Thomas: Muslim aid won’t change behavior

By Cal Thomas

Editor's note: Charles Krauthammer's column

is not available today.

Unemployment in America is hovering at just below 10 percent, so President Barack Obama held a “Summit on Entrepreneurship” in Washington in an effort to boost economic development ... in Muslim nations.

The president thinks more U.S. investment in Muslim lands and exchange programs that will bring Muslim women to America so they can work as interns will enhance U.S. prosperity and, thus, change Muslim attitudes about the United States.

Pigs will fly first.

The United States has been more than generous to Arab and Muslim nations in direct foreign aid, military assistance and other ways. Egypt receives about $2 billion of American taxpayer dollars every year, yet it still votes against American interests at the United Nations 79 percent of the time. Jordan, a “moderate” Muslim nation, receives nearly $200 million annually in U.S. foreign aid but votes against America 71 percent of the time. Pakistan votes 75 percent of the time against the United States while pocketing nearly $7 billion annually in foreign aid.

An even better example of the disconnect between American assistance and changed Muslim attitudes toward the United States is the Palestinian Authority. As former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger writes for ynetnews.com, just since 2007, “U.S. foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and to PA-controlled (non-governmental organizations) reached nearly $2 billion, in addition to $3.7 billion contributed by the U.S. to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East since 1950.”

Has this aid produced jobs and, thus, a moderation in rhetoric and the objectives of the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas? Has it led to both sides in the Middle East conflict mounting a “sustained effort to respect one another and seek common ground,” as Obama called for in his Cairo speech last year?

As Ettinger writes in his column, quite the opposite has occurred.

On March 11, PA media, which Abbas controls, praised Dalal Mughrabi, who commanded the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 38 civilians, including 13 children. The PA also named a girls school in Hebron, a computer center, a summer camp and a sport tournament after Mughrabi.

In 1994, Abbas, who was then deputy to Yasser Arafat, inaugurated a system of hate education that continues to this day. In the PA media, in schools and in mosques, children and adults are exposed to venomous anti-Semitic speech and images that rival those of The Third Reich.

Ettinger recalls that as Arafat's top aid for 50 years, Abbas was involved in the “betrayal of Arab host countries such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. He enrolled in KGB courses and submitted a doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial at the Moscow University.”

Abbas also coordinated PLO ties to communist regimes. He supervised the logistics of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre that took the lives of 11 Israeli athletes, co-supervised the March 1973 murder of two U.S. ambassadors in Sudan and was a key member of the Palestinian cell of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

And yet, Obama's special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, treats him as a legitimate leader who shares American objectives for the region.

The Obama entrepreneurship summit is about as useful as President Bill Clinton's midnight basketball program to curb street crime.

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