I appreciate the PA’s frankness. Now it’s time for some consequences.
Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.
The Palestinian Authority’s new budget for 2018 openly states, for the first time, that the PA is directly paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists. By the U.S. government’s own definition, that makes the PA a terrorist organization and it should be treated as such.
This devastating new information comes from the indefatigable researchers of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). They’ve translated and analyzed the PA’s just-released budget for 2018. What they found would be front page news around the world—if the news media treated the PA the same way it treats other regimes.
The PA’s budget allocates funds for two categories of terrorists. One is for “families of the martyrs and wounded.” That is, families of suicide bombers and others who are killed or wounded while trying to massacre Jews. They’ll be receiving $197-million this year. The other category is imprisoned terrorists. The PA will be giving $158-million to the “Commission of Prisoners” to pay salaries to terrorists who are serving jail sentences in Israel.
That’s a total of $355-million in terrorist funds. It amounts to 7.4% of the PA’s entire budget—and a whopping 44% of the foreign aid that the PA receives.
Palestinian Media Watch explains that in recent years, the PA tried to hide its terrorist payments through the use of bureaucratic subterfuge. When PMW first publicized the terrorist payments in 2014, the PA quickly shut down its Ministry of Prisoners Affairs and claimed—falsely—that an agency unrelated to the PA, the PLO’s Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, was providing the funds from non-PA sources.
PMW then uncovered the fact that the PA was actually transferring money to its “Palestinian National Fund,” which then gave it to that PLO commission, which then paid the terrorists. READ MORE
