by Daniel Greenfield
If the Biden administration wants to fight anti-Semitism, it can stop funding anti-Semitic terrorists.
On December 4th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stopped by J Street’s annual conference being held at a D.C. hotel owned by a Spanish airline and famous for its haunted ‘ghost suite’. But the real ghosts were those of the murdered Jews whose lives had been taken by the pro-terrorist policies that Blinken and the anti-Israel group he was celebrating had imposed on Israel.
Blinken, who had served as the vice chair of the board of directors for Human Rights First, an anti-Israel group, before his current appointment boasted of the $890 million in taxpayer money directed to the “Palestinians”. Fungible funds that will inevitably subsidize the murder of Jews.
Three days later, Kamala’s husband convened a high-profile D.C. summit to fight antisemitism. Unmentioned at the summit was that the Palestinian Authority’s Supreme Sharia Judge, and a special adviser to its terrorist ruler, Mahmoud Abbas, had recently slurred Jews with the traditional Islamic insult of “apes and pigs”.
That’s not the antisemitism that the summit was looking for.
Muhammad Al-Lahham of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, which runs the political movement behind the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority, was caught on video praising the “patriotic conscience” of a terrorist who had opened fire on a rabbi taking his 2-year-old son for a walk.
“Fatah does not made do with condemnations alone. Fatah emphasizes that vengeance must be wreaked upon the occupation, and that the souls of the martyrs must be avenged,” the official warned while boasting of the Palestinian Authority’s involvement in the murder of Jews.
“If we speak about 2022, around 170 Martyrs ascended,” Al-Lahham claimed. “Most of those who died as Martyrs while resisting, 90% of them were Fatah members. Yes, if the number of those killed among the occupation was 20, Fatah is the one that carried out these operations.”
A member of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling class was bragging about killing 20 Jews. And in D.C., a member of the Biden administration was bragging about helping finance the PA.
Secretary of State Blinken claimed that, “we will always condemn acts of terrorism or violence targeting civilians. There can be no justification for it ever, and anyone who engages in it must be held accountable. As President Biden has often said, we’ll also condemn those who fail to condemn such attacks – or, even worse, who praise or reward terrorists or their families.”
And yet he and his ambassador have never once condemned the terrorists by name. They only condemn the abstract principle of terrorism, not the actual terrorists who commit the attacks.
The Palestinian Authority spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on its Pay-to-Slay program which rewards terrorists or their surviving family members with large sums of money.
This year was the 20th anniversary of the Hamas bombing of the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University. The families of the terrorists who did it received millions from the PA.
Janis Ruth Coulter from Massachusetts, who had been guiding foreign students on campus, Marla Bennett from San Diego, who was studying on campus, Benjamin Blutstein of Pennsylvania, who was about to become a teacher, and David Gritz, a pianist from Massachusetts, were among those killed in the Hebrew University terrorist attack.
Unable to cut off the hundreds of millions of dollars from our government going to the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority, families of the victims took the terrorist organization to court. They won $218.5 million in damages, potentially cutting off some of our funding to the terrorists.
“Initially I was elated to hear the verdict, then a minute later I was crying because my son is still dead,” Katherine Baker of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Benjamin’s mother said.
The Obama administration however went to work defending the PLO. It complained that the initial award was too big and would cripple the terrorist regime’s ability to function.
Blinken, then deputy secretary of state, submitted a sworn statement complaining that anything that “deprives the PA of a significant portion of its revenues” would “undermine several decades of U.S. foreign policy”. He concluded by offering some crocodile tears, along with “grief and outrage” for the “grievous injuries and losses suffered by the American victims of the attacks”.
The Anti-Terrorism Act, that Blinken claimed he supported, had been passed in response to the PLO murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American in a wheelchair. According to Blinken, the act specifically passed to hold the PLO accountable, couldn’t be used to hold them accountable.
This year, on the 20th anniversary of the murder of four Americans, the terrorists got a pay hike of 14%. That’s on top of the $2.5 million they’ve already received over the last 20 years.
Who paid for it? The hundreds of millions that Biden pumped into the PA no doubt helped.
