Le Royaume-Uni paie un 'salaire' à des terroristes palestiniens

Douglas Murray, directeur adjoint du think tank Henry Jackson Society basé à Londres et grand défenseur d'Israël comme le savent nos lecteurs, s'exprime dans The Spectator: Pourquoi les contribuables britanniques (et les contribuables d'autres pays européens) payent-ils des salaires à des terroristes palestiniens?

Alan Duncan, le ministre conservateur (il n'est donc pas de gauche) du Développement international, a été informé à plusieurs reprises que l'argent fourni par le contribuable britannique à l'Autorité palestinienne et à son "budget général" est utilisé pour payer le salaire des terroristes palestiniens emprisonnés en Israël. Comme Douglas Murray l'explique dans l'article, Alan Duncan semble avec son air suffisant ne pas se soucier que des paiements pouvant aller jusqu'à 2.500 euros (£ 2.000) par mois soient versés aux pires des assassins - le montant du "salaire" est proportionnel à la longueur de la peine, les plus sanguinaires recevant la récompense la plus élevée... C'est évidemment plus que le revenu moyen de la plupart des citoyens britanniques dont beaucoup vivent dans la précarité. Mais M. Duncan a un excellent argument.  Il a déclaré qu'il ne s'agit pas de salaires mais de "programmes d'aide sociale qui versent des allocations sociales" (welfare payments) - évidemment ça change tout et c'est même très respectable!

Mais au fait que pense exactement M. Duncan d'Israël? Il y a un an, il a posté sur son site une vidéo embarrassante pour son Ministère. Il s'est fait filmer devant de la clôture de sécurité érigée par Israël pour arrêter une vague d'attentats suicides. Il y décrit la clôture comme un "accaparement de terres" et affirme que les Israéliens volent délibérément l'eau des Palestiniens et que les terres en question n'appartiennent pas à l'Etat juif. Ce dernier point a été prononcé par M. Duncan avec une incroyable férocité - la vidéo a été retirée depuis - et rend parfaitement clair le fait que M. Duncan exprimait sincèrement ce qu'il pense d'Israël et dans quelle direction vont ses vraies sympathies.

Douglas Murray a publié un article sur ce sujet dans le Wall Street Journal (Palestinian Terrorists on the Payroll, British taxpayers are helping to pay the salaries of jailed bomb makers). Extraits:

"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.

Fortunately such people can be consoled by the limitless complacency of the international development minister. For after the facts about the DfID budget were revealed, Alan Duncan rejected them in the following tones: "If these claims were true, this would be a matter of very serious concern for me and the Department."

"However," Mr. Duncan said, "I am pleased to reassure you that we have investigated the matter fully and can confirm that the allegations in Palestinian Media Watch's report are both inaccurate and misleading." The payments were not in fact salaries, he claimed, but rather "social assistance programs to provide welfare payments." [...]

Just a year ago Mr. Duncan dragged his department into a row when its website posted a video of him divesting himself of some of his franker opinions. Standing beside Israel's security fence—built, successfully, to stop a spate of suicide bombing—Mr. Duncan described the fence as a "land grab," claimed that Israelis deliberately stole water from Palestinians, and said that the land in question did not belong to the Jewish state. The latter point was spat out by Mr. Duncan with such ferocity—the video has since been removed—as to make it perfectly clear this was something Mr. Duncan felt, as well as thought.

But perhaps one should be more generous and assume that Mr. Duncan simply had not known what he was talking about on the subject of taxpayers' money or the security fence. DfID spends around £86 million each year in the Palestinian areas. Around £30 million of this goes to the PA's general budget, from which the terrorists receive their salaries. And PMW's latest report provides exactly the evidence Mr. Duncan said did not exist. The PA itself refers to the payments to prisoners not as "welfare payments," as Mr. Duncan would have it, but as a "monthly salary."

In addition, there is no possibility that the salary reflects the prisoner's family's welfare needs because the payments bear no relation to either the prisoner's marital status or social welfare situation. What they do relate to is the length of the sentence, with those convicted and sentenced for the worst crimes receiving the highest payments. [...]"