Ilhan Omar, U.S. Rep., led Friday’s condemnation of a reportedBiden administration plans to permanently seize $7Billion currently frozen Afghan assetsHalf of the proceeds to relatives of 9/11 victims. The advocates raised concerns about Afghanistan’s worsening humanitarian crisis. They also urged President Joe Biden for a change in course.
Noting that “there wasn’t a single Afghan” among the 9/11 hijackers — and the U.S. gives billions of dollars to the Saudi and Egyptian governments despite their “direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists” — Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that punishing millions of starving people is “unconscionable.”
Omar said she agrees with Barry Amundson — a member of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost his brother in the Pentagon attack — who warned the proposed seizure would “cause further harm to innocent Afghans.”
“That’s exactly what will happen,” Omar tweeted.
Barry Amundson, whose brother was also killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack, agrees: “I fear the end result of seizing these funds will be to cause more harm to innocent Afghans that have already suffered greatly.”
That’s exactly how it will happen.https://t.co/iP92Vqt45j
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 11, 2022
Khaled Beydoun (an Egyptian-American scholar) tweeted: “This is theft. Graft. Amid famine, no less.”
“Newsflash: Zero of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan,” he added. “This is absurd.”
Afghans for A Better Tomorrow is an advocacy group said in a statement that the proposed redistribution of Afghan funds “is short-sighted, cruel, and will worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation.”
“Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan,” the group — which is circulating a petition aimed at convincing the administration to immediately unfreeze some of the funds — asserted.
Currently, Afghanistan has 23 million Afghans on the edge of starvation.
One million Afghan children could be killed this winter.
All of this could be prevented if Biden’s administration agrees to gradually reduce its size #unfreezeafghanmoney. You can find out more about it here:https://t.co/ZjFo4US2GF pic.twitter.com/T2jkvQ5KbC
— Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (@AfghansTomorrow) January 10, 2022
Phyllis Rodriguez (whose son was killed in New York’s 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center) was among those who urged Biden not to adopt the proposed policy.
“President Biden has the opportunity to make amends right now! He can unfreeze the funds belonging to the Afghan people,” she said. “They are not the Taliban’s property but of everyday folks like us. Let’s see this as a humanitarian crisis that we can address immediately.”
Others also noted the awful conditions that the Afghan people are currently living in.
The US wants to kill the Afghan Central Bank, after 20 years of investments. So much for all the talk about the importance institutions.
We are no longer trustworthy. Which country’s money are we going next to seize?— Masuda Sultan (@MasudaSultan) February 11, 2022
Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American author and activist with Unfreeze Afghanistan, said that Afghans are “experiencing a historic famine within a pandemic, and their economy has been in a freefall worse than the Great Depression.”
“One of the main drivers of the economic collapse is the freezing of their assets,” she added. “If the funds are not returned and the famine is not averted, America will be blamed for one of the worst famines in history.”
Rodriguez said that “it saddens me that there are 9/11 family members who can’t see the discrepancies in our relative privilege to demand reparations instead of recognizing the dire need of Afghans.”
“They have suffered unjustly for the actions of a cadre of extremists — a tiny minority of the population,” she continued. “Major famine, disease, displacement, and destruction that our government and its allies created should be reversed through all means possible.”
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CodePink, a women-led peace group, said in a statement that “taking funds that rightfully belong to some of the poorest people in the world who are now facing a catastrophic famine is a cruel move that will not bring justice to the 9/11 families.”
Benjamin refers to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that ended last year when the Taliban retook it. tweeted that taking “billions of dollars away from starving Afghans” would be “a fitting end to 20 years of screwing the Afghan people.”