According to Blinken, funding terrorists so that they could kill Jews was in the national interest in 2015. It’s still in the national interest today with Biden, Blinken and Power resuming the flow of massive amounts of money to the Palestinian Authority, not to mention other Islamic terrorists.
It might be time to consider the possibility that it’s because they want to see more dead Jews.
When someone spends enough time, effort and money to kill you, it might be smart to consider the possibility that he wants you dead, rather than that he has entirely benevolent motives that lead him to cause harm to you on a regular basis. The latter is what’s known as gaslighting.
The essence of recognizing antisemitism is to simply admit that when someone says that they hate you, they really mean it, and when they try to kill you, it’s because they want you dead.
Gaslighting is at the heart of Democrat foreign policy toward Israel. The constant undermining of Israel and empowerment of its enemies is always rationalized. And Jews do much of the rationalizing. But the rationalizing falls apart when people start actually paying attention.
At J Street, Blinken went on a tear, warning that his administration would “work relentlessly to prevent any parties from taking actions that could raise tensions or further raise tensions and push the two-state solution even further out of reach.”
The target of all that “relentless” activity would be Israel.
The secretary of state’s examples of the acts that he would “relentlessly” and “unequivocally oppose” were “settlement expansion; moves toward annexation of the West Bank; disruption to the historic status quo at holy sites; demolitions and evictions; and incitement to violence.”
All but the last are specific references to Biden administration criticisms of Israel.
Despite a wave of Islamic terrorist attacks in Israel, one of which recently killed a Canadian 16-year-old boy and wounded an American teenage girl, Blinken falsely claimed that he had “seen dramatically higher levels of violence in the West Bank, perpetrated by both Palestinians and Israeli settlers”.
After repeatedly criticising Israel at the J Street hate conference, Blinken conceded that the “Palestinian Authority must carry out meaningful reforms” and “must demonstrate that it has the will and it has the capacity to be a true partner in a process that can lead to two states”.
Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority, however recently warned, “I do not adopt military resistance at this time, but it is possible that I change my mind tomorrow or after tomorrow, or any time.”
According to the man whose terror regime Blinken has been funding, he might turn to terrorism tomorrow or at any time. But according to another top official, they’re already responsible for 90% of the terrorism including the murder of 20 people. And that’s a drop in the bucket since the PA continues devoting hundreds of millions to its Pay-to-Slay program that sponsors terrorism.
There’s been no reaction to this. Instead, the Biden administration continues to threaten Israel and to warn that it will boycott some Israeli ministers whom it considers to be “far right”.
But at J Street, Blinken led a round of applause for Hady Amr, the administration’s emissary to the PLO, who admitted that he was “inspired by the Palestinian intifada.”
Hady Amr had accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and coordinated an organization that had smeared Israel as “apartheid”. And warned “every Israeli” that Arab Muslims would “never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done” and that “thousands who will seek to avenge” the air strike that took out a Hamas leader.
That is not too extreme for the Biden administration.
Addressing J Street, Blinken gushed that, “Hady is here today. I hope you appreciate the applause. As all of you who work with him know, his knowledge, his experience, his relationships, his principles will make him an ideal leader for this role.”
To know Hady’s principles is to know Blinken’s and Biden’s principles as well.
While it’s nice that Kamala’s husband took time out from his busy schedule to convene an antisemitism summit, the listening session amounts to nothing in the way of policy. Antisemitism is indeed rising, and no administration is likely to do much about it, but the one thing this administration could do is to stop funding the murder of Jews.
Unfortunately that’s too much to ask.
“I’m 12-years-old, I’m from New York, and I’m going to stay alive,” Jamie Sokolow remembered saying when the family fell victim to an attack in Jerusalem after her father had survived 9/11.
These were the people Blinken had worked to thwart to continue funding the murder of Jews.
That is what J Street, most recently lubricated by a $1 million Soros donation, is dedicated to.
If the Biden administration wants to fight antisemitism, it can start by doing the most basic thing possible and end its ongoing financial and political support for the worst antisemites in the world who describe Jews as “apes and pigs” and call for the extermination of the Jewish people.
But it won’t. And that tells us everything we need to know. The rest is just empty words.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is
an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-convenes-anti-semitism-summit-while-funding-murder-of-jews/
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