Hamas’ current bloodthirsty and barbaric terror attack inside Israel, was empowered by the Radical-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama. He aided the jihad terror group in Gaza—and helped spawn its current mayhem and destruction inside the Jewish state.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Jamie Glazov’s new book, Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America, documents this dark reality.
Below, are excerpts of a chapter in the book written by Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield, titled How Obama Funded the Murder of Israelis.
In Jerusalem, 2017 began with a terrorist ramming a truck into Israeli cadets who were getting off [a] bus. Four of the Israelis, three of them women, were killed, and over a dozen more were injured. Fadi al-Qanbar, the terrorist, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, but his widow was set to receive a lifetime monthly pension of 2,900 Israeli shekels from the Palestinian Authority for his crime.
Hours before President Trump was inaugurated, Secretary of State John Kerry ensured money was delivered to the terrorists. The amount: $221 million.
NOTE: The Palestinian Authority’s Martyrs Fund budget for 2017 allocated $153 million in salaries to terrorists who had been or were imprisoned by Israel and another $190 million to the families of the terrorists.
The $221 million amounted to a sizable percentage of the “Pay to Slay” budget that was used to incentivize murders like these.
The Martyrs Fund was a key mechanism for incentivizing these attacks, assuring surviving terrorists of a generous lifetime income and, in the event of their deaths, giving them the comfort of knowing that no matter what happens, their families will be very well taken care of.
A sad example: The murders of Jews funded in 2017 included the Sabbath attack on the Salomon family who were celebrating the birth of a new member of the family when an Islamic terrorist burst in with a knife and a Koran, stabbed to death seventy-year-old Yosef Salomon, wounded his wife, Tova Salomon, and murdered Chaya and Elad, Yosef’s son and daughter.
Omar el-Abed, the terrorist, later explained:
I saw two houses; from one of them I heard voices and from the other I heard laughter. So I decided to get into the one that had laughter.
The Israeli Defense Ministry estimated in 2018 that the murderer, who had smiled through the trial, had been paid 12,000 NIS, and would earn as much as 12 million NIS or $3.5 million throughout his life.
While some argued that United States foreign aid was not meant by the Obama [Regime] for the Martyrs Fund and its ‘Pay to Slay’ program, money is fungible. American foreign aid allowed the Palestinian Authority the financial freedom to invest money into funding the murder of Jews. The connection between foreign aid and violence had already been demonstrated when the rise in murders closely followed the increase in foreign aid from 2001 to 2007.
The Trump administration aggressively cut foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, but the damage had already been done. The Israelis who had been killed by “Pay to Slay” terrorists would not be brought back to life. But the Obama Regime’s foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority was only part of the terror funding picture. The other half of the terror picture was the PA’s occasional rival and ally, Hamas.
In 2016, the Obama [Regime] had illegally transferred $1.7 billion to Iran. The deputy chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed credit for the ransom. The IRGC is a hub of Islamic terrorism in the region and was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by President Trump.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner admitted:
We can always hand it over to someone who can hand it over to the IRGC.
After the $1.7 billion payment, Iran increased its military budget by that same amount. It’s been estimated that 65 percent of the military budget goes to the IRGC.
And the IRGC funds, trains, and aids a variety of Islamic terrorist groups, including Hamas. That includes the missiles that Hamas has been firing at Israel and that have fallen on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Further, the billions in sanctions relief allowed Iran to increase its investment in conflicts in the region. In 2017, Hamas announced that it had resumed receiving aid from Iran. In 2019, Iran boosted aid to Hamas from $70 million a year to $30 million a month. Beyond Hamas, Iran also backs Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which was at the center of the latest round of rocket attacks on Israel in the fall of 2019.
The extent of Iran’s involvement in Islamic terrorism in Israel can be measured by an admission by Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign affairs adviser to the Supreme Leader of Iran that:
[M]ost of the weapons used by the Palestinians came from Iran, or that Iran help[ed] the Palestinians manufacture the weapons themselves.
The Obama Regime dramatically boosted aid to the Palestinian Authority.
It went on pouring funds into the Palestinian Authority even though the terror network was funding the murder of Jews.
No doubt the Obama Regime was aware of the consequences of the billions it had poured into the Palestinian Authority and Iran. It knew that the money would be used to kill Jews. We will never know exactly how many Americans and Jews were killed because of those billions.
[M]oney is fungible. When billions are poured into the infrastructure of terror, that money is blood money.
The crimes committed by the terror networks that feed off that infrastructure, at any level of scale from large terror groups like Hamas or Hezbollah to the individual “lone wolf” Islamic terrorist who expects to receive a generous salary from the Palestinian Authority and are on the political conscience of their funders, no matter how indirect they may claim that their contributions are.
The report card of the Obama Regime reflects not mere statistics. It is marked with blood. And that blood flow continues to expand, even with Obama hiding in a basement and with Joe-Joe the puppet-in-charge bumbling and stumbling out front.
