Under Sequester, U.S. Giving Islamists $500 Million
Posted 07/29/2013
Mideast: The sequester has "cost jobs," says President Obama, and "gutted investments in education and science and medical research." But somehow he's earmarked $500 million for Hamas terrorists.
Circumventing Congress and with no fanfare, President Obama last week issued an executive order enabling him to send an additional $500 million directly to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — much of which you can bet will wind up going to the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.
According to Obama, "it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions of" Congress' legislative restrictions "in order to provide funds . .. to the Palestinian Authority."
At the beginning of his first term, Obama promised close to $1 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledging none of it would reach Hamas.
But the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Acharonot has documented that tens of millions of dollars in aid for the PA — from Israel — ended up being used by Hamas for weapons. If Israel can't guarantee its own aid is safe, how can we?
What's more, back in February, the president was warning that the "meat cleaver" of the impending budget sequester of automatic spending cuts would "jeopardize our military readiness" — the budget ax having amazingly already "forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf" even before it came into effect.
Sequester was going to force the government to "let criminals go," Obama claimed, jeopardize "air traffic controllers and airport security," cause tens of thousands of parents "to scramble to find child care," and put "hundreds of thousands of Americans" at greater risk of cancer and flu.
Well, the sequester has been supposedly devastating the functions of the federal government for nearly five months now.
And yet the president just managed to pull a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money out of the U.S. Treasury's hat to fund further an organization that will likely finance more rockets to kill Israeli citizens on their home soil.
When Hamas started winning elections, a realistic Bush administration wisely determined that the ballot box was no road to peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip anytime soon.
President Obama, on the other hand — not unlike Jimmy Carter's policies toward communists in Central America — thinks we can bribe these thugs into civilizing themselves.
That in fact was the whole ethos of his 2009 "New Beginning" speech at Cairo University. Obama opened the door to the subsequent "Arab Spring" that has seen regimes friendly to the U.S. be replaced with Islamists.
Muslim Brotherhood flunky Mohamed Morsi's rule was threat enough for the Egyptian military to step in, and Morsi now finds himself accused of colluding with — guess who? — Hamas.
In Syria, the White House was convinced that the wild card of Islamist rebels taking control was preferable to menacing secularist dictator Bashar al-Assad; in Libya, Muammar Gadhafi, whose nuclear weapons program was neutralized by the Bush administration's aggressive waging of the global war on terror, was replaced by an Islamist regime that remains a question mark.
Now, for the sake of restarting negotiations with Palestinians this week after a three-year hiatus, the Israeli government is releasing over 100 Arab militants, some sentenced to life, whose crimes include throwing firebombs at a bus carrying children and stabbing and shooting elderly Jews.
As Israeli Economic Minister Naftali Bennett quipped to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, it amounts to freeing "a hundred terrorists for a process. We are showing the world that, for us, everything is negotiable."
Thanks to President Obama, it's a hundred terrorists and $500 million. Apparently, neither Israeli pride nor American budget constraints can stop the appeasement of Islamist terrorists.
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