Daniel Pipes has a short, provacative article in Frontpage Magazine which asks if foriegn aid actually causes terrorism, instead of preventing it. I recommend reading the whole thing but here is an excerpt from Funding the Palestinians:
...In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, "These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism."
The Palestinian record fits a broader pattern, as noted by Jean-Paul Azam and Alexandra Delacroix in a 2006 article, "Aid and the Delegated Fight Against Terrorism." They found "a pretty robust empirical result showing that the supply of terrorist activity by any country is positively correlated with the amount of foreign aid received by that country" – i.e., the more foreign aid, the more terrorism.
If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, "occupation," and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.
Some older studies on the same subject, written by TF Blog contributors, are here and here.
Update 12/19/2007: A telling graph from the original study at CAMERA:
A soit disant "necessity" for the "tyrant plea"
Posted by: Joseph . E / Givatayim / Israel | February 28, 2008 at 15:13