 If elections for the Palestinian Authority were somehow held today, the Hamas presidential candidate would win 54% of the vote while Mahmoud Abbas would only get 38%. So you can see why there will be no elections. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is fine with Abbas postponing the elections forever, because otherwise the terror clans will do what they did the last time that Bush naively allowed elections and vote for Hamas. Pictured: Blinken (left) meets with Abbas on May 25, 2021 in Ramallah. (Photo by Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) |
"In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate," said Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, "we would like to welcome Secretary Clinton."
"Blinken," someone corrected him.
"Sorry, Blinken," said the 86-year-old Islamic terrorist leader.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to travel thousands of miles to find a leader even more unpopular and out of it than the one he had left behind at the White House.
That was last year. This year, Abbas got Blinken's name right, but not much else.
In 17 years (and just one election), Abbas has seen a lot of secretaries of state come and go to get their pictures taken with him before sending him a few hundred million dollars.
Last year, Abbas told Blinken that he had "postponed the elections" because of Israel and that the moment he gets his paws on Jerusalem, "we will hold them immediately and without any delay, because ultimately what we're interested in is to establish democracy throughout Palestine." This year they can't be held either, because Abbas still doesn't have Jerusalem.
The last Palestinian Authority presidential election was in 2005. Abbas won. The last parliamentary election was in 2006. Hamas won. The presidential and parliamentary elections have been postponed since then but are expected to resume any time now. If not, blame Israel.
Since elections won't be happening anytime soon, a recent poll reveals that 73% of the "Palestinians" occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip want Abbas to resign.
If elections were somehow held today, the Hamas presidential candidate would win 54% of the vote while Abbas would only get 38%. So you can see why there will be no elections.
Sixty-one percent want to tear up all agreements with Israel (since they haven't kept them, that would be a technicality), 70% don't want to negotiate with Israel and 64% don't even want to negotiate with Biden. Fifty-eight percent oppose the "two-state solution" that is the touchstone of the entire peace process.
Seventy-three percent believe that the Koran predicts that Israel will be destroyed, but only 32% believe it will happen in 2022.
Under these circumstances, the last thing the Biden administration wants is democracy for the quarreling foreign jihadist tribes who invaded Israel over the last few centuries and were rebranded with the name of the European colonists known as the Philistines.
Blinken is fine with Abbas postponing the elections forever, because otherwise the terror clans will do what they did the last time that Bush naively allowed elections and vote for Hamas.
And that would be inconvenient because Hamas won't pretend that they aren't terrorists.
Four Israelis were murdered last week by a Muslim terrorist attack at a mall in Beersheva.
Despite the terrorist's Islamic State membership, a Hamas spokesman praised "the executor of the heroic operation" and promised more "heroic operations: stabbings, ramming and shooting" like the car-ramming and stabbing spree that killed a rabbi who ran a soup kitchen and two mothers of three. So much for the claim that Hamas will inhibit the rise of the "extremists" of ISIS.
P.A. media also hailed the terrorist, Muhammad Abu al-Kiyan, who was shot and killed by an Israeli bus driver who chased him down on foot, as a "martyr." If the P.A. follows its usual "Pay to Slay" policy in this case, it won't just be financially supporting the usual stable of PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad families, but also an ISIS terrorist's family.
And that will mean American taxpayers will end up subsidizing ISIS terrorism in Israel, as the Biden administration explores ways to bypass the Taylor Force Act's ban on terror funding.
At a joint press conference on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Blinken gave a speech mostly blaming Israel for future violence during Passover and Ramadan. That speech was followed by another ISIS attack in which two heavily armed terrorists opened fire on a bus. The Islamic terrorists were taken down by cops who had been eating nearby, but not before they killed two officers.
Hamas celebrated the "valor and courage" of the ISIS terrorists, as did Islamic Jihad.
Hezbollah, backed by Iran, praised the ISIS attack as an "important and most effective practical response to the infamous and treacherous normalization meetings that some Arab regimes are carrying out with the enemy entity," referring to the anti-Iran summit in Israel with the foreign ministers of Bahrain, UAE, Morocco and Egypt.
Iran's pro-Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps outlet, too, praised it as a "martyrdom operation." When it comes to Israel, Iran and ISIS are on the same side. Much as Al-Qaeda and Iran were on the same side when it came to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
Blinken meanwhile used the visit to pitch Israelis on a Biden plan to remove the IRGC, Iran's terror hub, from the list of foreign terrorist organizations, claiming it would be "symbolic."
He failed to condemn the terrorist attack as an ISIS attack, calling it "senseless" violence.
At his joint press conference with Abbas, Blinken also failed to condemn terrorism or to note that ISIS, with the tacit support of his PLO hosts in Ramallah and of Hamas in Gaza, was planting its flag in Israel. Instead, Blinken once again condemned Jewish Israeli "settler violence."
Like Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland's previous visit, the formula of Biden administration officials condemning Israeli "settler violence" while promising to "strengthen" the terrorists of the P.A. is as familiar as it is evil. The P.A. is an unwanted institution whose leader 73% of the people he rules over want to see out of office.
And 49% want to dissolve the Palestinian Authority.
Considering the decades of failure, misery and terrorism wrought by the failed Clinton initiative to create a Palestinian state, it's long past time for everyone to turn the page on this disaster.
Neither Arab Muslims nor Israelis want Abbas or the P.A. Only diplomats like Blinken and Nuland insist on keeping the senile tyrant of Ramallah in office until he dies.
In a final statistic, the poll asked who was "most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people." Thirty-one percent picked Hamas, 29% chose Abbas' P.A., and 33% chose none of the above. Eighty-four percent believe the P.A. is corrupt and 70% believe Hamas is dirty.
The "Palestinian people" have spoken. Will Biden listen to them?
The root source of the corruption is the hundreds of millions of dollars Blinken came bearing last year for the regime of a corrupt, senile autocrat who didn't even know whom he was talking to. There's more money coming this year to prop up the terrorist regime.
All in the name of a peace which doesn't exist and that the majority of "Palestinians" don't want.
The United States has gone from using its foreign aid to the P.A. to prop up PLO, Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorism against Israel to subsidizing ISIS terrorism.
Will ISIS be a final red line for the corrupt farce of a two-state solution and a peace process?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
This article was first published by Frontpage Magazine and is reprinted here by permission of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
