Daniel Greenfield April 12, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11 while working with an anti-Israel group.
A
few years later, the Beirut-born extremist had become an advisor on
Muslim relations to the World Economic Forum before heading up
Brookings' Doha Center for Qatar. The tiny Islamic tyranny is allied
with Iran, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a backer of Hamas.
The
Obama administration appointed Amr as the Deputy Head of USAID's Middle
East Bureau which put him in a key position to direct taxpayer money
from an organization already notorious for funding pro-terrorist and
anti-Israel groups.
A decade after Amr had responded to the death of a Hamas leader
by ranting that
"there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders
of innocents", the Obama administration made him a Deputy to its Special
Envoy for Israeli Palestinian negotiations.
Amr decamped back to Brookings during the Trump administration, becoming one of
Biden’s big bundlers,
joining his transition team and getting picked as Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Within two decades of
praising the intifada against Israel and a decade of working for a
think-tank deeply compromised by its pro-Hamas regime sponsor, the
foreign radical had climbed to a pole position in setting the Biden
administration’s policy on Israel.
Politico described Amr as “the
key U.S. official dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” The
Times of Israel called him, “Biden’s point-man on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Biden’s point man didn’t waste much time.
On
February 1st, it was reported that Amr had spoken with Minister Hussein
al-Sheikh of the Palestinian Authority. Al-Sheikh, a member of the PLO
Central Council and of the Central Committee of the Fatah Party, had
praised the top terrorist Hmeid family as a "fighting family" whose members had murdered at least 10 Israelis, and promised aid to it.
In response to efforts to get the PLO to stop rewarding terrorists, Al-Sheikh
had declared that, “If we have one dollar, we will spend it on the families of our martyrs and prisoners.”
Al-Sheikh
described his conversation with Amr as "positive."
In
late February, Al-Sheikh wrote a letter to Hady Amr claiming that all
the terrorists, including Hamas, had committed to "peaceful popular
resistance" against Israel. A Hamas official however
boasted that,
“the Palestinian voter will vote for those who trampled the Zionists'
heads underfoot, and wrote the loftiest verses of victory with their
blood and body parts.”
On March 1, Hady Amr and his team
delivered their memo, The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,
which called for resuming aid to the terrorists, abandoning pro-Israel
moves by the Trump administration, and doubling down on building a
terrorist state inside Israel.
A militant anti-Israel activist
from Beirut was not only defining an anti-Israel foreign policy, but, as
foreign policy expert Elliot Abrams
noted,
the memo repeatedly used British spellings for words like "programmes",
“normalise”, and “emphasise”, driving home the point that Americans
were no no longer in charge of their own foreign policy even on a simple
linguistic level.
The memo's reset "with the Palestinian people
and leadership” was advanced by Amr's contacts with figures in the PLO
and Fatah terrorist movements, and called for an immediate resumption
of the foreign aid pipeline to the terrorist territories, including
UNRWA, which has served as a front for Hamas operations, beginning in
late March or early April”.
The timing held up perfectly with the
State Department announcing approximately $250 million in aid to the
terrorist territories in early April closely following the timetable of
Amr’s memo.
“Israel strongly opposes renewing funding for UNRWA,
an anti-Semitic agency that incites against Israel,” Ambassador Gilad
Erdan, Israel’s representative to the UN,
tweeted.
Ambassador Erdan was understating the case. UNRWA schools are routinely staffed by Hamas supporters who
preach the murder
of Jews and Americans, and has produced top terrorists. Members of the
Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group working for UNRWA have used its
facilities and signage to transport weapons, and terrorists, and to
store and fire rockets at Israel.
The funding is “consistent
with who we are as a people. It also happens to be what's consistent
with what's in our interest,” Ned Price, Biden’s State Department
spokesman, falsely claimed.
The $150 million for UNRWA is
crucial to the strategy of restoring funding to the terrorist areas
without violating the Taylor Force Act. The law, named after an American
veteran murdered in Israel by an Islamic terrorist funded and
celebrated by the PLO,
banned further foreign aid to the terrorist entity until it stopped
funding terrorists. The PLO, including Abbas and his pal, Al-Sheikh,
have vehemently refused to stop funding further terrorist attacks.
