by Melanie Phillips
How utterly extraordinary. Hillary Clinton made a big speech today to the US Jewish lobby group AIPAC – a speech of no small importance given the crisis in relations between the Obama administration and Israel. But in this speech, as Israel Matzav notes, she committed an astounding howler. Referring to the recent Palestinian naming of a square near Ramallah in honour of terrorist Dalal al Mughrabi, she said:
When a Hamas-controlled municipality glorifies violence and renames a square after a terrorist who murdered innocent Israelis, it insults the families on both sides who have lost loves ones in this conflict.
But the naming of the square was a Fatah event supported by the Palestinian Authority and glorifying a Fatah terrorist. Does Clinton not know this? Of course she does. What this whopper tells us is that she – and the benighted Obama administration that wrote her lamentable speech – cannot and will not acknowledge that Fatah is a terrorist organisation that glorifies a terrorist who murdered not only dozens of Israelis but also the niece of an American Democratic senator.
Clinton and the Obamites cannot and will not acknowledge this because their whole Middle East strategy revolves around forcing Israel to give a state to Fatah -- because they 'deserve' it as moderate peaceful statesmen-in-waiting. As if. The fact that the Obamites are actually bullying Israel into accepting a Fatah-run terrorist state was unfortunately all-too graphically demonstrated when Fatah named its square after Mughrabi. So Clinton, purporting to attack the glorification of terrorist violence, turned the instigators into Hamas instead.
Her message to renounce violence, recognise Israel and abide by previous signed agreements (this from an administration that has torn up America's own agreements with Israel) was addressed solely to Hamas. To Fatah, whose leaders declare they will never accept a Jewish state, whose armed wing continues to commit acts of terror and who have gone back on countless agreements, not one word of criticism.
The rest of Clinton's speech was as bad if not worse. Most egregious was her equation of Palestinian incitement to hate and murder Jews with Israel's construction of settlements in the West Bank. Thus murderous aggression by Arabs against Jews is equated with building houses on land to which Israel is historically, morally and lawfully entitled. On planet Clinton, building houses 'undermines mutual trust'. But why should Israel, the victim of Palestinian aggression, be expected to build Palestinian trust, for heaven's sake? It is the aggressor who has to build the trust that he has renounced his aggression. Clinton's moral blindness is simply astounding.
Far from the irrelevant settlements, it is Arab incitement to hate and murder Jews and drive them out of their own restored homeland which has been the cause of the conflict for the past eight decades. As Clinton herself said -- without apparently acknowledging the implication of her words – Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion accepted the compromise solution of two states in the 1930s. What she failed to say is that the Arabs refused it then and ever since and are doing so even now – and yet the Obama administration is silent on this fact, the only fact that matters, and instead bullies Israel over the utterly bogus grievance of the settlements.
Thus the Obama administration has put itself on the side of the aggressors in the Middle East conflict and declared itself hostile to their victims – even as it professes a 'rock-solid' bond with those victims. This is an administration that quite simply does not acknowledge the difference between right and wrong, victim and aggressor, bullying and justice. It is thus no friend to the Jewish people, and a threat to the peace of the world.
Correction: an earlier version of this post mistakenly stated that the square in question was in Ramallah. In fact it was in a suburb of Ramallah where there is a Hamas-controlled municipal council. The naming of the square, however, had nothing to do with Hamas and was entirely a Fatah event.
Melanie Phillips
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