Nowhere is this truer than in our White House and Department of State—when it comes to Israel. After eight years of animosity toward Israel from the Obama Administration, we thought that would come to an end on January 20th. But, on Friday, Adam Kredo, writing in The Washington Free Beacon, said:
The State Department is facing harsh criticism for claiming in an official report that Israel is to blame for terrorism attacks committed by Palestinians and accusing the Jewish state of being largely responsible for an impasse in peace negotiations, according to a leading member of Congress who is calling on the State Department to correct its “inaccurate and harmful” characterization of Israel.
The State Department, in its latest annual report on the global terrorism situation, blames Israeli security policies for stalling the peace process and claims that Palestinians rarely incite terror attacks.
This drew the ire of Rep. Peter Roskam (R. Ill.), who is co-chair of the House Republican Israel Caucus. The Congressman fired off a pointed letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “call[ing] on the Administration to immediately amend [the report] to portray Palestinian terror attacks as a primary reason for the impasse in peace talks.”
In the letter, he expressed his concern about “numerous mischaracterizations found in the 2016 State Department Country Reports on Terrorism, which … wrongly blame Israel for Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.” Roskam adds:
This report wrongly insinuates Israeli security measures on the Temple Mount and a stalled peace process as key forces behind terrorism. Most egregiously, it portrays the PA as innocent peacemakers far removed [from] being the source of terrorist activity. The report states, “explicit calls for violence against Israelis, direct exhortations against Jews, and categorical denials by the PA of the possibility of peace with Israel are rare and the leadership does not generally tolerate it.” This assertion is demonstrably false.
The PA does not only tolerate terrorist attacks against Israelis but it also incites, rewards, and memorializes those who carry out these horrific attacks.
During the last major wave of Palestinian terrorism which began in September 2015 and continues today, Palestinian terrorists executed 181 stabbing attacks, 159 shootings, and 60 vehicular ramming attacks, which killed over 50 Israelis and injured nearly 1000. President Abbas, who deemed this terror wave a “peaceful uprising,” was a key supporter of these heinous attacks. On September 16, 2016 he stated on Palestinian TV:
“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.“
The report pulls out all the stops to cast the PA as peacemakers and the Israelis as overreacting instigators:
President Abbas said he sent the PASF to schools to look for knives and to caution Palestinian youth against undertaking attacks against Israelis. The PASF thwarted hundreds of lone offender attacks, according to public statements by PA and Israeli government officials.
Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.
The PA has taken significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence. While some PA leaders have made provocative and inflammatory comments, the PA has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.
This is rank propaganda. Whatever Islamist Obama leftover wrote this should be immediately identified and fired. It’s likely the same person who wrote the 2015 report; the writer uses much of the identical language. Don’t be confused by the 2016 date, however: this report refers to the Palestinians’ organized protests over the metal detectors Israel installed at the entrance to the Temple Mount. This is happening right now, so the Trump Administration definitely wrote this report.
In another Adam Kredo article, he writes that State Dept. officials “are standing by the report,” and that the officials told the Washington Free Beacon “that it remains unclear why terrorists engage in violent acts.” He quotes one official that:
“This section of the report—which is based on input from our embassies around the world—is intended to inform our efforts to counter radicalization to violence, and to better understand what might be assessed as motivations that could drive individuals towards violence.”
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It’s a radical absurdity that installing metal detectors is a legitimate “motivation that could drive individuals towards violence.” In fact, it’s the stated rationale of the protestors in Jerusalem; our State Department agrees with them.
This unfolded as Haaretz reported: “in a rare move, the Trump administration … asked the Palestinian Authority to add [David] Friedman [our ambassador to Israel] to meetings between Palestinian negotiators and Jason Greenblatt, the president’s special envoy to the peace process. The last time an ambassador to Israel took part in a meeting between American and Palestinian negotiators, without any Israeli presence, was in the late 1990’s.
