Abbas curses President Trump By David Zukerman
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the fourth year of his four-year term, delivered a speech to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization that directs a curse at President Trump, insults the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, and denies that Israel has anything to do with Judaism.. The New York Times responded that Abbas “shied away from urging the kind of provocative acts, like ending the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel or disbanding the authority itself, that could raise the costs of occupation for Israel and shake officials in Jerusalem and Washington.”
Many Google sources on the speech included the curse that Abbas directed at President Trump: “‘may your house be demolished.” ABC News included the curse and also a call from the PLO to suspend recognition of Israel and end security cooperation with the Jewish state.
The Times acknowledged that Abbas “attacked” President Trump for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, along with David Friedman, U.S. ambassador to the Jewish state, and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. It did not provide readers with the language of the curse, which drew laughter from Abbas’s audience, according to media reports. At the Times, attacks on President Trump and members of his administration apparently are not to be considered “provocative acts.”
The Times also reported that Abbas indicated he would never meet with Ambassador Friedman. Curiously, Abbas missed the chance to bolster his attack on Friedman by way of the Times, which, in a December 16, 2016 editorial, called Friedman “A Dangerous Choice for Ambassador to Israel.” The Times also quoted Abbas’s comment that Palestinian reaction to administration policy on Jerusalem would “be worse, but not with high heels.” It is not to be expected that Abbas will be cited by the Times for making a provocative “sexist” comment.
The Times further reported that Abbas, in the course of his two-hour speech, “delivered broadsides against Hamas, other Arab leaders[,] and Britain.”
It is not clear why the Times omitted the anti-Trump curse from its account of the Abbas speech (whose complete text seems to have not yet been posted on the internet). After all, would a Times columnist like Charles M. Blow have difficulty with the curse directed at President Trump?
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