Most people would not fund terrorists to murder their own children. The question then, is why do so many people, for so many years, have no qualms about letting their tax money fund the murder of other people’s children – specifically our children, Jewish children in Israel?

Yesterday, one of these children, Hodaya (Odelia) Nechama Asulin, who was critically wounded six years ago in a terrorist attack near a bus stop in Jerusalem when she was only 14 years old, passed away after succumbing to her injuries. She never regained consciousness after being hit by the jihadist’s bomb.

Your tax money helped pay for that death, which you probably had not heard of, because your media most likely did not even report about it.

Imagine if you were the mother or the father of that wounded child, Hodaya: hoping against hope that their little angel would wake up one day and greet them as she used to do. Yesterday they buried her.

How do you feel about your tax money being spent to fund the Palestinian Authority (PA), a terrorist entity, which exists only to wage jihad on the state of Israel and to enrich its deeply corrupt leadership?

Do you think jihad and corruption are responsible ways to spend your country’s tax money?

What does it say about you, that you are passive in the face of the knowledge that your money helps fund the murders of other people’s children?

Perhaps the following imaginary situation might help put things in perspective: Imagine that your government, along with most of the world community, decides that it wants to support the ‘struggle’ of ISIS to build an Islamic caliphate for itself and its supporters.

Your government, along with the rest of the Western world, thinks it only fair and right from a human rights perspective that Muslims should have their own Islamic caliphate.

Consequently, sizable portions of the state budget are set aside for foreign aid to benefit the ‘struggle’ of ISIS. Numerous agencies are established under the auspices of the UN, ensuring that the funds of member states can be channeled directly to the ISIS fighters, who are too busy raping and decapitating Christians and Yazidi in Syria and Iraq to work for a living.

Now, what do you do? The problem with ISIS is that it not only kills people in faraway lands, it also kills your own children in your own country. Do you go out and protest against your government’s policy of aiding and abetting these child murderers? Or do you lean back comfortably in your sofa, thinking that it is not your problem that your tax payer money is spent funding the murder of your children?

The answer to that is obvious.

The PA is estimated to have received a total of $25 billion in foreign aid since the mid-1990s, making the PA one of the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid. In 2017 alone the PA is budgeted to spend a sum amounting to half of the foreign aid it is expected to receive this year, in stipends to terrorists – convicted inmates of Israeli prisons – and the families of ‘martyrs’. This is nearly $345 million out of an expected total donor sum of $693 million. This sum represents an increase of 13 % from 2016. Some Fatah terrorists held in Israeli prisons are said to receive monthly stipends of up to $4,000.

Your tax money also pays for a constant barrage of indoctrination and incitement to murder: From the moment children enter kindergarten in the PA, they learn, as per the Quranic passages 5:60 and 7:166, that the Jews are cursed and that Allah transformed them into apes and pigs.

The violent hatred of Jews is taught in schools, preached in mosques, on the internet, on TV and radio, and manifests itself in the statues – paid with your tax money – the PA erects in its city squares in the memory of terrorists and as examples for its youth to emulate.

Official Palestinian Arab culture is saturated with adulation of the jihadist who dies in the pursuit of murdering Jews.

You probably tell yourself that there is nothing you can do about the way your government has decided to spend your tax money. You are not the protesting kind; after all, you just want to live your life.

Hundreds of millions of people think just like you, that it is not their responsibility — they cannot do ‘anything’ to change the situation anyway. If all those hundreds of millions of people would protest that spending their taxpayer money on murderers is unconscionable, it might possibly have a better chance of succeeding than staying put on the sofa.

The US House Foreign Affairs Committee recently passed the Taylor Force Act, legislation that would cut US funding to the Palestinian Authority unless it discontinues its practice of paying monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who kill Israelis.

The Taylor Force Act, however, is only a tiny step in the right direction, as it does not deal with the indoctrination and the incitement to virulent Jew hatred that pervades PA society. Europe, another major donor of foreign aid, is not even at a point where it might possibly consider a Taylor Force Act.

One of the greatest Jewish figures in history, Hillel, formulated the maxim, “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others”. If you would not fund the murder of your own children, stop funding the murder of other people’s children.

Act now and stop making excuses. There are none.

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Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst

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