“They’re violating the law. That’s the bottom line.” These are words not spoken easily by Stuart Force but with a conviction and belief that he is doing the right thing, during his appearance on this week’s “Shoulder to Shoulder“ podcast with Rabbi Pesach Wolicki and Pastor Doug Reed.
Force is suing the Biden administration for its continued financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), much of which ends up as the “Pay for Slay” rewards given to Palestinian terrorists and their families.
Force is the father of Taylor Force, a 28-year-old military veteran who died in a stabbing terror attack on the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa promenade in March 2016. The terrorist’s family receives a monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund (Pay for Slay) equal to several times the average monthly wage for a Palestinian worker. Then-president Donald Trump introduced the Taylor Force Act on March 23, 2018, to halt the continued transfer of aid, and by the end of that year, an estimated $500 million of US aid to the PA had been saved.
However, the Biden administration allegedly transferred $75,000,000 in economic support in 2021 to programs that the plaintiffs say directly benefit the PA and do not fall within exemptions clauses in the Taylor Force Act.
“We had heard that the payments to different organizations, whether the PA or UNWRA, had resumed,” Stuart said. “They figured out ways of sending money to other purposes, but money being fungible, it ends up getting moved around within the PA.
“If you send money over there, it’s all in the same pot. So when the United States sent the money that they use for ‘pay for slay,’ that meant [the Palestinians] didn’t have to use it [from their budget.].”
Force’s co-plaintiffs in the case are his wife, Robbi, Congressman Ronny Jackson (TX-13), and Sari Singer, an American citizen injured in a bus bombing attack in Jerusalem in 2003.
Taylor, who graduated from the New Mexico Military Institute and West Point in 2009 and later became an officer in the United States Army, was on a university trip at the time of the attack. Force was an MBA student traveling with other business graduate students from Vanderbilt University.
“One of his professors, Mark Cohen, sponsored a trip every spring break to go to Israel to acquaint some of the business students with the up-and-coming business atmosphere in Israel, which is world famous,” Stuart said on the podcast.
As he explained his family’s ongoing battle to sue the Biden administration – filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas – Force said they expected the administration’s official reply to the lawsuit this week.
“We’re not asking for money. We’re not asking for a mea culpa or ‘I’m sorry, it was an accident,'” Stuart said. “We’re just asking them to stop sending the money in violation of the Taylor Force Act. And it’s plain and simple. They’re violating the law. That’s the bottom line.”
