Because, after all, every dollar of remuneration to a struggling Israeli widow is one less that’s available to build that state they’ve been working on for the past 60 years. I confess to taking a perverse pleasure in this story, just because it illustrates so absurdly the consequences of buddying up to our eternal “partners in peace.” The only way to make it more surreal would be to have the U.S. government indemnify them by simply cutting a check in the amount of the damages they owe — not quite $300 million, per WaPo. Which of course would mean you and I were, quite literally, paying for Palestinian terror. We already pay for Saudi terror. Why not?
The State Department is considering supporting the Palestinian Authority in its quest to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments won by American victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel, according to Palestinian officials and defense lawyers involved in the cases…
Testimony in Israeli courts has connected senior Palestinian leaders — such as the late Yasser Arafat — to specific terrorist attacks involved in the lawsuits. But Palestinian officials have argued that it makes no sense for the United States to be providing millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority while U.S. courts are threatening to bankrupt it…
Leslye Knox, a 46-year-old mother of six children and widow of Aharon Ellis, a U.S. citizen who was killed in 2002 while singing at a bar mitzvah in Hadera, Israel, said that she has sued under a law passed by Congress in 1990 after the murder of Leon Klinghoffer by terrorists who seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship. In 2006, a federal judge ordered the PLO and the Palestinian Authority to pay Knox and other Ellis relatives nearly $174 million, but nothing has been paid while Knox has struggled to support her family…
“If the State Department tips the scales of justice against the victims in order to support adjudicated terrorists, the war on terrorism will be seen throughout the world as a farce,” said David J. Strachman, a Rhode Island lawyer who has spearheaded many of the lawsuits.
