U.S. Funding Mortgages for 'Palestinians' in Judea & Samaria? WHAT?!

Carl in Jerusalem reports a real JAW-DROPPER!

.... The US government has funded $313 million of home mortgages in the 'West Bank.'

No, not the 'West Bank' of the Mississippi River. The 'West Bank' of the Jordan River. As in Judea and Samaria.

Yes, the United States government is funding mortgages for 'Palestinians.' 

The GAO report released Tuesday described some of the actions OPIC is taking in the emerging market of the Palestinian territories.

“U.S. agencies and implementing partners participate in various programs with the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF) or PIF-owned entities that include home mortgage financing, loan guarantees, and educational initiatives,” says the report. “First, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) along with PIF and other entities have committed to lend $485 million to the Affordable Mortgage and Loan Company (AMAL) to support mortgages for low- and medium-income borrowers in the West Bank....

 

 

Read. It. All.

And then go back to May 2008 and review. To be quite fair, we note that while this is now happening on Obama's watch, it has its roots in the Bush administration.

 

al-Reuters, May 21, 2008:

.... In remarks prepared for delivery to the Palestine Investment Conference in Bethlehem, Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt said $150 million has already been transferred as budget support to the Palestinian Authority.

The United States also has pledged to provide $148 million in humanitarian aid through the United Nations, and is "requesting significant levels of assistance from Congress for next year," Kimmitt said in remarks released in Washington.

Kimmitt said much of the other direct U.S. funding will be channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development to bolster private sector growth. "Agribusiness partnerships, microfinance assistance, modernizing financial institutions, and a new trade facilitation program are only a few of the several important initiatives that USAID is undertaking."

Kimmitt said the mid- to long-term goal was to catalyze private investment flows to promote broad, sustainable growth.

He highlighted a $500 million mortgage lending facility for the West Bank, which aimed to boost the local housing sector.

The facility was being supported by the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp, Britain's Department for International Development, the World Bank's International Finance Corp, the Palestine Investment Fund and the Bank of Palestine....

 

We pick up BtB on Day 3 of the Conference:

"The mere convening of an international investors' conference in Palestine defines success to me," Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank economist, told Reuters. "That's what success is about and it's a Palestinian message to the world saying 'Yes, we can.'"

 

And after the conference, we lined up these dots: Tony Blair, the miners' canary, and Caroline Glick.

 

.... Could we get a closer look at that map?

Doesn't look like a two-state solution to me.
Looks like a one-state solution.

 So why does Blair look like the cat that ate the canary? There's a lot I could read into the picture, but I think I'll leave it alone and let you come to your own conclusions.

P.S. My thanks to Caroline Glick, who recently made a statement that is forever etched in my mind: 

"... even though Israel is the proverbial

canary in the mineshaft,

everybody is ignoring the bird."

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

As my grandkids would say, this is the "same old same old." GW Bush never understood that the so-called "Palestinians" are nothing more than jihadis masquerading under a different label. The same is of course true of Obama. Since 1979, the United States has been burdened with leadership that doesn't comprehend one of the basic facts of our time: that what Andy McCarthy calls the Grand Jihad is, at its core, a unitary event -- an event that takes somewhat different forms in different places, but that always pursues a single goal: the retrieval of allegedly "Muslim" lands as a first step in spreading sharia across the globe. Israel is one of those lands. From the jihadi viewpoint, the Islamization of Israel -- what a horrific phrase that is! -- is absolutely essential to te success of the worldwide Jihad. What a pity that not a single American president or Secretary of State has ever understood that. If they had, foolishness of the sort described in this post would never have happened -- since every penny spent on funding the Palestinians (for whatever purpose) is a penny spent in furtherance of the Grand Jihad.