RUTHFULLY YOURS

Solomon Yahya was born in Yemen in 1915. He worked as a gardener for forty years in Israel. Even long after retirement he continued doing the work that he loved. A month before the Madrid Conference at which Israel was forced to negotiate with the PLO, he was stabbed to death in a public park.

He was 76 years old.

Solomon had escaped Muslim persecution in Yemen, where the last remaining Jews live in a ghetto, only to be murdered by a Muslim terrorist in his own country.

At the end of last year, Solomon’s murderer, Abu Mohsin Khaled Ibrahim Jamal, was freed by Israel as a “confidence-building” measure to bring Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to the negotiating table.

Most of the prisoners released along with Solomon’s murderer had also killed civilians; their victims included Steven Rosenfeld, an American immigrant, a mother of seven and a history professor.

The release of the murderers, negotiated by Kerry, was praised by a State Department spokeswoman as “a positive step forward.”

Mahmoud Abbas appeared together with Solomon’s murderer as well as two other killers and called them heroes and their release “a day of our joy for our nation.”

During his visit last year, Obama had told a handpicked Israeli audience, “I genuinely believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas.” Obama’s true partner refused to even show up for peace negotiations until the murderer of a 76-year-old gardener was released.

And Obama and Kerry backed Abbas’ demands.

In an interview this week before Netanyahu’s latest visit, Obama said that Abbas is “ sincere about his willingness… to shun violence” and claimed that “this is a rare quality not just within the Palestinian territories, but in the Middle East generally.”

Abbas had been Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority for a decade and President of the Palestinian Authority since 2005. He has been negotiating with Israel for over two decades and yet the most that Obama can say is that Abbas is willing to shun violence at some point in the future.

Meanwhile the Chairman of the PLO possessed of that “rare quality” of sincerely shunning violence has continued overseeing a war against Israel.

The State Departments lists the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a wing of Abbas’ Fatah party, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization for its multiple suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Abbas owes his political power in part to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade which had endorsed his candidacy at a crucial point.

A year ago, Abbas had pledged to continue in the path of two leaders of Hamas, the head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and George Habash of the PFLP. Abbas had called Hitler’s Mufti, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who encouraged Hitler to carry out the Holocaust, one of the first pioneers of the Palestinian revolution.

But Obama continued singing Abbas’ praises, “You’ve got a partner on the other side who is prepared to negotiate seriously, who does not engage in some of the wild rhetoric that so often you see in the Arab world when it comes to Israel… for us to not seize this moment I think would be a great mistake.”

Meanwhile around the time of Obama’s visit last year, Abbas had told Russia Today, “As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”

Abbas insists that he has the same policies as Hamas. Who is Obama to disagree with Abbas’ self-assessment?

While Abbas is canny enough to refrain from Ahmadinejad’s tantrums, his regime maintains a tight grip on the media which describes Jews as pigs, monkeys and rats. Calls for violence are constant and this is not mere rhetoric but linked to the training and celebration of terrorists as the Palestinian Authority commemorates the death of terrorists, their release from prison and exhorts its youth to imitate them.

The Palestinian Authority isn’t really an embryonic state so much as it is an oversized employment agency for terrorists spending much of its budget on paying the salaries of terrorists on the loose and in prison. Terrorists and their families live in special housing and enjoy a variety of benefits in a system that encourages, executes and rewards the terrorism that is its only real identity

Abbas has chosen to stop running for office. The elected legislature hasn’t sat in a long time. Instead decisions are made by the PLO Council exposing the fact that the Palestinian Authority is just the PLO.

In his current interview, Obama said, “Abbas is getting older, and I think nobody would dispute that whatever disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who has been committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue.”

if Abbas were prepared to “negotiate seriously,” he wouldn’t need to be bribed to come to the negotiating table, bribed again at the negotiating table and then bribed to come back to the negotiating table after stomping out over some manufactured crisis

During his visit last year, Obama had said that, “Peace will have to be made among peoples, not just governments… The days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders are over.”

A year later, Obama is disavowing his own words and urging Israel to seize the opportunity to negotiate a peace treaty with an aging autocrat on the tenth year of a four year term.

If Israel doesn’t seize the opportunity to reach an agreement with the 78-year-old Abbas, who has lived two years longer than Solomon Yahya, then we are supposed to believe that peace is all but doomed.

With this argument, Obama admits implicitly that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank don’t want peace. If they did, they never would have voted for Hamas. The Palestinian Authority isn’t told to seize an opportunity with Barak or Netanyahu. The diplomats are confident that any Israeli Prime Minister will negotiate because a real country is more than the sum of its leaders.

The same isn’t true of the Palestinian Authority. In a poll, 87.7% of Palestinian Arabs agreed that Hamas terrorism was the best way to achieve independence. 70% do not believe that peace talks will work.

Obama doesn’t want to discuss that 87.7% and instead pimps an elderly terrorist leader who is more interested in helping his older son retain his monopoly on cigarettes in the West Bank and his younger son cash in on USAID money than doing anything that would destabilize the comfortable status quo—such as making peace with Israel.

Abbas isn’t Israel’s peace partner. He hasn’t even been able to make peace with other Palestinian leaders. Like every other terrorist leader, he perpetuates a war against Israel to cash in on the conflict.

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