A third of the United States foreign aid is spent on Israel and Egypt. That’s your tax dollars hard at work.

Israel receives $400 million in economic aid and $2.775 billion in military aid while Egypt receives $250 million in economic aid and $1.3 billion in foreign aid.   Their total aid package ($3.175 billion to Israel and $1.55 billion to Egypt) account for a third of all US foreign aid and yet neither one of the countries are developing countries.

What is disturbing is that both of these countries turn around lets the US borrows the money back with interest.   The US borrows $20.6 billion from Israel and $26 billion from Egypt and are pay them back with interest.

In fact, the US pays close to $200 billion in interest on its own money!

If you express the money that is being given to these countries as aid per citizen it is vulgar how much money is being given away.

Israel receives $412 per citizen while Egypt receives about $20 per citizen.  In total aid, Israel receives twice as much aid as Egypt but when you express the numbers in terms of aid per citizen, Israel receives 20 times more aid!

When you further analyze the number and try to access the impact the money is having on the country, the disparity is greater.

Israel citizen average $29,404 per year which is nearly three times the average for the world while Egyptian citizens average $6,367 per year which is almost half the average of the world.

When we give $412 per Israel citizen, we are only making the rich richer whereas when we give $20 per Egypt citizen we helping (albeit minimally) reduce the disparity between the rich and the poor.

The whole point in giving aid to a country is to help that country develop; to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, to develop infrastructure to help the people. By the above numbers, it is obvious that the intention here is not to help the people rather it is to help their governments buy more F-22s and M16s.

Sources

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/112189/who-owns-the-us?mod=bb-debtmanagement

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm

http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201430

Muslims as members of an open and democratic society are not only privileged but in many ways obligate to present a perspective and to enhance the multicultural and pluralistic smorgasbord that our society aims to be.   There are several ways to perceive the multiviews presented in the media.   The first, a cynical view, emphasizes that conversations in our society is constantly being controlled by a group of people through the media with an agenda to advance their selfish aims.   Different views are in constant competition in the evolutionary sense and “you kill or be killed.”   To “win”, you have to out compete your competition.   Here winning can be defined as eliminating different perspectives by either overwhelming them or undermining them.   An example would be the Gaza crisis.  There were groups in the US who wanted to drain out the Palestinian voice and only present the Israeli side.  The Israel perspective out competed the Palestinian perspective and therefore a lopsided presentation of the situation flooded the media.  The second view, or optimistic perspective, is that conversations in our society are enhanced by participation and that diversity of views influence the conversation irrespective of their impact.    Different perspectives enhance the conversation in general and there are no winners or losers but more informed participant.  Everyone wins with diversity and lack of diversity is to the detriment of society.  The model in biological sense is more like an ecosystem.  The more diverse the ecosystem, the more likely it will thrive.  Each component of the ecosystem contributes uniquely to it.   Using the Gaza crisis, although those supporting the Israel perspective flooded the media with their view of the crisis, it could not  overwhelm those supporting the Palestinian perspective because it made an impact on the conversation.

Both of these views, would suggest that Muslims need to participate in the media.  From the first view, we have to heavily invest to compete with those who would like to present our religion incorrectly.   Similarly, our participation in the media will have an impact irregardless of the effort, so no one has an excuse not to participate.

Investing in student media is like investing in seeds that will produce fruits, rather than buying the fruits.  Although, it takes time, nurturing and resources to maintain, our community will benefit exponentially when harvest time comes around.

By: Habib Hamidi

Authoritarian leaders subjugate their people to their absolute ways.  They expect everyone to follow their rules and what they deem as right.  Many times, they enforce their rules violently and make it known to their people that dissent is not tolerated. They promote their agendas through the media by stressing how deleterious it would be for the society as whole if they allowed the opposition to speak”that the national security and the life of the ordinary citizens would be compromised.  This is how they justify their suppression of people’s freedoms.   As bad is it may sound, it’s nearly not evil as apartheid, or worse yet, Hitler’s Nazi Germany.    In a country led by an authoritarian regime, there are rules to follow and you just have to toe the line.

In apartheid and other more malicious forms of authoritarian government, race is a determinate in how you are treated in society.  There is no line for you to toe.    You are who you are genetically, and there is no way to change that.   If you are an Arab living in Israel, that’s the reality you woke up to everyday for the past sixty years.   You know that if you are taking your pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth, you are going to be stopped at a checkpoint for the simple reason that you are Arab.   If you own a house, you know that any day, Israeli authorities can knock on your door and confiscate it from you because you are Arab.  If you are a student and have been working your hard your whole life to study in a place outside of Israel and you are successful in receiving a scholarship, the Israel government can deny your leave, again, because you are Arab.    Simply going to class is a daunting task because you don’t know what the checkpoint procedures are everyday.  Because you are Arab, you have to leave for class hours before your classes start in order to make it to school on time, even though the school can be down the street from you.

www.pcdc.edu.ps

Israel justifies their treatment arrogantly by comparing it to the treatment of American Indians at the hands of early settlers and the treatment of African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement.   What they fail to realize is that we have acknowledged how wrong that was and we have learned from it.  No American would want their country to repeat that history because it was shameful and wrong.   Unfortunately, few Americans know that we are perpetuating the same policy by supporting Israel.   Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America’s entire foreign aid budget (www.ifamericansknew.org). In per capita terms, the United   States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. Furthermore, the US aids Israel militarily.  According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, current U.S. military aid grants to Israel “represent over 20% of the overall Israeli defense budget.”  The only reason Israel can get away with the apartheid is because the US supports them.   There have been 65 UN resolutions passed against Israel. But Washington used its veto 32 times to shield Israel from critical draft resolutions between 1972 and 1997. This constituted nearly half of the total of 69 U.S. vetoes cast since the founding of the U.N.

Without the US support, Israel will cease to exist in its current form and may be more likely to act as pluralistic society like ours where citizens view diversity as a source of strength instead of a challenge.   They would have to change because the world does not tolerate apartheid, just as it did not tolerate Hitler or South   Africa, because sensible people know that countries capable of inflicting harm on others have the ability to inflict harm on them.  So, as horribly as we may see authoritarian rule, the Arabs in Israel would prefer it to Israeli apartheid.   Democracy is only a dream and a fantasy in their mind.

Naomi Klein wrote in the Nation on January 7,  2009, “It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.”