PrintFebruary 24, 2009
Will Samantha Power have a role in giving aid to Hamas?
As I wrote about on American Thinker yesterday, the Obama administration will send 900 million dollars in aid money to Gaza, ostensibly to rebuild the area after the battle between Israel and Hamas two months ago . The money will be funneled through UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This is disingenuous and deceptive. These entities will be merely conduits to send money to Hamas members and to the terror group itself. The United Nations Refugee and Works Agency has not only admitted to having Hamas members on its payrolls, its offices have been used as havens by terrorists.
Andy McCarthy at National Review (McCarthy knows a great deal about terrorism, he is a former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for the first World Trade Center bombing):
Even Obama's pal Khalidi has acknowledged that UNRWA has on its payroll official "members of different political groups such as… Hamas and Islamic Jihad, without reference to their belonging to a specific group" (emphasis added). UNRWA fails to screen its 23,000 employees (99 percent of whom are Palestinians) for terrorist ties. As my friend Claudia Rosett recently wrote in Forbes, the agency's Israel-bashing commissioner, Karen Koning Abuzayd, absurdly told Congress it was too difficult for UNRWA to run checks against terrorist watch lists because "Arab last names sound so familiar." UNRWA further permits its employees to affiliate openly with Hamas and other terrorist organizations. In addition, the agency claims it cannot screen recipients of its largesse for terror ties because — besides Arab names being so very difficult for Arabs to distinguish — attempting such screening would endanger staff members. Translation: Of course we give the money to Hamas.
And that's not the half of it. UNRWA-sponsored schools inculcate the Palestinians' virulent, anti-Semitic brand of radical Islam.
Furthermore, UNRWA ambulances are used by Hamas to transport weapons and explosives to terrorists. Its other vehicles have been used to ferry terrorist operatives for attacks against Israeli troops. Its schools have been used both for launching terror attacks and as "summer camps" that provide paramilitary training to tens of thousands of Palestinian children. UNRWA camps are used by Hamas as bomb- and arms factories.
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.
Furthermore, the Obama administration is working on forging a unity government between Fatah and Hamas. If this were to occur, Hamas would have access to aid that had previously flowed to the Palestinian Authority (which for all intents and purposes is controlled by Fatah). Fatah has already been caught sending aid money from the West Bank to Hamas members in Gaza. But it will get worse should this unity government, being pressed by the Obama team, come to pass.
It will only be a matter of time that Hamas takes control of the unity government and throws out Fatah members (or throws them off roofs, as they have been doing in Gaza when they took control there). This op-ed by Mohammad Yaghi explores the probability of this event happening in today’s Jerusalem Post.
The aid announcement was officially made by the State Department-a welcoming gift to the Palestinians as Hillary prepares for her first trip there as Secretary of State. But who will monitor and control the funds?
This is where Samantha Power may very well come into play.
She is a fierce critic of Israel. She was indisputably Barack Obama’s closest foreign policy adviser during the campaign. They go back years. She was placed on the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral affairs. This role encompasses working with groups such as the United Nations and non-governmental organizations
These are the groups that will be used to channel aid to the Gazans (i.e., Hamas).
Will Power have a role in monitoring and dispensing the 900 million dollars? As I have written about before, the State Department is being progressively stripped of its power to make foreign policy.
This may turn out to be another example of how the formulation and practice of foreign policy is being taken from the State Department and centralized in the National Security Council. I wrote about this dynamic here . After my article was published, Dick Morris seemed to concur (see Hillary’s Incredible, Shrinking Role ).
Paul Mirengoff at Powerline did not dismiss concerns about Samantha Power over at the National Security Council as others did. He noted the possibility of “portfolio creep”-the likelihood that Samantha Power’s role and influence would grow with time.
That time may very well be here.
Will she be in charge of working with those multilateral organizations and NGOs who will dispense almost 1 billion dollars in our taxpayer dollars to “Gaza” (Hamastan)?