The
Biden administration is claiming that its funding is indirect and
therefore not in violation of the Taylor Force Act even though it
blatantly violates its intent. But this is an administration packed full
of Obama vets who oversaw shipments of foreign currency to Iran on
unmarked cargo planes in order to dodge the law against providing money
to Iran’s terrorists.
Aside from UNRWA, much of the remaining cash will be funneled through USAID.
“Given
the absence of USAID activity in recent years, engaging civil society
actors will be critical to regaining trust and goodwill with Palestinian
society,” a congressional notification argued.
Why does the United States have to pay to regain the “trust and goodwill” of terrorists?
When Price was asked about a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that showed that USAID
had not vetted
the second level of grants for terrorist connections, he retorted that
it “found no cases of U.S. funding going to parties, providers on the
ground who failed vetting."
Of course that’s the point. There was no vetting and therefore there were no findings.
The
Biden administration has made it clear that it intends to violate the
Taylor Force Act up and down while claiming ignorance, and insisting
that it’s not in violation because it claims it isn’t.
And the result will be more terrorism.
According to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon, a non-public State Department report
admitted that the
PLO had spent $342 million on subsidies for terrorists and their
families. In this non-public report, the State Department admitted that
the PLO was funding terrorists, that it had not ended calls for
violence, and was not committed to peace, but that the aid would come
anyway.
The cash began flowing even before Biden officially took
office. The $2.3 trillion omnibus bill Congress passed in December which
was sold as coronavirus relief for small businesses, also included $250
million in funding for "Palestinian dialogue and business" over 5
years.
The Alliance for Middle East Peace was the heaviest lobbyist for the pigout. ALLMEP is an alliance of
many anti-Israel organizations, some strongly supportive of BDS.
The $250 million will be administered by USAID which already funds anti-Israel groups.
All those millions are a down payment on a bigger set of Biden administration anti-Israel goals.
The
Amr memo had also called for, “rolling back certain steps by the prior
administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real
barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labelling”.
These are euphemisms for reversing the Trump administration’s pro-Israel
measures such as ending the punitive restrictions on Israeli
agriculture and villages.
The ban on labeling products imported
to the United States as ‘Made in Israel’ that are grown by Jewish
farmers in those parts of Israel claimed by the Islamic terrorists is
likely next on the agenda. The Amr memo had also implicitly called for
reopening the PLO office in Washington D.C. and a diplomatic mission to
the PLO in Jerusalem. Those are also likely to come.
The Trump
administration had created pro-Israel facts on the ground, while the
Biden administration intends to restore the anti-Israel status quo in
foreign policy one step at a time.
After first emphasizing
coronavirus relief, the cash spigot has been turned on for UNRWA and
USAID. The money and the political support that comes with it will
bolster the PLO and advance anti-Israel narratives, including BDS, in
Israel and around the world at taxpayer expense.
But the worst is yet to come.
And the Al-Sheikh letter falsely claiming that Hamas is ready to be peaceful is the next step.
In
2019, Amr had co-written an article arguing that the United States
should lay "out the terms of a three-way Hamas-Israel-PA/PLO deal now"
and "build an international consensus around it."
That would mean
the Biden administration and its point man developing a plan to
legitimize Hamas, gaining the support of the Europeans and the Russians,
and then imposing it on Israel.
Hamas, according to Amr and his
co-authors, would offer Israel nothing more than a cease-fire, while
Israel would have to “incentivize” by “offering a significant move” on
peace.
That means more territorial concessions, including Jerusalem, and freeing more terrorists.
A
year after 9/11, Hady Amr, Biden’s future “point man”, wrote that he
was “inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” And through him the Biden
administration is also inspired by the intifada and its war to destroy
Israel and turn it into another Islamic territory ruled by the
terrorists.
Tags:
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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
