Not content with the $20 million he ordered sent to Gaza, President Obama is now going for aid in a big way. The New York Times reports:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration intends to provide some $900 million to help rebuild Gaza after the Israeli incursion that ended last month, administration officials said Monday.
In an early sign of how the administration plans to deal with Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, an official said that the aid would not go to Hamas but that it would be funneled through nongovernmental organizations.
Andy McCarthy at National Review has a comprehensive smackdown of the idea the money won’t go to Hamas, beginning with this excellent paragraph:
Various la-la land conservatives and moderates assured us that Obama, despite a career spent in the Left’s fever swamps, is really a “pragmatist” who would govern from the center. They pooh-poohed us knuckle-draggers who doggedly pointed to his radical intimates, like Hamas-apologist Rashid Khalidi. I wonder what they’re thinking today as Obama takes time out from destroying the economy to send $900M from the mint’s busy printing press to Hamas.
Despite disclaimers in the New York Times, yes, the money is going to Hamas, via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA.
The UNRWA is effectively an arm of Hamas in Gaza (and elsewhere). In its second term, the Bush State Department was reckless in enabling Palestinian terrorists on its utopian quest for Middle East peace. As in so much else, Obama is taking that parlous policy and multiplying it by a hundred.
After going through the many ways UNRWA aids Hamas, McCarthy concludes:
The game here is obvious. UNRWA takes in hundreds of millions (indeed, billions) in aid. Some is directly funnelled to Hamas in cash or in kind. But for the most part, UNRWA performs social welfare services quite consciously to free Hamas — the Palestinians’ chosen government — to divert its limited resources to wage a terrorist war (“the resistance”) against Israel.
And here’s the nub of it:
If an organization comprised of American citizens attempted to do this, they could be prosecuted and imprisoned for decades on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization. (I would say “would be prosecuted,” but with this administration, who knows?) Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (an old hand at empowering Palestinian terrorists) are now proposing to give nearly a billion dollars to a Hamas subsidiary — knowing full well that this funding must inevitably result in the murder of innocent people.
McCarthy points out that Congress could stop this expenditure. Fat chance. All we can hope for is that a few principled Republicans will raise the alarm, so at least some citizens will realize how closely the Obama administration is aligning itself with terrorists.
I highly recommend you read McCarthy’s whole post.