Soccer Dad

Peace group? Please!

I have never much liked James Besser, the reporter who covers American Israeli politics for nearly every Jewish-American weekly. He is quite a partisan and makes no bones about it in his reporting. An example of this came last week in Hitting Hamas

As Congress plunges into the contentious issue of U.S. aid for a Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, a Jewish peace group that wants humanitarian assistance to continue has staged a preemptive legislative strike.

What's the "peace group?" Why it's Americans for Peace Now.

Now I'm sure that APN calls itself a peace group, and that's well and good, but if anyone looks at the results of its advocacy objectively, one would hard pressed to say that the policies it espouses have led to peace. A reporter should be reporting what a group is; not what it calls itself.

I realize that calling APN a "terror" group would be provocative; but it's clear from the evidence that the "peace process" has encouraged terror rather than discourage it.

Now APN is advocating a more flexible approach to the funding of a Hamas run PA.

Direct aid to the PA will be inappropriate when Hamas takes over, said Lewis Roth, the peace group’s assistant director. But provisions in the Ros-Lehtinen bill that would add numerous conditions to humanitarian assistance provided through nongovernmental organizations could lead to the PA’s collapse and a major new crisis for Israel, he said.

And what would be so awful about the PA's collapse? When the PA was fully funded the money went to the pockets of Arafat's cronies and to the pockets of those who promoted and engaged in terrorism. With Hamas in charge maybe we don't have to worry about humanitarian aid finding its way to the former but certainly we have to worry about the latter.

The problem with the "peace process" until now has been the lack of conditions imposed on the PA. Allowing the money to flow unconditionally to NGO's will perpetuate the problem.

On the Peace Now website you can find numerous references to how much money Israel spends on "settlements." If the group were as scrupulous about cataloguing the money spent on the Palestinians that has gone to terror groups and corrupt officials they'd at least be objective. But given the latitude they've given Fatah and now want to give Hamas, they have no right to call themselves "pro-peace" or a "peace group."

Technorati tag: Peace Now, Hamas.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.