http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425707/print The Obama Intifada
By Matthew Continetti — October 17, 2015
More than 30 dead in Israel as Palestinians armed with knives attack innocents. What’s responsible? A campaign of incitement, which slanderously accuses Jews of intruding on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and murdering Arab children in cold blood.
And who is legitimizing this campaign? None other than Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whom President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have long held up as a peacemaker. “I think nobody would dispute that whatever disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who has committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue,” Obama told writer Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014.
That’s a strange view of commitment. This is the same Abbas, remember, who rejected then–Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s absurdly generous 2008 peace offer. The same Abbas who resisted negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the ten-month settlement freeze in 2010, which Obama demanded explicitly on the grounds that it would give Abbas the cover he needed to begin talks. Abbas finally relented to Saudi pressure and attended a few meetings with Netanyahu that September. But under no definition of what the word “negotiation” actually means were these meetings for real: The freeze was about to expire, the get-togethers were perfunctory, and nothing of significance was discussed. The farce ended soon after.
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