PA Increases Funds for Terrorists, SWC Urges EU Member States to Join US and Israeli Initiatives in Withholding Funding

July 19, 2017

Palestinian Media Watch reports that, despite growing international protests, the new Palestinian Authority budget increases spending by 13% for salaries to terrorist prisoners and by 4% for payments to families of terrorist “Martyrs." Direct terror funding expenditures by the PA now reach 1.237 million shekels - $355 million for 2017.

“Is the PA President running a mafia or a government? No Israeli government, right, center, or left, can seriously negotiate with a leader who embeds a pay-for-murder scheme to kill Jews,” charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Dean and Founder and Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish Human Rights NGO.

“Abbas' priorities, when it comes to his own people, border on the bizarre. He spurned desperate pleas from mothers and withheld the funds to provide full electricity for his living constituents in Gaza, yet he eagerly escalates financial rewards for terrorists — dead and alive," Wiesenthal Center officials added.

Photo: Rabbi Cooper (L) during an earlier meeting with Taylor Force Act sponsor, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO)

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has endorsed the Taylor Force Act that would cut US funding to the PA because of its financial support of Palestinian terrorists and their families and has consulted with Israeli MK Elazar Stern who has introduced similar legislation to withhold tax revenues from the PA that matches its terrorism outlays.

“Now is the time for Germany’s Merkel and France’s Macron to decrease their allotments to the PA and tell Abbas to stop playing Santa Claus for terrorists,” Hier and Cooper concluded.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).