Thursday, May 11, 2006
Why on earth should Israel or anyone else be backing a Palestinian Arab government that continues to be overt in their war against the Jewish State?
"We ask all the people in surrounding Arab countries, the Muslim world and everyone who wants to support us to send weapons, money and men," Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal said in a speech at a pro-Palestinian event in Qatar.
"You should not shy away from of this. This is resistance, not terrorism," said Meshaal whose group -- sworn to the destruction of Israel -- leads the Palestinian government.
Prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi told the event Muslims should boycott banks refusing to transfer funds to the Palestinians after Washington said it could penalize banks that help provide money to the Hamas-led government.
"We call on Muslims to boycott banks that do not transfer money to the Palestinians. The boycott would force them to cooperate," he told participants, referring to banks in Jordan and Egypt which he did not identify...
Meanwhile, at the UN, the Europeans are trying to find a way to funnel in money using "temporary measures" (yeah, right), but the US is "wary":
This wariness was expressed yesterday by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, during a meeting with visiting Israel Defense Forces officers from the National Security College in Israel.
Echoing his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bolton expressed concern that the international mechanism was meant primarily to transfer salary payments to more than 165,000 Palestinian civil servants. Among these are some 75,000 security personnel, who have not received regular payments in recent months and have been exacerbating the unrest in Palestinian society.
At a press conference with her counterparts in the Quartet on Tuesday, Rice said that "no country in the world, including poor African countries, relies on foreign sources in order to make payments to its employees."...
Is the continuing Palestinian Arab dysfunction a living example of the end result of an entire people on the dole, deprived of their right to bear consequences? That's a rhetorical question, of course.
