https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/mahmoud-abbas-hosts-american-delegation-ramallah-hugh-fitzgerald/
Joe Biden will be visiting the Middle East this July, but what he hopes this will accomplish — other than allowing him to be seen to be doing something about the Middle East other than appeasing Iran in Vienna – is unclear. He will no doubt be repeating the Bidenites’ new mantra, that both Israelis and Palestinians “deserve equal measures of freedom, security & prosperity.” By way of preparing the ground for Biden’s visit, an American delegation met with Mahmoud Abbas on June 11. A report on the meeting is here: “Palestinian Authority President Hosts US Delegation in Ramallah,” Algemeiner, June 12, 2022:
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas hosted Saturday a US delegation led by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf, ahead of an expected visit of US President Joe Biden.
Abbas reiterated his requests to remove the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the US list of terrorist entities during the meeting, his office said.
The PLO is not only a terrorist entity, but the earliest of Palestinian terror groups, spreading murder and mayhem ever since its founding in 1964, years before the PFLP (1967), Hamas (1987), and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (1987) existed. The fact that the PLO has in recent decades been overshadowed by other terror groups, especially Hamas, does not mean that it has forsworn terrorism as a tactic, but only that it has been less active than other groups. It was morally intolerable that the PLO was ever allowed to open a Washington office, in the naïve aftermath of the Oslo Accords, when Washington was prepared to believe the assurances of the PLO’s leader, Yasir Arafat, that the organization now abjured terrorism. It was, like every other statement by Arafat, a lie. The PLO continued to praise and promote terrorist attacks; right up to the present, it has never denounced any of them. Yet in his insensate desire to appease the Palestinians, Joe Biden promised, as a presidential candidate, to reopen the PLO office in Washington that Trump had closed in 2017.