Condemning Manchester Terrorist Murder of Children … in the Company of Abbas By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2017/05/23/condemning-manchester-terrorist-murder-of-children-in-the-company-of-abbas/
No exception to the perennial folly of American administrations, regardless of party, President Trump dreams of forging peace between Israel, our ally in the Western democratic tradition, and the Palestinians, an amalgam of sharia supremacists and hard-Left kleptocrats, for whom the obliteration of the Jewish State is the ne plus ultra. Thus, did the president have the misfortune of being in the company of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when news broke of the terrorist attack targeting children and young adults at a concert in Manchester.
Trump and Abbas stood side-by-side in Bethlehem as the American president condemned the terrorists as “evil losers in life” — “radical Islamic terrorism” having evidently been retired from Trump’s repertoire while he meets with regimes that support radical Islamic terrorism.
Abbas, it bears emphasizing, is an utterly unfit “peace partner.”
Though he still clings to power in the thirteenth year of his four-year term, he does not even control the Palestinian territory — his rival, the Hamas jihadist organization, runs Gaza. His Fatah faction, the legacy of master-terrorist Yasser Arafat, sports its own terrorist wing (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade). It spends much of its time glorifying jihadists who mass-murder Jews, including Jewish children, naming streets and monuments in their honor.
Abbas’s presence during Trump’s remarks about an especially barbaric terrorist attack called to mind a similarly savage incident I described in The Grand Jihad:
In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of terrorists sent by Abu Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of the four shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she’d ever see. Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, bashed in the four-year-old’s skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle.
Hours later, upon finally being “rescued” from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead — accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the terrorists searched for more Jews to kill.
The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. For years, however, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release,lionizing this monster as a “brave leader” and “model warrior.” In 2007, the [Israeli] government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers.
Kuntar was welcomed to the West Bank as a conquering hero. The Palestinian Authority [then as now, led by Abbas] granted him and another released terrorist honorary citizenship “as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic suffering in the occupation’s prisons.”
Besides his work for the Palestine Liberation Front, Kuntar was also a member of Hezbollah and became a celebrated senior official in that terrorist organization — Iran’s forward militia — after his release. He was finally killed in Damascus in 2015, in an operation that was widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli defense forces but for which the Free Syrian Army claimed credit.
My friend Ruthie Blum picks up the story from there at the Algemeiner:
The official Facebook page of the Fatah political faction, headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on Monday lauded Hezbollah official and arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar, assassinated on Saturday night in Damascus, pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon reported.
Fatah uploaded a video clip of a speech Kuntar gave in Lebanon, to coincide with his funeral there on Monday. In the video, Kuntar says, “I returned today from Palestine, but believe me … I am prepared to go back to Palestine.” Among the comments below the posting are sentiments such as, “Allah rest his soul.”
Elder of Ziyon pointed out that this honoring of Kuntar — whom Israel is accused of assassinating — comes not from terrorist organizations, such as Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, but rather from Fatah, considered by the international community to be moderate, two-state-solution-seekers.
“This is an extreme case where every civilized person must be appalled by a terrorist who took credit for killing a four-year-old child,” said Dr. Dan Schueftan, director of the National Security Studies Center at Haifa University.
Schueftan, an expert on Mideast affairs, was referring to Kuntar’s particularly heinous slaughter of an Israeli family in Nahariya in 1979, when he was 16 years old.
But, Schueftan told The Algemeiner, “It turns out that nothing is too low or too barbaric — even for the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement — to adulate when it comes to killing innocent Jews. Though Fatah at the moment is reluctant to use massive terrorism, for fear of Israeli counter-measures, it still educates its public to call a child-murderer a hero and a saint.”
Peace partner? I’m thinking: evil loser.
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