Why, asks Douglas Murray ...

... are politicians forced to resign over trivia but never over serious matters. His example is Andrew Mitchell who resigned over alleged rudeness to the Downing Street coppers whereas he ought to have been forced out over his performance at DfID where he agreed to use UK taxpayers' money to pay terrorist leaders' salaries.

A report by Palestinian Media Watch recently revealed that British taxpayers have been paying salaries to terrorists. It revealed that £3 million every month is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in salaries to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The salaries come from the PA's general budget. That "general budget" is kindly provided by the U.K., among other EU countries.

Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East.

This is not new, of course, and, despite denials or pleas of ignorance by Alan Duncan, Mitchell's successor it goes on. The lunacy of cutting defence spending and eviscerating our armed forces while paying out money to terrorists who are itching to attack us and our allies is self-evident.

It is, perhaps, time to restart a campaign for the cessation of all international aid.

In Europe but not run by Europe?

According to the European Arrest Warrant any member state of the European Union can demand the immediate extradition of just about anybody from Britain, whether the crime in question is one in this country or not. But our government cannot extradite condemned terrorists, inciters of mass murder or men accused of raising finance for terrorists to the United States even if our courts have agreed to it after a long and exhaustive discussion.

The BBC reports that the European Court of Human Rights has halted the extradition to the United States of well-known cleric Abu Hamza Al-Masri, who is already serving a seven-year sentence here for "for soliciting to murder and racial hatred" as well as three other men who are accused of breaking laws on both sides of the Pond.

The three other men facing extradition are Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan and Haroon Rashid Aswat. Mr Ahmad and Mr Ahsan were allegedly involved in raising funds for exremists. Mr Aswat is accused in relation to the alleged terror camp.

It seems that the ECHR does not exactly disagree with the fact that these people ought to be tried for the crimes they are accused of committing; the problem is that they might be given very long sentences in the United States, which will have to be served in tough gaols and that will breach their human rights.

Without getting into arguments about human rights for people whose aim in life seems to be to inflict as much pain and damage on other human beings as possible, let us consider the coalition government's attitude.

Back in the days of the election campaign, we were told by the Conservatives that they would scrap the Human Rights Act and return to the Common Law (as well as preserve parliamentary sovereignty but that is another subject). By the time of that famous Coalition Programme for Government, the promise was watered down somewhat [scroll down to the last item]:

We will establish a Commission to investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights that incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that these rights continue to be enshrined in British law, and protects and extends British liberties. We will seek to promote a better understanding of the true scope of these obligations and liberties.

Or, put another way: yet another promise bites the dust. Are we surprised? Not overwhelmingly so.

Meanwhile

UK Home Secretary Theresa May said: ""We note that the European Court of Human Rights has decided that all the applications are partly admissible. We await the court's judgement on the case. In the meantime these individuals will remain in custody."

What can I say? In Europe but not ruled by Europe.

Follow the money

Jonathan Schanzer does in the Weekly Standard. Interesting but unsurprising links there between the non-profit (and that, in itself, covers a multitude of sins) organization behind the Gaza flotilla IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi in Turkish) and some others, who are known to be financiers of terrorism. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Battling the finances

Oddly enough, I do not propose to write about the brave battle that various incompetent politicians are waging against the not-very-competent-but-largely-wealth-creating financial institutions. Well, not this time, anyway.

Yesterday I attended a talk given by Jonathan Schanzer, organized by the indefatigable Henry Jackson Society, entitled Terror Finance and the Transatlantic Relationship. They could not have picked a much better person if they wanted to give us the more or less official point of view:

Jonathan Schanzer is a leading American author & scholar in Middle Eastern studies, and formerly a counterterrorism analyst for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury where he tracked the activities of terrorist financiers. Prior to joining the Treasury, he served as a Research Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he authored the book “Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror”. He also participated in a Washington Institute fact-finding mission in Iraq in 2004. His most recent published book is “Hamas vs Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine”. In addition Mr Schanzer has published numerous scholarly journal articles, national newspaper editorials, and magazine features. He has appeared with frequency on American television channels, such as Fox News and CNN, as well as Arab television channels, such as al-Jazeera. Mr. Schanzer has travelled widely in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. He will shortly be joining the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as Vice-President.

To be fair to Mr Schanzer he did make some comments that showed him to be not entirely in sympathy with the present Administration in its extraordinary financial profligacy and even more extraordinary assumption that it is a good idea to follow in the EU3's unsuccessful footsteps and "engage" with Iran. Nor did he seem to be terribly happy about the fact that no Administration has shown itself to be ready to tackle the vexed question of Saudi Arabia, the support for Wahhabi extremism and terrorism that comes from that country and the American reliance on its oil. I am not sure that his idea of renewables would provide a solution in the near future but, at least, he has noted the problem.

Most of the talk was along predictable lines but I was particularly interested in the points he made about Islamic charities and the need the US and UK governments faced to shut some of them down as they were channelling money to terrorists and terror educators.

Let us disregard the inevitable cries of "Islamophobia", which greet every shutting down of an Islamic charity that had been taken over by people whose idea of jihad is most definitely not self-enlightenment but the destruction of everybody else, including and especially other Muslims.

There is the unfortunate truth that many Western charities have succumbed to the same disease. This is not particularly new. I recall being somewhat puzzled when I found out that the address, phone number and personnel of Christian Aid in London was identical with an organization called Defence and Aid, whose work consisted of defending and aiding guerrillas in South Africa and the surrounding countries. Whatever one may think of these people's activity, it was not what people gave money for to the charity.

There is, however, one more point about the subject of funding of terrorism and, especially, terrorist education in places like Gaza - much of that money comes either from charities that have become NGOs and are funded, to a large extent, by various governments and transnational organizations. Even more importantly, funding comes from international aid of various kind. At the very least, that money is fungible; and, at worst, there are no checks at all on what it is spent on. That is why we get such things as the sickening children's programmes on Gaza TV. (Here is the latest news item about Tomorrow's Pioneers. I see there is another large psychotic animal present.)

That subject - the use of taxpayers' money - was raised by a couple of people in the audience (yes, yes, I was one of them) but proved to be a subject too far for Mr Schanzer who rather obviously avoided it.