsy-turvy understanding of war economics has prevailed in Israel since the Oslo negotiations began in 1993. Rather than deprive their Palestinian enemies of resources, Israelis have been following Shimon Peres’s mystical musings, and especially his 1993 tome, The New Middle East, to empower them economically. As I wrote in 2001, this “is tantamount to sending the enemy resources while fighting is still under way – not a hugely bright idea.”

Rather than further funding Palestinian bellicosity, Western states, starting with Israel, should cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority.

While the “Wheels of Justice” PA Arab propaganda team is in the southwest, spreading poison, here is what their brothers are doing in Israel…this is what they are gathering money for, this and worse.

By Noam Bedein of Sderot Media Center, Sderot, Israel

At 8:30 PM on Saturday night, April 21st. 2007, less than an hour after the Bibiyen family finished the Sabbath with the traditional blessing over the spices, wine and a candle– all the symbols of the hope to begin a new week of living — a missile fired from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) camp in Jabalya in the Gaza strip scored a direct hit on the Bibiyen home.

The extended Bibiyen family consisting of two grandparents, Dvora 52 , and Yigal, 64, had welcomed the families of their four sons and one daughter to spend the Sabbath with them. Everything had ended on such a pleasant note.

This reporter spoke with the Bibiyen family on Sunday morning while they were cleaning through the rubble.

All of them were stunned and still trying to comprehend the miracle that occurred the previous night.

One of the sons, Yahav 31, still a bit shaken, said that he did not realize until Sunday morning how close each family member was to being literally blown to bits.

Yahav told the story, fresh in his mind, how the “Color Red” alarm had gone off, and, only seconds later, how he heard a huge explosion upstairs on the second floor; where his mother and his wife — in her fifth month of pregnancy–were sitting and talking.

The missile tore through the staircase, flinging the stairs 30 meters away to the street below, smashing into the roof of a car.

Yahav added that it took almost an one hour until his wife and mother were evacuated from the second floor, from where a fire engine ladder lifted both ofthem into a waiting ambulance — both of whom were diagnosed by a medic to be in an advanced state of shock and in need of immediate treatment. On the Sunday morning after, they were both resting in the hospital in Ashkelon.

With a sigh of relief, Yahav said that “I am glad that everyone is ok –physically– , and when I think of how my brother had just left with his two children 10 minutes before after watching TV exactly where the wall had fallen down, how my other brother with his 8 months pregnant wife had left 5
minutes before, and how my sister and father had just come downstairs into the kitchen, I am overwhelmed…”

Yahav walked through the house, and pointed out that the pictures of the Rabbis on the walls weren’t damaged, while all other pictures and fixtures were destroyed, and carefully marked the places whereeach and every one from the family was standing where one could see the hole that the rocket bore through the wall and the staircase was blown away.

Yahav said that he could not understand how this miracle had happened, because if anyone in the family had been standing a few steps away, from where they were standing, this would have meant certain death.

“If we had 2 more seconds to start running down the staircase — we wouldn’t be here today. If my brother would have decided to stay a bit longer with his children, who knows what could have happened” said Yahav, who also noticed that the missile had barely missed the gas balloons.

Yuval, Yahav’s older brother, was asked how his two children were doing who had left the house only ten minutes before.

They heard the blast and ran back to the house and watched their grandmother and Aunt being rescued from the second floor.

Yuval said that his children are only worried about their grandmother, Devorah, and they keep asking what happened to her.

Yuval said that he would have trouble taking his children to visit their grandparents’ home again. They will simply not understand why and how it was destroyed.

Yahav goes back to work on Lag B’omer, the day that wedding season resumes on the Jewish calendar. That is because Yahav is a wedding video photographer for his livelihood.

Yahav used a cover missile attacks for Israel TV and quit because he wanted to film happier events. That is, happier events than the 212th missile to hit the western Negev since Israel declared a self-imposed “cease-fire” on November 26th, 2006.