USAID Has Been Funneling Money to Terrorists

Among Donald Trump’s recent shakeups of the federal government is the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was created in the 1960s to counter Soviet influence abroad through American assistance. Whether the agency will reopen, and in what capacity, is anyone’s guess, but there is little doubt that it is much in need of reform. Ben Cohen and Mark Dubowitz write:

In principle, the agency’s efforts to advance democracy and prevent wars are laudable. Developing countries benefit from agricultural technologies, inoculation against disease, and educational development. But, as is so often the case with social-development projects, fringe political ideologies were imposed on USAID’s work by government employees and consultants.

In 2024, as the region reeled from the aftermath of the bestial atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the previous year, the United States significantly boosted its financial support for projects in Gaza and the West Bank, spending more than $200 million of American taxpayers’ money in territories already rife with terrorist incitement and activity. . . . These grants were made to what USAID called “miscellaneous foreign awardees.” You wouldn’t know from the opaque accounting process that beneficiaries included local partners who praised the October 7 onslaught.

Indeed, the rot had set in before 2023. Among the twenty Palestinian NGOs that received USAID funding in 2022 was the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute, whose chairman crowed over the escape of “six of our prisoner heroes” from an Israeli jail in 2021, all of whom were later recaptured.

None of this was remotely worrying for USAID’s governing bureaucracy. Instead of heeding the August 2024 warning from its own Office of Inspector General that due-diligence standards had fallen woefully short, the agency stoked false Palestinian claims that Israel was engineering a famine in Gaza.

Read more at New York Post

More about: Donald Trump, Terrorism, U.S. Foreign policy

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict