By Democrats may love nothing more than sending millions of taxpayer money abroad without having any oversight. In Congress over the summer, they “blocked an effort to install greater oversight over the billions of dollars the United States is sending to Ukraine, the watchdog who oversaw U.S. spending in Afghanistan issued a warning.
Spending too much too fast, with little oversight, would lead to unanticipated consequences,’ John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said at an event sponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft last week. The U.S. has sent more money to Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan over 12 years, Sopko pointed out. “I’m not opposed to spending that. I just want to make sure it’s done correctly and there’s oversight,'” he said according to The Intercept.
“Sopko especially warned about the risk of fueling corruption, perhaps the most damaging legacy of the billions the U.S. spent in Afghanistan and a major factor in the collapse of its effort in the country. ‘If that much money is coming in, you know some of it is going to be stolen,’ he said. “In Afghanistan, corruption was the existential threat. It wasn’t the Taliban. It was corruption that did us in.'”
Now, it appears that the White House is again making the same mistake, this time by sending “humanitarian aid” to Palestinians. The Biden administration recently announced a plan to allocate millions of taxpayer dollars to support organizations within the Gaza Strip. However, it has chosen to keep the identities of these groups confidential, making it difficult to see if, like the billions of dollars it gave to Iran, some of the funds reach the hands of terrorists who have attacked and injured American troops.
The White House earmarked at least $34 million in U.S. taxpayer funds for “confidential” nonprofits and United Nations agencies operating in the Gaza Strip, according to a review of U.N. funding channels by NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that tracks the international organization, writes The Washington Free Beacon.
“This lack of transparency prevents congressional oversight and independent assessment of the ultimate recipients of U.S. government funding,” the watchdog group wrote in a briefing document earlier this week. “The potential for abuse in the Palestinian context is acute and indisputable.”
Hamas is already known to have stolen international aid pumped into the Gaza Strip since the terror group launched its war on Israel in October. But the Biden administration is allocating more than $120 million to various U.N. organizations and nonprofits operating in the region. It remains unclear what safeguards have been placed on these funds to prevent Hamas from stealing them, raising questions about how Congress can adequately vote on an appropriation package without knowing who exactly will benefit from the American funds.
“At a time when the U.S. is pressuring the Israelis to dial back on the intensity of the war in Gaza, the least thing the U.S. could do is demand greater transparency from the U.N., as money and assistance from the multilateral organization has been diverted for Hamas’s benefit for decades,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department who is the senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
Since October, evidence has shown that one of the favored nonprofits working in Gaza, The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, referred to as the UNRWA, has been helping Hamas in its fight against Israel.Â
One of the hostages released during the Thanksgiving weekend deal told reporters that that he was held for nearly 50 days in an attic by a teacher from UNRWA.Â
The hostage also told the Jerusalem Post “that the teacher who held him captive was a father of 10 children. He was barely provided food or medical attention, and was locked away by the teacher.
A report from the beginning of the month saw an UNRWA-run school in Nablus posting a video to its official Facebook page in which a young student called for the victory of Hamas’s ‘jihad warriors’ in Gaza.
The report documented several examples of teachers at UNRWA schools in Gaza praising the attacks on social media, and found ties between Hamas terrorists and the agency’s schools.”
Stealing “humanitarian aid to Gaza” has been a mainstay of Hamas.Â
🔴IDF reveals footage of #Hamas operatives preventing #Gaza residents from accessing humanitarian aid by diverting these supplies for their own use pic.twitter.com/Vn04rv9Itc
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) December 11, 2023
“Earlier in the day, the IDF said it found Hamas was using UNRWA-labeled bags to hide explosive devices, AK-47 rifles and an RPG,” reported I24, a Middle Eastern news outlet.
“Hamas terrorists were caught stealing humanitarian aid then beating the civilians from whom the supplies were stolen, in footage captured by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and released on Monday morning.
The video evidence is just the latest showing the terrorist organization Hamas exploiting the civilian population in Gaza, whether by firing from civilian locations as the IDF has repeatedly shown, or using the humanitarian aid in various nefarious uses, such as storing weapons within UNRWA-labeled bags.”
Fox News reported that Biden has sent nearly a billion dollars to the UNRWA, which explains why the president has little interest in revealing where the latest round of “aid” is going.Â
Stealing aid sent by western governments to Palestinians has been a boon for Hamas leadership. The New York Post noted that “while their people languish in poverty and are treated as human shields, the leaders of Hamas live billionaire lifestyles.
The terror group’s three top leaders alone are worth a staggering total of $11 billion and enjoy a life of luxury in the sanctuary of the emirate of Qatar.”Â
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