More on Mahmoud Abbas' bizarre way of fighting terror. (Also note al-Haaretz referring to the "Israeli regime".)
Several days ago the Palestinian finance minister, Salam Fayad, resigned. ...So this means that the Palestinians have over 50,000 "policemen" of which many are just terrorists and most don't even bother working.
[Some] reports (such as in the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida PA daily, from the end of last week) say Fayad resigned because Interior Minister Nasser Yousef, who is responsible for the security services, added to the Gaza services another 2,500 youths - almost all of them militants from Fatah and other movements. Yousef did this with the approval of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and plans to add another few thousand young Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists to the security services in the near future. Adding thousands of people to the security services would be a budgetary burden on the Palestinian treasury, and Fayad, according to these reports, would not have been able to stand for it.
Senior Palestinian officials explain that putting thousands of youths into the security services, especially in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank, is the only way Abu Mazen can obtain calm, security-wise. Tens of thousands of youths complete Palestinian high schools and universities every year and don't have anything to do. In the past, they came to Israel to work and returned home every evening with full pockets. Now the only way to calm them down is to have them join the PA organization. It doesn't matter where; the important thing is that they be placed in some sort of framework and receive a small salary.
For comparison's sake, at one point, some 20,000 Palestinian workers (mostly teachers) worked for the Israeli regime in the West Bank and Gaza, in addition to an unknown number of security officials. Some 160,000 people are serving in the Palestinian government, about a third of them in the security services.
Yeah, this idea of giving Palestinian Arabs control over their own people is working out real well.
I also love the line "the only way to calm them down is to have them join the PA organization." This is stated as a matter of fact - and its implications are large:
It means that, according to the PA:
- Criminals must be paid off to stop crime;
- Palestinian Arabs have no ability (nor desire) to build their own private industry and to make money by actually selling things that the world might need;
- Palestinian Arabs are inherently violent (otherwise, why can't they remain calm on their own?)
- Palestinians cannot possibly get out of the mess they are in by themselves and they will demand more and more money from the world to pay off their own terrorists who have no intention of keeping any sort of peace with Israel.