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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harvey Allen who wrote (129195)	4/14/2004 7:22:09 PM
From: E	Respond to of 281500

Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up. It is alleged that he funneled money to the orphans of such suicide bombers, but I have never seen any documentation for the claim. Supporting orphans is in any case not the same as funding terrorism. It was rarely orphans being funded, it was most often the surviving parents and siblings of suicide-bombing young men. And it wasn't a secret: the Arab media gave extensive coverage to the glory and wealth that fell to the families of young "martyrs." The proposal that the payments were made out of sympathetic concern can't be entertained seriously. This practice has been widely reported, and it wasn't a secret. The only figure I remember specifically (I'm not going to research it) was $10,000. for the family per "martyr" from Saddam. The family also received an annual income that continued until the youngest child of the family reached a certain age, but if I remember correctly, that allowance came from the PA. The Saudis made a generous gift, too. And Saddam contributed to the Red Crescent, which also made some payment to the families, so maybe that's where the "funnelling" idea came from. The parents of these unfortunate teenagers were generally desperately poor people who had many children to raise. The sons of well to do Palestinian families rarely sought these remunerative martyrdoms. As everyone knew, because they saw the glorifying coverage on TV, a child's sacrifice could bring prestige and a better life in a big new house to his parents and his eight or ten siblings.... ' He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. ' I should think this proves he was a threat to his own people. Right. And we were his partner in obtaining those WMD, and we continued to supply him after he committed the atrocities, so manifesting indignation on that front is rather sordid, imo.