In the West Bank city of Qalqilya, a twenty-foot-tall statue of Saddam Hussein was unveiled last week in the midst of a major thoroughfare. The statue was sponsored by the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), a terrorist group that, like Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Stephen Flatow comments:

[T]he Palestinian Authority’s district governor for the Qalqilya District, Rafi Rawajba, attended the unveiling ceremony. Rawajba is a representative of the Fatah movement. . . [And] if the mayor or Abbas didn’t want [the statue] there, it would be gone in five minutes.

In fact, the ALF has erected statues of Saddam in several other Palestinian Authority (PA)-controlled cities, too, and Abbas has not ordered them taken down, either. That’s because he was always one of Saddam’s biggest fans. . . . Just two weeks ago, the official Fatah Facebook page included Saddam alongside photos of other Arab heroes in a collage with the slogan, “From the sea of the blood of the martyrs, we will create the state of Palestine.” On the tenth anniversary of Saddam’s death, last December, the Fatah Facebook page featured a memorial poster hailing Saddam as a “martyr.” There’s even an entire “Martyr Saddam Hussein Square” in Ramallah, the PA’s capital city. . . .

Nearly 300 American soldiers died fighting Saddam in the Gulf War in 1990. Another 4,497 gave their lives fighting Saddam in the Iraq war of 2003 and its aftermath. The creation of statues and public squares in PA territory honoring Saddam is a direct slap in the face to the U.S. and its fallen soldiers.

Abbas and the PA received $357 million from the U.S. last year. Abbas seems to assume that the aid will continue to flow, even if he allows anti-American terrorists such as the ALF to be part of the PLO, and even if statues of America’s enemies, like Saddam Hussein, are erected in PA cities. To judge by the non-reaction of the Trump administration to the newest Saddam statue, it appears that Abbas’s assumption may well be correct.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].