A top pro-Israel organization blasted Obama today for suggesting that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is a peacemaker.
Despite Obama’s hollow praise, Abbas has said Hamas and Fatah need not recognize Israel.
The Zionist Organization of America reported:
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s remarks in a Bloomberg interview this week in which he appears to have threatened Israel with isolation and lack of American support if it fails to follow his negotiating dictates, while whitewashing the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s Mahmoud Abbas — who has consistently honored and glorified Jew-killing terrorists, refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, end incitement to hatred and murder or arrest terrorists and ban terrorist groups — as a peacemaker.
The ZOA has issued the following statement:
“The ZOA believes that this interview reflects a long-standing pattern of President Obama’s hostile bias against Israel and indulgence of the unreconstructed Abbas and his terrorist-sponsoring PA regime.
“President Obama spoke of Jewish communities in Judea/Samaria and the false claim of a declining Jewish majority as the causes of the receding of peace prospects — not the PA’s refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, sign a deal that ends the conflict with Israel, implement its signed commitments under the Oslo agreements to outlaw and arrest terrorists and end the incitement to hatred and murder of Jews that suffuses the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps.
“At the same time, President Obama gave a free pass to Mahmoud Abbas, someone who has made no concessions over the five years of the Obama presidency and who has refused to even negotiate with Israel during almost all of that period.
“President Obama seems to be setting the groundwork for blaming Israel for the inevitable diplomatic failure that lies ahead.”…
…President Obama also bestowed unmerited praise on PA president Mahmoud Abbas:
“I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist, to recognize Israel’s legitimate security needs, to shun violence, to resolve these issues in a diplomatic fashion that meets the concerns of the people of Israel.”
This is the free pass President Obama gave Abbas, someone who repeats that he will not accept Israel as a Jewish state; who has confided to Arab journalists that “If [the Arab states] want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor”; who has hailed Jew-killing terrorists as “heroes fighting for freedom”; who as stated that disarming terrorist groups is “red line” that he must never cross; and who has declared that, when there is a Palestinian state, “we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it.”
