Board meeting of Al Maktoun, a UAE charity. Are they writing checks for laptops for "needy" Americans? 

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Yesterday, I tweeted, and somehow contemptuously, that London's mayor was seeking money for a new airport from Qatar, Dubai and Kuwait.

Today, the Wash Post reports on the extensive charity the UAE is lavishing on "needy" American communities.

I feel ill. Emiratis are the people who were falconing with bin Laden in Afghanistan when the US didn't strike OBL pre-9/11; these are the people whom we successfully rejected over the UAE's proposed Dubai Port's purchase of US ports. Now, they just buy their way in all over America with laptops, soccer fields and hospital beds.

That's because no one has the Yankee pride to turn down the blood money and get along without it.  After all, UAE is not only a dictatorship where liberty doesn't exist, its many millionaires bankroll jihad violence and aggression against the US and our allies. Or as a State Department cable released by Wikileaks puts it: "UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups, including al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups, including Hamas."

Now they "provide financial support" for poor pitiful Americans.

From the piece we learn:

Today, the nearly 2,200 high school students in Joplin [MO] each have their own UAE-funded MacBook laptop, which they use to absorb lessons, perform homework and take tests. Across the city, the UAE is spending $5 million to build a neonatal intensive-care unit at Mercy Hospital, which also was ripped apart by the tornado. ...

During the past two years, the UAE government has paid for the construction of all-weather artificial turf soccer fields in low-income parts of New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. The embassy wants to build three more fields this year. Otaiba hopes to break ground on the first of them this spring in the Washington area, although the embassy is still in discussions with potential partners and has not settled on a location.

Otaiba said he also has promised New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) about $5 million apiece to help rebuild their jurisdictions in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

...The UAE and Qatar, a fellow petro-wealthy Persian Gulf nation, both wrote $100 million checks to the State Department in 2005 to help with the reconstruction of the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. ... 

... In 2009, he [UAE Amb. Otaiba] helped facilitate a $150 million gift from the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate, to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington to establish a new research center to develop innovations in pediatric surgery.

The UAE made large gifts to other hospitals, including Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic, but the ambassador also began branching into new areas — a Baltimore food bank, the New York Police Foundation and a nonprofit group that helps Washington high schoolers pay for university tuition.

In the case of Joplin, Otaiba said the decision to help started with a phone call from the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, who saw images of the devastation on CNN. A week later, an embassy staffer was in Missouri, looking for ways to assist.

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The decision [in Joplin] to accept the UAE money prompted an angry response from a few residents, and it sparked rants from some conservative radio commentators — one of them, Debbie Schlussel, accused the school system of taking “Islamic blood money” — but Huff stood firm. “I can live with the hate mail,” he said. “It’s the right thing for the kids.”

Whatever would they have done without it?