Boker Tov, Boulder Audits The PA's Books!

Boker Tov, Boulder goes through articles on the contributions the Palestinians have received since 2004. The list is probably not exhaustive, but it is mind boggling. It just goes to show you: those contributions in the hundreds of millions do add up.

Noah Pollak notes:

On Wednesday, Mahmoud Abbas asked the world for $5.8 billion in aid; three days later the request had inexplicably grown to $7.1 billion. As many people have pointed out, per capita the Palestinians are by many orders of magnitude the largest recipients of foreign aid in the world, receiving vastly more, for example, than the destitute peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. [emphasis added]

Rick Richman writes that Condoleezza Rice is pushing for donations to the Palestinians in a way that would put the UJA to shame:

Here is what Condoleezza Rice acknowledged last week, in the course of a Q&A session at the U.S.-Palestinian Public-Private Partnership:

[W]e're going to have a donors conference on the 17th. This is an opportunity for the international community to signal very strongly that it intends to make sure that the resources are there for the Palestinian Government under Salam Fayyad to provide for the Palestinian people and to begin to provide a framework in which economic development can flourish. It's going to take flat support of budgets for a while because there really isn't a functioning Palestinian economy. And I think we all understand that. And so finding a way to help the government just function for a while has been a very strong preoccupation of mine.

The Condoleezza Rice hard sell just perpetuates a longstanding and growing problem

Rickman also recommends Barry Rubin's article, You Owe Us Bigtime: The Distortion of Palestinian Aid Politics, which shows the dimensions of the problem that Rice is asking the world to contribute to.

If the criticisms leveled at Bush about the Iraq war were based on integrity and not politics, those same critics would be jumping all over this.

More to the point, unlike Hamas, the PA is even more financially dependent on others. How can the West demand that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence, and abide by interim peace deals--when the West does not demand the same from Abbas?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Palestinians.