by Marco Rubio
President Obama refuses to criticize Abbas or demand that he stop the incitement and violence. Instead, the administration plays the moral equivalence game. “All sides,” it says, must “restore calm,” as if Israel is somehow to blame for being the victim of terrorism.
Over the past
month, Palestinians have staged a series of riots and terrorist attacks
targeting Israelis. Last week, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed two
Israelis to death in Jerusalem and injured two others, including a
two-year old boy. Several days earlier, a terrorist ambushed an Israeli
family driving through the West Bank, murdering two parents in front of
their four children, ages four months to nine years. Those attacks were
only the start. On Wednesday alone, Palestinians reportedly staged over
100 rock attacks, 35 fire bombings, and another series of stabbings.
This
terrorism follows weeks of growing violence against Israel, from
firebomb attacks on Israeli security forces at the Temple Mount to
Palestinian rock throwers, who stoned a Jewish driver in Jerusalem,
forcing him off the road and killing him. Reminiscent of the days when
Yasser Arafat talked peace in English and jihad in Arabic, Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — a man President Obama regularly
hail[ed] as a peacemaker — is inciting the bloodshed. “Every drop of blood
that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for
Allah,” he recently declared on Palestinian television. “Al-Aqsa is ours
and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre . . . [Israelis] have no
right to desecrate them with their filthy feet.”
Abbas
has used such anti-Semitic language to promote lies that Jews are
defiling the Al-Aqsa mosque area and attempting to alter the status quo,
in an attempt to take it over. He followed this incitement by declaring
at the United Nations last week that he was no longer bound by peace
agreements with Israel. The very next day, Fatah claimed responsibility
for the brutal terrorist attack in the West Bank — an attack which
killed an American citizen.
And
what has been the Obama administration’s response to weeks of official
Palestinian incitement, anti-Semitism, and violence? President Obama
refuses to criticize Abbas or demand that he stop the incitement and
violence. Instead, the administration plays the moral equivalence game.
“All sides,” it says, must “restore calm,” as if Israel is somehow to
blame for being the victim of terrorism. Secretary of State Kerry this
week cautioned “everybody to be calm, not to escalate the situation.”
For her part, Hillary Clinton has been silent. This is not surprising
given that as Secretary of State she led many of the Obama
administration’s attacks on Israel.
Indeed,
the indifference that President Obama and Hillary Clinton display
toward incitement and violence against Jews fits a long-running pattern
of callousness and neglect toward the Jewish state. In June 2009,
President Obama reportedly told American Jewish leaders that he wanted
to put daylight between America and Israel. He went on to demand a full
settlement freeze to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — an
extraordinary precondition that even Abbas himself never made.
The
president’s demand destroyed any hope of moving forward on peace,
asking too much of Israel and giving Abbas no incentive to negotiate.
The Palestinians refused to enter negotiations until the last month of
the freeze, but Hillary Clinton reserved her anger for a 45-minute rant
aimed at Prime Minister Netanyahu. Over the next five years, this
pattern persisted — administration officials largely absolved the
Palestinians of responsibility for incitement and terror while
threatening to reassess relations with Israel and calling the leader of a
close ally a “chicken — .”
By
distancing the United States from Israel, President Obama has created
an atmosphere that rewards the provocative behavior of the Palestinian
Authority. Absolving the guilty, blaming the innocent, and ignoring
Palestinian incitement is putting lives at risk. It is long past time
for President Obama and Hillary Clinton to call on President
Abbas — clearly and publicly — to work to stop the anti-Semitism and
terror. And it is also long past time for President Obama and Hillary
Clinton to pledge — clearly and publicly — to block the Palestinian
campaign to bypass peace with Israel by unilaterally declaring
statehood.
Israelis
are under attack as they seek to do nothing more than go about their
daily lives. It’s time for the United States to make clear that we stand
with Israel and reject President Abbas’s ugly tactics, which are
leaving Israel without a partner for peace and only leaving his people
with a future that is more uncertain, less peaceful, and less
prosperous. With the Middle East in flames, the best way to stabilize
our role in the region is to restore our ties with Israel as the Israeli
people once again are under attack.
Marco Rubio, United States Senator from Florida. Candidate for President of the United States. Fighting for a New American Century
Source: https://medium.com/@marcorubio/now-more-than-ever-america-must-stand-with-israel-1f735e5f4c29
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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