RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here clearly are comprehensive statistics that illustrate exactly how the PA uses its resources.

One of the most significant recent scoops came from Israel Radio’s Palestinian affairs correspondent, Gal Berger, who managed to lay his hands on actual Palestinian Authority spreadsheets that show precisely which convicted terrorist behind-Israeli-bars is subsidized and to what tune by the Palestinian Authority.

Normally rows and columns of financial data hardly make for a riveting read. But this case constitutes a striking exception.

Here clearly are comprehensive statistics that illustrate exactly how the PA uses its resources – including moneys handed over monthly by Israel as well as contributions the PA solicits from international donors. The analysis of the figures is singularly enlightening despite the fact that the general bottom line is hardly astonishing or unanticipated.

It has long been known that the PA rewards the perpetrators of some of the most heinous atrocities against Israeli civilians for their deeds.

Apprehended, convicted and incarcerated terrorists – including the linchpins of the ghastliest of mass-murder incidents – are paid substantial monthly stipends while they do time. Similarly compensated are their family-members on the “outside.”

Until now, however, there was no black-and-white breakdown of the specific disbursal of financial sustenance to a gamut of actual sadistic slayers and to the behind-the-scenes masterminds who conceived the homicidal tactics and dispatched their executors.

The newly uncovered evidence, moreover, shows that the PA’s largesse isn’t limited to Fatah terror orchestrators but that most of its outlays are earmarked for Hamas members convicted for some of the Second Intifada’s most gruesome carnage and now doing time in maximum-security penitentiaries. Presumably, rival organizational and political affiliations are no bar for PA generosity toward terrorists.

Besides offering incentives for bloodletting, this is part and parcel of the glorification of terror in purportedly moderate Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah-ruled jurisdiction. The aggrandization – indeed near-deification of mass-murderers – must be perceived as an integral component of incitement to terror by Abbas’s topmost hierarchy.

The message to routinely indoctrinated and inflamed PA youth is that slaughtering Jews is endorsed by unstinting societal sanction. The wherewithal lavished on both the killers and their kin is the tangible expression of their community’s and officialdom’s gratitude for spilling Jewish blood.

Such incontrovertible sponsorship and promotion of terrorism is hardly novel in the PA context. It was never any deeply buried secret that the prisoners’ relatives are financially underpinned by the PA, a fact that helped boost their prestige and heroic status.

Now, however, we know exactly who gets what, down in fact to such details as how much is deposited when into which particular account in which particular bank. The rule of thumb is that those sentenced to the longest terms, get more. In other words, the greater the crime – the higher the remuneration.

For example, Abdullah Barghouti, Hamas’s notorious bomb-maker – serving 67 life sentences – has up to now amassed over six figures in PA “salaries.”

Building up an impressive financial portfolio is also Ibrahim Hamad, who headed Hamas’s military wing in Judea and Samaria. He was sentenced to 54 life sentences.

The aforementioned duo had a hand in some of the most heinous terror outrages like the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, the nightclub bombing in Rishon Lezion on May 7, 2002 and the Hebrew University cafeteria bombing on July 31, 2002.

They aren’t the only ones making money in prison. Muhammad Arman, who is doing 36 life sentences, has also “earned” hundreds of thousands of shekels courtesy of the ostensibly cash-strapped PA.

The infamous mind-blowing list goes on and on.

The PA’s own paperwork shows unambiguously that tens of millions of dollars are shelled out every month to imprisoned terrorists and to their relations – at a time in which Abbas moans that Ramallah can’t make ends meet.

It’s the same Abbas who poses as a frustrated peace-partner but cannot bring himself to condemn the premeditated stabbings of Israelis by his own incited henchmen.

The impression he deliberately imparts is that terror convicts and/or casualties were arbitrarily and unjustly martyred. The latest crop of Abbas’s homegrown killers likewise expects to be officially celebrated as idols instead of castigated as villains.