A terror attack and the CDU
Shira opened her eyes briefly and asked for her mother. She held her hand and pressed it, then she fell asleep again. The day before she was fighting for her life.
On Sunday, December 9th, at a bus stop in Ofra, a small community in Judea and Samaria, popularly called the West Bank, Amichai Ish-ra was standing with his 21-year-old wife, when Arab Palestinians drove by in a white car and shot at those waiting with a gun. Seven people were injured in the hail of bullets, most severely Shira, who was pregnant in her 30th week. The bullets hit her in the lower abdomen. Ambulances brought Shira and Amichai, who had been hit in the legs, to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, where their baby was born by Caesarean section. For six hours, a team of twenty doctors fought for the young mother’s life. For an hour and a half, it seemed they would lose the battle, Shira’s mother reported after her daughter had survived the operation.
Shira’s baby could not be saved. The infant boy died. »We regretfully announce the death of Shira and Amichai’s child four days after the attack, despite the efforts of the medical doctors to save him,« the hospital announced in a statement. Shira is still in intensive care. In her ninth month of marriage, the new mother was lying in artificial coma and her baby died, after he has been drifting between life and death for days. One can hardly imagine what the young family had gone through during those horrible days.
But, the terrorist killers and their families are now financially secure.
Millions for murderers
For 2018, the Palestinian Authority (PA) budgeted 340 million dollars for the care of terrorists and their families, as Jonathan S. Tobin explains in detail. The recently published budget plan quantifies financial assistance for imprisoned terrorists and the families of those who died and were wounded in the »fight against Zionism«:
The total PA budget is 5 billion US dollars. Prisoners are allocated 155 million dollars. Five thousand prisoners receive monthly payments along with thousands of released prisoners as well, according to the length of their incarceration.
185 million dollars are reserved for the families of »martyrs« and the wounded. Twenty four thousand families receive monthly payments, 28,000 are covered by health insurance, and even pilgrimages are financed. Additionally, there are unspecified payments to imprisoned members of the Palestinian security forces who were involved in terrorist attacks as well as to the families of those members who were injured or killed in self-initiated attacks. Those amounts are included in the budget for the security forces and are not reported individually.
The total of $340 million makes up about 7% of the total budget. With that money, the Palestinian leadership intentionally creates incentives for terrorism. This has nothing to do with »welfare«; the salaries and other gratuities paid to imprisoned terrorists is far more than standard social welfare payments. It’s supposed to pay to be a Jew killer.
Therefore, thanks to a law passed in July of this year, Israel will deduct one twelfth of the amount paid in the previous year to support terrorists from the taxes and customs duties that Israel collects and pays to the PA. It’s likely that from January 2019, approximately $21 million per month will be held in an escrow account until further notice. The PA loses another 200 million dollars in the same year because the USA has stopped part of its payments as long as aid money is channeled to finance terrorists.
Whether and to what extent Germany will plug the ensuing financial gap is not known. When the USA announced in August that it would cut its aid payments to UNRWA by 300 million dollars, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas immediately announced Germany’s willingness to step into the breach. »We are currently preparing to provide substantial additional funds.«
In any case, the Palestinian Authority seems not to be especially alarmed. Although the financial pressure on his agency is increasing, Mahmoud Abbas vehemently rejects the demand to stop paying terrorists: »Even if we have only a penny left, we will use it to pay the salaries of the martyrs and prisoners of war.«
Scene change: the CDU party conference.
On two days shortly before the attack in Ofra, one thousand and one delegates of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) met in Hamburg for a federal party conference. A new chairman was to be elected, and as always at party congresses, a large number of proposals were submitted for review. Such motions are then accepted, rejected or transferred to a committee. The so-called »remittances« are something like a first-class funeral. A final decision can be avoided through a declaration of non-competence. Such proposals are transferred somewhere else where it indefinitely awaits resolution. At some point, when delegates and the public have long since lost sight of it or forgotten it altogether, it’s either decided upon, transferred to a commission for commentary or transferred yet again to another committee. A proposal can be kept in suspension for any length of time. No one openly rejects a proposal, but rather avoids making a final decision.
Motion C 156 was submitted by the Frankfurt am Main district association at the federal party conference: »For years now, the Palestinian Authority has been paying financial support to families of Palestinian terrorists, which, depending on the amount of a possible prison sentence, amounts to between 300 and over 3000 dollars a month. Even if terrorists die in attacks on Israelis, pension payments are made. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority deliberately and knowingly supports terror against Israel, making it a financially worthwhile business.
As long as the Palestinian Authority doesn’t refrain from this practice of terror support, no further financial aid should be provided by the EU or Germany, since there is no guarantee that German and European taxpayers’ money is not being misused for that purpose.
Therefore, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany calls on the Federal Government to support freezing financial aid for the Palestinian Authority at the European level and also to suspend Germany’s own payments to the Palestinian Authority until payments to Palestinian terrorists and their families are terminated.«
What could there be for a Christian-democratic party to consider or debate? One may not have been aware or even suppressed the issue, but now it’s black and white, on paper by one’s own party colleagues: German tax money is being used to promote the murder of Jews, German tax money supports the families of terrorist killers. The German Chancellor had assured the Israeli Knesset that Israel’s security is a German »reason of state«. Can there be anyone in this country, in Europe, who thinks that people who shoot at teenagers and pregnant women should be financially rewarded?
Motion C 156, »Freeze financial aid to the Palestinian Authority«, was referred to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag together with 67 other undecided proposals.
Translation by William Wires
First published in German on mena-watch
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