April 7, 2012

U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll Islamists $1.5 Billion

By Don Kirk in Philosophy of Human Rights

The Kuwaiti News Agency (KUNA) reported today that the United States released a lump-sum $1.5 billion in annual foreign aid to the new Egyptian government. Since U.S. government expenditures are in deep deficit, sending $1.5 billion to Egypt required the United States taxpayers to borrow $600,000,000 from lending countries, mostly China and Japan. There is no word on what the interest rate is that the U.S. taxpayers will have to pay on the borrowed six hundred million dollars.

The new government in Egypt is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that openly seeks to establish religious shari’a law as the supreme law of the land (as Saudi Arabia already does), expel Americans from the Middle East, and eliminate Israel. The terms of the foreign aid require that Egypt spend the donated U.S. dollars on American-made “military” and other “goods,” which must make every American human rights activist in Egypt so, so happy.

This annual foreign aid to Egypt is the result of the U.S.-sponsored peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. By the terms of the treaty ending the last of their wars, as long as Egypt recognizes the sovereignty of Israel and is not at war, it receives U.S. foreign aid each year approximately equal to the amount of annual foreign aid sent to Israel. It’s a bribe, nothing less, and it is made acceptable to American taxpayers only because it requires that the American dollars are to be spent by the Egyptian government buying American-made armaments. After Mr. Mubarack was deposed as president of Egypt a year ago, the treaty terms mean that the annual foreign aid continues to go to the now-Islamist Egyptian government. In effect, we continue to finance and arm governments who despise us.

There is no word on whether the Obama adminstration ever discussed ending the annual foreign aid to Israel–which would allow the U.S. government to avoid sending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Islamist Egypt–or what it intends to do about the American citizens currently under court indictments in Cairo for trying to bring human rights, the Rule of Law, and help develop civil society in Egypt.

That ‘taste’ you sense reading this post is known in moral psychology as “disgust.” Clearly, no member of either the Obama or Bush administrations studied the Philosophy of Human Rights when they were at university.