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The President’s Moral Equivalence in the Face of Palestinian Terror

Oct. 23 2015

The White House has responded to the wave of terror in Israel with tepid and ambiguous statements, condemning Israel’s “excessive” use of force, claiming that both sides are responsible, and urging both Israel and the Palestinians to “tamp down the violence.” Victor Davis Hanson sees such comments as symptoms of a larger problem:

[T]he present U.S. government—which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. . . .

[Meanwhile], President Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. . . . Amid the collapse of American power, [Mahmoud] Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed Obama’s pronouncements—from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so-private slapdowns of Netanyahu—and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.” . . .

The Obama administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all of the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature. . . . The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular—and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.

Read more at National Review

More about: Barack Obama, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian terror, Politics & Current Affairs, Postmodernism, US-Is

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic