Leave it to the State Department: While other U.S. departments and agencies waste tax payer money, no other department does it with quite the counter-productive flair of our friends in Foggy Bottom. First, there was the issue of U.S. money going to pay salaries to jailed Palestinian terrorists, including those who murdered Americans.
Now, it turns out that the State Department is paying money to the United Nations Development Program which is turning around and funding the Inter Press Service (IPS), a media outlet which seeks to be “a communication channel that privileges the voices and the concerns of the poorest and creates a climate of understanding, accountability and participation around development, promoting a new international information order between the South and the North.” In effect this means shilling for Venezuela, Zimbabwe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. For example, in this story, IPS appears to be advocating for a renewed Palestinian uprising.
Let’s put aside the question of why the United Nations feels it must fund a media outlet effectively to compete with the private sector. Now, both with terrorist salaries and now incitement, the State Department can argue that money is fungible and that they cannot control all the activities of their grantees. Fair enough. But if a grantee has money to waste, then it doesn’t need subsidies from American taxpayers.
As an aside, I see that frequent IPS writer Ali Gharib, now on staff at Think Progress,complains in a somewhat snarky post that the State Department has given a grant to MEMRI. He does not reveal his own conflict of interest as, in an era of declining resources, IPS and MEMRI must compete for the same pot.
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