Biden Boasts of Providing the Palestinians with Half a Billion Dollars

BY HUGH FITZGERALD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/07/biden-boasts-of-providing-the-palestinians-with-half-a-billion-dollars;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Joe Biden is proud of himself for having provided the Palestinians with $500 million in aid. He apparently regards this as a major geopolitical achievement, not as a moral and geopolitical disaster. He says it has “rebuilt ties” with the Palestinian Authority. A report on his hallucinatory miscomprehension is here: “Biden: ‘We’ve rebuilt ties with Palestinians, restored some $500 million in aid to PA,'” JNS, July 10, 2022:

The Biden administration has “rebuilt ties” with the Palestinian Authority and restored some $500 million in aid to it “without permitting terrorists to rearm,” U.S. President Joe Biden wrote in an op-ed published on Saturday night in The Washington Post.

The PA is happy to pocket whatever aid it can inveigle the Biden Administration into giving it. But it has not shown any gratitude in return. It just denounced the Americans for daring to suggest that, even if Israel may have been responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, her killing was not “intentional” – a conclusion which the Palestinians say constitutes a “betrayal.”

The PA continues with its “Pay-For-Slay” program, which provides generous subsidies to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists who died during their attacks. In so doing, the PA both rewards past, and incentivizes future, terrorism. The Taylor Force Act was meant to pressure the PA so that it would stop that program. It prohibits giving aid to the PA as long as that “Pay-For-Slay” program continues. The Biden Administration, in providing those half-billion dollars to the PA, is violating the Taylor Force Act; it apparently believes or pretends to, that there is an exception for “humanitarian aid” in the Act, but there is none. Nor are those subsidies the only way the PA encourages terrorism. It holds terrorists up as heroes, naming schools, streets, squares, and sports competitions after them, plastering city walls with posters of them, making them the much-to-be-admired subjects of radio and television programs.

The article comes ahead of the American leader’s July 13-16 trip to the Middle East, which will see him travel to Israel and Saudi Arabia, with a stop in Ramallah to meet with Palestinian officials.

“In Israel, we helped end a war in Gaza-which could easily have lasted months-in just 11 days. We’ve worked with Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan to maintain the peace without permitting terrorists to rearm,” Biden wrote in reference to the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Biden is hallucinating about the 2021 Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. It came to an end in 11 days, not because of anything the Americans did, but only because Israel had killed more than 200 Hamas fighters, including 40 officers, intercepted more than 4,000 rockets, destroyed thousands more rockets, missiles, and other weapons hidden in Gaza pulverized control-and-command centers and demolished large parts of the network of tunnels Hamas had built under Gaza.

“We also rebuilt U.S. ties with the Palestinians. Working with Congress, my administration restored approximately $500 million in support for Palestinians, while also passing the largest support package for Israel-over $4 billion-in history. And this week, an Israeli prime minister spoke with the president of the Palestinian Authority for the first time in five years,” Biden wrote.

No, America did not “rebuild ties” with the Palestinians. It only let the Palestinians yet again help themselves to whatever aid the Americans had put on the table. There has been no discernible decrease in Palestinian anger against the United States.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Friday discussed with P.A. chief Mahmoud Abbas the “need to ensure quiet and calm” ahead of and during Biden’s visit.

In his op-ed, Biden noted that this coming Friday he is set to become the first U.S. president to fly directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia: “That travel will also be a small symbol of the budding relations and steps toward normalization between Israel and the Arab world, which my administration is working to deepen and expand,” he wrote, adding, “In Jiddah, leaders from across the region will gather, pointing to the possibility of a more stable and integrated Middle East, with the United States playing a vital leadership role.”

Having initially shown themselves unenthusiastic about the Abraham Accords, because they were the brainchild of the Trump Administration, the Bidenites have now come round to realizing what an achievement those Accords represent, and are now hoping to encourage the further “integration” of Israel into its Arab neighborhood. This will include trying to persuade the most important Arab country, Saudi Arabia, to join the Abraham Accords.

With respect to Iran, Biden argued that reengaging in nuclear talks along with allies in Europe and around the world had “reverse[d] our isolation,” and that instead “now it is Iran that is isolated until it returns to the nuclear deal.”…

Iran is not isolated – witness its continuing friendship with Russia and China, its support from Syria’s Assad, and its control, through its proxy Hezbollah, of Lebanon. None of these countries are going to end their support of Iran “unless it returns to the nuclear deal.” And during the long months when those negotiations with Iran continued, the Iranians continued to race to enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Now even the Israelis have decided they will no longer try to slow down the uranium enrichment program, since Iran already has enough uranium for a bomb, acquired while the Vienna negotiations were going on, and instead Israel will focus on Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Tehran’s ability to mount a nuclear warhead on such a missile.

Biden still claims he has faith in a “return to the 2015 nuclear deal.” But Iran will not give up the uranium it has already enriched – and preventing that enrichment was the whole point of the 2015 deal. Iran has shown its long-term ability both to hide nuclear facilities from the IAEA, and to simply declare others off-limits to the IAEA investigators when they request an inspection. Iran has been consistently limiting, hindering, and lying to inspectors ever since the 2015 deal was first in place. Why should anyone believe that even if the 2015 deal is revived, Iranian behavior will be any different this time? Or do the Bidenites have a special undisclosed way to prevent Iranian cheating? And Biden says nothing about trying to prevent Iran from now building a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, which the Israelis believe is where their, and our, efforts should now be concentrated.

Israel has just announced that President Biden is to be awarded the Jewish state’s Presidential Medal of Honor.

Why?