Avid Editor's Insights: BUSH, STOP PAYING TRIBUTE

In what I consider to be the finest summation of the failure of American Middle East foreign policy and its ungodly consequences, Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa Lappens expose the inexplicable stupidity and naivete at throwing untold billions at ‘Palestinian’ jihadis - tribute- over decades. We have, in effect, built, produced the weapon of our destruction and still ……….. we will fund these savages in even greater amounts — as we speak.
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Please read their whole article and then compare and contrast Bush and Jefferson. Jefferson wouldn’t pay the tribute

U.S. Rewarding Palestinian Terrorism Terror Finance blog

Unwavering U.S. determination to fund,

train, and arm more than 50,000 Palestinian ‘soldiers’ raises serious doubts

about the repeated promises President George W. Bush has made to secure Israel’s

safety and bring peace to the Middle East.

If the Bush administration gets its way, $4.2 billion to $7 billion in

American taxpayer dollars over the next five years may fund training and

purchase arms for tens of thousands of seasoned Palestinian terrorists. Many are

veteran murderers, released from Israeli prisons in ‘confidence building’

measures repeatedly demanded by the U.S.

It’s as if the U.S. proposed sending money, arms, and military instructors to

help Sudanese strongman, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, assist Darfur refugees —

against whom he openly pursues genocide.

[…]

Instead, in 1994 the U.S. helped establish the Palestinian Authority (PA),

headed by one of the most wanted criminals in the world — the Muslim Brotherhood

member and Soviet-trained jihadist Yasser Arafat. His comrade in arms, vizier,

and chief negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, follows in Arafat’s footsteps — albeit

without the trademark kafiyah and beard — even more successfully.

Ignoring $10 billion (PDF) in Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) loot

that Arafat already controlled, plus more than $2 billion in illegal annual

income, the West showered millions more on Arafat. The West assumed that giving

the PA legitimacy, funding it, and persuading Israel to cede territory would

convince Palestinians to stop targeting Israel and the West.

[…]

In 2001, a year into the second intifada, official donations to the PA jumped

over 80% from $555 million to $1.002 billion (PDF)— including at least $114

million from the U.S. Sure enough, that year hundreds of Israelis were murdered

and thousands injured in at least 121 attacks.

[…]

Yet, in dozens of cases the USAID mission for the West Bank and Gaza failed

to enforce federal laws requiring they bar organizations and individuals that

threaten, support, or are affiliated with terrorism. The USAID also failed to

certify that recipients have not provided material support for terrorism.

In at least 74 cases, according to a December 2007 audit, the mission ‘failed

to comply’ (PDF) with the anti-terrorism requirements of Executive Order 13224.

It failed to vet subcontractors and require anti-terrorism certification for all

contractors and subcontractors who received money.

Yet, the USAID mission even now plans to forfeit requirements on cumulative

payments of under $25,000 annually. It should be noted that $25,000 can buy 50

Katyusha rockets.

The USAID mission argued that the prohibition against cash assistance to the

PA is ‘technically an anti-corruption measure and not an anti-terrorism

measure.’ Thus, they claim they violated no anti-terrorism clause.

[…]

This would be the first time the U.S. gives the utterly corrupt PA cash to

use as it likes, even to share with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations such

as Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Notwithstanding Fatah-Hamas leadership disagreements branding each other

‘murderers and thieves,’ on Jan. 30 Abbas agreed to give Hamas $3.1 billion of

$7.7 billion pledged by international donors in Paris last December.

Money is fungible. PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank

official, made this clear in a 2007 interview with London’s Daily Telegraph. ‘No

one can [assure] donors’ that funds reach their designated destinations, Fayyad

declared. He went on to state that controlling Palestinian finances is

‘virtually impossible.’

We don’t have to fund these murderers. Bush is no Jefferson but he could learn a thing or two from him.

America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe by Gerard W. Gawalt

After the United States won its independence in the treaty of 1783, it

had to protect its own commerce against dangers such as the Barbary

pirates. As early as 1784 Congress followed the tradition of the

European shipping powers and appropriated $80,000 as tribute to the

Barbary states, directing its ministers in Europe, Thomas Jefferson and

John Adams, to begin negotiations with them. Trouble began the next

year, in July 1785, when Algerians captured two American ships and the

dey of Algiers held their crews of twenty-one people for a ransom of

nearly $60,000.

Paying the ransom would only lead to further demands, Jefferson argued

in letters to future presidents John Adams, then Americas minister to

Great Britain, and James Monroe, then a member of Congress. As

Jefferson wrote to Adams in a July 11, 1786, letter, ‘I acknolege [sic]

I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro the

medium of war.’ Paying tribute will merely invite more demands, and

even if a coalition proves workable, the only solution is a strong navy

that can reach the pirates, Jefferson argued in an August 18, 1786,

letter to James Monroe: ‘The states must see the rod; perhaps it must

be felt by some one of them. . . . Every national citizen must wish to

see an effective instrument of coercion, and should fear to see it on

any other element than the water. A naval force can never endanger our

liberties, nor occasion bloodshed; a land force would do both.’ ‘From

what I learn from the temper of my countrymen and their tenaciousness

of their money,’ Jefferson added in a December 26, 1786, letter to the

president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, ‘it will be more easy to raise

ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe

them.’

Jeffersons plan for an international coalition foundered on the shoals

of indifference and a belief that it was cheaper to pay the tribute

than fight a war. The United Statess relations with the Barbary states

continued to revolve around negotiations for ransom of American ships

and sailors and the payment of annual tributes or gifts. Even though

Secretary of State Jefferson declared to Thomas Barclay, American

consul to Morocco, in a May 13, 1791, letter of instructions for a new

treaty with Morocco that it is ‘lastly our determination to prefer war

in all cases to tribute under any form, and to any people whatever,’

the United States continued to negotiate for cash settlements. In 1795

alone the United States was forced to pay nearly a million dollars in

cash, naval stores, and a frigate to ransom 115 sailors from the dey of

Algiers. Annual gifts were settled by treaty on Algiers, Morocco,

Tunis, and Tripoli.

When Jefferson became president in 1801 he refused to accede to

Tripolis demands for an immediate payment of $225,000 and an annual

payment of $25,000. The pasha of Tripoli then declared war on the

United States. Although as secretary of state and vice president he had

opposed developing an American navy capable of anything more than

coastal defense, President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of naval

vessels to the Mediterranean. As he declared in his first annual

message to Congress: ‘To this state of general peace with which we have

been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least

considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands

unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to

denounce war, on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of

the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a small squadron of frigates

into the Mediterranean. . . .’