“State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters [on July 11th] that U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s participation in a meeting with Palestinian officials earlier that day wasn’t a diplomatic downgrade for the Palestinians, but ‘perhaps even an upgrading.’”
This is vastly underserved by “a terrorist cartel disguised as a government,” as Bruce Thornton described the PA in FrontPageMag. Its president is “a holocaust denier who financed the infamous 1972 Munich Olympics massacre,” wrote Thornton, he “hasn’t run for office in a free election since 2005, [and his] corruption has earned him a net worth of $100 million.”
Should we blame the president for this? Kredo writes:
The report singling out Israel is another clear example of the State Department pursuing policies that are well out of line with the White House’s stated agenda, which the sources said has been pro-Israel. One source who advises the White House Middle East policy described the State Department’s explanation to the Free Beacon as “spectacular bull—t.”
The problem is that the Obama team spent eight years filling the State Department with career staffers who think exactly like they [the team] think, and those people are still running things,” the source said. “Some really good people have tried to clean house, but every time anything got going Tillerson went to the president personally to protect the Obama holdovers. So they feel safe producing this kind of mind-numbing nonsense and sending it to Congress.
If that’s true, it’s Tillerson’s fault, but the buck stops at the president.
All Trump supporters—but especially high-profile people like Sean Hannity—need to criticize Trump when he’s wrong, particularly in some of his appointments. His National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster unsuccessfully tried to get Trump’s speechwriter, and Trump himself to change “radical Islamic terror” to “radical Islamist terror,” Hillary’s exact words. He believes “terrorists are ‘un-Islamic.’” Sound familiar?
“McMaster is from David Petraeus’s circle…. His deputy is Ricky Waddell, Deputy National Security Advisor, who was earlier with Petraeus in the Obama administration.”
“Given that Petraeus strongly urged Obama, in public, to give PLO/Fatah a state in Judea and Samaria, we may expect a similar bias in Waddell, especially considering that his boss, H.R. McMaster led—in the Obama years—the handful of top Petraeus advisors that Waddell belonged to.”—Source: Historical and Investigative Research.
Jordan Schachtel wrote in Conservative Review that Michael Ratney, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department, was “one of John Kerry’s closest confidantes [and] is now in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio at the State Department.” He added that:
“While he served as Jerusalem consul, Ratney oversaw grants to OneVoice, a leftist non-profit that President Obama allegedly used to try to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 2015 election.”
Kris Baumann, who was made NSC adviser on Israel-Palestinian matters, believes we should negotiate with Hamas and that we’re not putting enough pressure on Israel to deliver a peace agreement.
He’s also advocated “airports being built for a Palestinian-Arab State in both Judea/Samaria and Gaza,” and—like the nameless lefty who wrote the State Dept. report—blames Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for “inciting Palestinian violence.”
In his 2009 Ph.D. dissertation, Bauman “extensively quoted Robert Malley,” the notorious pro-Hamas Middle East NSC official under Obama, reports Dan Greenfield in FrontPageMag.
Guess what. In another Conservative Review article, Jordan Schachtel wrote:
Robert Malley, the controversial “ISIS czar” to former President Barack Obama—whose critics have labeled him an apologist for Islamic terror groups – has attended National Security Council meetings on the grounds of the Trump White House, sources with direct knowledge of the situation confirmed to Conservative Review. [Emphasis added.]
Malley was at one point too controversial even for Obama … He was dropped early on from the 2008 Obama campaign after information surfaced that he had been meeting with members of Hamas.
With people like this in the White House, we can abandon all hope of escaping the fate of Europe, which is overrun by Muslim throwbacks; we can forget about winning the War on Terror. Certainly, we will not see fair treatment of our ally Israel, just as we haven’t for the last eight years.
If the president wants to have a legacy as one of the greatest presidents, he must start by cleaning house in his administration and forget about making peace between the Palestinians and Israel: history has proven the PA and Hamas (which Trump has left out of the equation) want only to destroy Israel.
Those who support him should tell him.
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