Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.

JNS.org — The Palestinian Authority’s legislation and actions under President Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, which support the murder of Jews and Americans, have been far worse than all of the antisemitic comments Abbas has made.

Abbas is the first political leader to establish a law providing for financial incentives to murder Jews. PA law currently budgets and disburses more than $350 million in financial incentives to murder, and the more Jews and Americans a terrorist kills, the more money he and his family receive.

Amazingly, while the PA was providing such financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Jews and Americans, US aid to the PA continued to increase during the Obama administration. Fortunately, due to the passage of the Taylor Force Act in March 2018 — if the Trump administration implements the law — aid to the PA could finally be significantly cut by the exact amount of money provided in the PA’s terrorist funding, minus a few exceptions.

This raises a question that is not just political and financial in nature, but moral as well: Why is any US aid going to the PA at all?

What’s more, Abbas is not a recent antisemite or anti-Zionist. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis questioning the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust. He also was Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man in terror and has been part of the PLO for more than 30 years.

Abbas has hailed numerous terrorists as heroes and routinely names schools and public squares after them. PA-produced television shows encourage Palestinian youth to follow in their path. It’s not surprising that the Anti-Defamation League found that Palestinian Arabs are the most antisemitic people in the world, with more than 90 percent expressing racist views.

Abbas has supported antisemitism and the murder of Jews his entire adult life. The approach to Abbas by successive American administrations of believing that he would accept peace with Israel and try to work out a territorial compromise has always been doomed to inevitable failure. Abbas has never wanted peace and like Arafat tells his people that the Jews have no right to a nation of their own and all of Israel should be a Palestinian Arab state.

The recent passage of the Taylor Force Act has so far failed to convince the Palestinian leadership to change its heinous laws that provides financial incentives to terrorists. Accordingly, stronger action must be taken. Hamas, for instance, should be forced to choose between using whatever money it gets for the economic needs of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza or see its terrorist regime implode. The world should view either of these outcomes as superior to the continuation of the status quo.

Farley Weiss is the president of the National Council of Young Israel.