Recent documents reveal that the State Department applied for an OFAC license which exempts it from Global Terrorist Sanctions Regulations in order to provide foreign aid.
By Daniel Greenfield
(AUGUST 28, 2023 / FRONT PAGE MAG) Last year, Biden met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”
Batsheva Nigri, a preschool teacher, was riding in a car with her twelve-year-old daughter when Islamic terrorists from the Palestinian Authority’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cut them off and riddled the car with 22 bullets. Batsheva’s twelve-year-old daughter watched her mother die.
The Palestinian Authority’s terror group hailed the murder of a 42-year-old preschool teacher as a “natural response to the crimes of the occupation” and as revenge for Denis Michael Rohan, a non-Jewish Australian tourist, starting a fire in the Al-Aqsa occupation mosque in 1969.
Those who knew the preschool teacher described her as a woman with a “heart of gold” to whom “all the children were like her children.” Hamas and Islamic Jihad however claimed that her murder glorifies Allah.
Last Monday’s murder comes after an Israeli father and son were shot to death on the Sabbath. They’re among a growing list of terror victims this year ranging in age from a 6-year-old boy purposely run down on a Jerusalem street to an 82-year-old woman who was killed while trying to get her disabled husband to safety when a rocket hit their building.
The twenty-six terror victims are a sharp increase from the only 3 deaths in 2020 when the Trump administration’s cutoff of aid to the terrorists occupying parts of Israel took effect.
The number of terror victims fell every year Trump was in office, from 15 in 2017, to 12 in 2018, 10 in 2019 and then only 3 in 2020.
And the number of terror victims shot up every year Biden was in office from 17 in 2021, to 31 in 2022, and there is every sign that 2023 will top that.
Twice as many Israelis were killed in one month of Biden than in one year of Trump.
It’s only August and already 26 Israelis have been killed by Islamic terrorists. Last year at this time 18 Israelis had been killed by terrorists making for a 40% increase in 2023.
What made all the difference? As Rep. Ilhan Omar once said, “It’s all about the ‘benjamins’”.
In 2018, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, named after an Iraq War veteran who was stabbed to death by a terrorist in Jerusalem, which cut off most aid to the Palestinian Authority. In 2019, President Trump went even further with a nearly total cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority. Biden not only restored aid, he sharply increased the flow of cash to the terrorists.
Biden’s half a billion dollars helped fuel a massive surge in Islamic terrorism. While the money is officially listed as humanitarian aid, injecting money into terror zones funds terrorism.
The Palestinian Authority maintains a ‘pay-to-slay’ program which pays salaries to terrorists based on the lengths of their prison sentences. That means successful killers can earn $3,000 a month in a part of the world where the average salary is around $700 a month. It’s five times more profitable to be a terrorist than a teacher.
That’s the price of Batsheva’s life and that is what the Biden administration has been paying for.
The Biden administration is well aware that the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism. While Biden and Secretary of State Blinken refused to raise the issue with terror leader Mahmoud Abbas, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf claimed, “we are working to bring pay-to-slay to an end.” Instead the United States is funding pay-to-slay.
And worse.
Recent documents reveal that the State Department applied for an OFAC license which exempts it from Global Terrorist Sanctions Regulations in order to provide foreign aid.
A government sanctions exemption document warned that, “we assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups.”
The Biden administration knows that it’s funding terrorism. It is not only aware of it but it actually applied for an exemption in order to be able to continue funding terrorists… including Hamas.
Batsheva’s murder, like that of the 74 terror victims killed under Biden, was paid for directly and indirectly through foreign aid to terrorists and sanctions relief on Iran’s terror regime. These policies were not undertaken in ignorance, the OFAC documents provide clear evidence that the Biden administration had been warned that it was funding terrorism and that people would die.
That’s why the number of Israelis continues to climb every year that Biden has been in office.
After 7 Israelis, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in a Sabbath terrorist attack outside a synagogue in January 2023, Secretary of State Blinken met with Mahmoud Abbas and promised another $50 million to UNRWA which acts as the employment agency for Hamas. Earlier that same month, the Biden administration warned Israel to turn over $39 million in tax revenues to terrorists rather than providing that money to help terror victims rebuild their lives.
In August, with 4 Israelis already murdered, the Biden administration demanded that Republicans stop blocking $75 million in “humanitarian aid” to the UN agency. Sen. Jim Risch and Rep. Michael McCaul are determined to block that aid until Secretary of State Blinken certifies that UNRWA “is not affiliated with U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations”. And yet the Biden administration can’t seem to even manage to clear that lowest of legal bars.
In Batsheva’s kindergarten in Efrat, which the Biden administration considers an “illegal settlement” despite being referenced numerous times in the bible, the children have lost a teacher and a friend.
The murdered preschool teacher had been on the way to “prepare the kindergarten for the start of the year.” A woman who worked with her described how “every time I entered the kindergarten, she welcomed me with a beaming smile that always accompanied her. The children were everything to her, she always hugged them and gave what she could to the children, the staff, the parents.”
Batsheva did not have to die. None of the 26 already killed this year did. The 3 dead in 2020 show what’s possible. The Biden administration is knowingly funding the murder of the innocent.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine and in Arutz Sheva.