Sunday morning Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter made an incredible disclosure at the cabinet meeting. Dichter stated that Israel is the largest contributor to the Palestinian Authority's budget. Israel gives the PA one billion dollars a year. This comprises 45 percent of the PA's total budget. "There is no oversight [to ensure] that each and every dollar Israel transfers doesn't go to funding terror," Dichter said. He added that Arafat's office receives a budget of roughly nine million dollars and, the director of the Shin Bet noted, "I cannot promise that at the margins the money doesn't go to finance Fatah/Tanzim terrorists."
In saying this, Dichter was making a clear and almost unprecedented indictment of the government. Our government is putting a billion dollars a year into a black hole controlled by one of the most active terror regimes in the world. And this terror regime is actively waging war against our country. And of course, our government knows that the PA uses its budgetary funds to finance terror because in the aftermath of Operation Defensive Shield, it published documents seized in IDF raids of PA offices and Arafat's headquarters proving that the PA directly funded suicide bombings and was paying the salaries of terrorists. In any even semi-rational country, this disclosure would have been the story of the week – if not the year. After all, can anyone imagine the US media reaction to a disclosure by the head of the FBI that the US was funding the Taliban or the Ba'athist regime in Iraq after September 11? In any marginally sane society, there would be demonstrations launched, lawsuits filed, black headlines, and stuttering government spokesmen sent out to whimper excuses for the government's financing of the murder of its citizens by the sworn enemies of the state.
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