Amiad’s mother, Shira, was 30 weeks pregnant when Barghouti shot her and six other Israelis at a bus stop outside the town of Ofra.
By JPOST EDITORIALThe baby that died after the Ofra attack (bottom left) being laid to rest at the Mount of Olives cemetry, December 12th, 2018(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Another act of unfathomable cruelty has been added to the annals of Palestinian history with the murder of Amiad Yisrael Ish-Ran. There is a direct line between the Palestinian sniper who killed 10-month old Shalhevet Pass in her stroller in Hebron in 2001 to Saleh Omar Barghouti, who the IDF said shot at Amiad Yisrael in utero this week.Amiad’s mother, Shira, was 30 weeks pregnant when Barghouti shot her and six other Israelis at a bus stop outside the town of Ofra.Shira had to undergo an emergency Caesarean to deliver her baby, and the doctors in Jerusalem’s Shaare Tzedek Medical Center fought for three days to save his life, to no avail.Barghouti shot Shira in the stomach only because she is Jewish. Amiad Yisrael was murdered only because he is Jewish. He died so young, at only three days old, that his name was only announced at his funeral. It means “my Nation of Israel forever,” signifying that the Jewish people will not be terrorized out of their homeland.Hamas has praised this act of barbarism, and after security forces shot and killed him, Palestinian social media accounts praised Barghouti as a hero and martyr.Meanwhile, all you hear is a deafening silence from the Palestinian Authority. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this week: “There is no reason to expect a condemnation from the Palestinian Authority. They only contribute to the incitement here.”A study of the Palestinian Authority’s budget by Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, shows that the authority is contributing to incitement to the tune of NIS 1.27 billion, or over $338.7 million in payments to terrorists and their families in 2018. NIS 580m. will go to jailed terrorists and NIS 691m. to the families of dead terrorists – both a marked increase from 2016.And the world is contributing to this encouragement of terrorism. Kuperwasser found that more than 50% of the foreign aid that went to the PA last year was used to pay salaries to Palestinian terrorists in prison and to the families of dead terrorists.By comparison, the entire Palestinian Authority welfare budget is NIS 790m. The message President Mahmoud Abbas is sending to Palestinians is this: Maim and murder Jews, and you will live a far more luxurious life than any ordinary Palestinian.According to the PA’s pay-for-slay scheme, Shalhevet Pass’s murderer, Mahmud Amru, who is serving multiple life sentences, should be receiving about NIS 10,000 a month, nearly five times the average Palestinian’s salary. There is no other way to interpret this than that PA pays people to murder babies.Barghouti received that message loud and clear. So did Ashraf Walid Suleiman Na’alwa, the murderer who killed two coworkers in Barkan and was caught and killed by Israeli forces Wednesday night after a two-month manhunt. Surely their families expect to be paid for their barbarism.Now, the test is on Abbas. Will the PA pay up, as it has for many murderers before these two?The US Taylor Force Act bans US aid to the PA until it stops paying terrorists – as a result, the PA lost over $200m. All US aid was stopped, expect to the Palestinian security forces.In Israel, a law was approved this year that would have the government deduct the amount paid to terrorists from the taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the PA.Yet Abbas had remained defiant and said he will continue to pay people who murder Jews, babies included.The world needs to reexamine its aid to the Palestinians and realize where their money is going. A significant portion of the NIS 2.8b. ($755m.) in foreign aid to the Palestinians will be used to pay terrorists. Are the nations of the world willing to continue their support, even after some of those funds are likely to be used as a reward for murdering a baby?How does shooting a baby in his mother’s belly help the Palestinians, or bring peace? These are questions that Abbas and his funders must answer.
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