Worse than all of the anti-Semitic comments by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas have been the P.A.’s legislation and actions under Abbas’s leadership, supporting the murder of Jews and Americans.
He is the first political leader to establish a law providing for financial incentives to murder Jews since Hitler. P.A. law currently budgets and disburses more than $350 million in financial incentives to murder (budgeted to increase to more than $400 million next year), with the more Jews and Americans a terrorist murders, the more money that he and his family receives. Amazingly, while the P.A. was providing such financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Jews and Americans, U.S. aid to the P.A. continued to increase throughout the Obama administration. Fortunately, due to the passage of the Taylor Force Act in March 2018, aid to the P.A. will finally be significantly cut—by the exact amount of money provided in the incentives, minus a few exceptions.
This raises a question that is not just political and financial in nature, but moral as well: Why is any U.S. aid going to the P.A. at all?
And if one is concerned about humanitarian concerns, then why has there been no humanitarian aid going to North Korea since many citizens there have been dying due to starvation?
Instead, U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley pushed for stronger economic sanctions upon North Korea because they understood the old Talmudic adage that he who is merciful to the cruel is destined to become cruel to the merciful. Humanitarian aid to North Korea only strengthened the despotic regime with its evil policies, clearly demonstrated by its torture and death of young American Otto Warmbier, who was released last year only to die back home. The only way to get this cruel regime to change its pursuit of nuclear weapons—and, hopefully, change its other evil policies—without a military confrontation was to make it a pariah regime and sanction it into financial submission. In other words, the only way to do what was best for the North Korean people was to enact policies of punitive sanctions that would temporarily make it worse for them, but would ultimately serve to improve the lives of its citizenry and reduce the threat that rogue nation poses to the rest of the world.
The result? Kim recently walked over the border into South Korea, making concrete steps to finally end the Korean War 65 years after the 1953 Armistice Agreement that stopped the shooting but didn’t end the war, and indicated a willingness to denuclearize North Korea. There’s no rational counter-argument to this immutable fact that the firm, unyielding policies of the United States under Trump have finally started to bring North Korea “in from the cold.”
A similar policy needs to be adopted regarding the P.A. Abbas is not a recent anti-Semite or anti-Zionist. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis questioning the amount of Jews dying in the Holocaust. He was Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man in terror in the PLO for more than 30 years.
Abbas has hailed numerous terrorists as heroes, and routinely names schools and public squares after them; further, P.A.-produced television shows encourage Palestinian Arab youth to follow in their paths. It’s not surprising that the Anti-Defamation League found that the Palestinian Arabs are the most anti-Semitic people in the world with more than 90 percent expressing anti-Semitic views. Abbas has supported anti-Semitism and the murder of Jews his entire adult life. The world and U.S. approach towards Abbas by successive American administrations of believing that he wanted peace with Israel and trying to work out a territorial compromise has always been doomed to inevitable failure. Abbas has never wanted peace, and like Arafat, educates his people that the Jewish people have no right to Israel, and that all of Israel should be a Palestinian Arab state.
The recent passage in the United States of the Taylor Force Act, with its substantial cut in aid for the P.A., has so far failed to convince Palestinian leadership to change its heinous law that provides financial incentives to terrorists. Accordingly, stronger action must be taken. Hamas, for instance, should be forced to choose between using whatever money it has for the economic needs of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza or see its terrorist regime implode. The world should view either of these outcomes as superior to continuation of the status quo.
