By Shoula Romano Horing
In a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a U.S. Capitol ceremony hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, President Trump denounced Holocaust deniers as “an accomplice to this horrible evil” and Holocaust denial as one form of “dangerous anti-Semitism that continues all around the world,” and that can be seen “when aggressors threaten Israel with total and complete destruction.”
As an Israeli and a supporter of Trump, I applaud these heartfelt words but remain confused as to why, within one week of uttering these words, Trump is scheduled, on May 3, to meet at the White House the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas who is himself an infamous Holocaust denier. In 1982 Mr. Abbas argued in his Ph.D. dissertation that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and incited violence against the Jews living under Nazi rule to spur more Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Why would Trump honor the Palestinian president, who is the cofounder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and modern Islamic terrorism, and who was second in command to the notorious Yasser Arafat, whose sole purpose was the total and complete destruction of the Jewish state?
Why does President Trump believe that peace is possible with the head of the Palestinian Authority, who in 2010 instituted government regulations stipulating that the amount paid to terrorists’ families would be on the sliding scale, with the highest payments going to those who proved the most brutal in murdering Jews?
Why will Trump discuss a peace deal with Abbas who sponsored a new 2016-17 Palestinian curriculum, including textbooks teaching children to be suicide bombers and denying the existence of the Jewish state?
The time has arrived for Mahmoud Abbas not to be invited by Western governments or treated as a legitimate, civilized leader but to be held responsible by Israel and the United States for his involvement in the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and his long history of sponsoring terror and inciting and indoctrinating his own people, including children, to anti-Israel and anti-American hatred and martyrdom.
In the autobiography of former PLO official Muhammad Daoud Oddeh, published in France in 1999, he wrote that he recalled that the plan to murder the Israeli athletes was concocted in Rome at a meeting he held with senior PLO officials including Mahmoud Abbas, who was responsible for securing the funding for the massacre.
For many years, the U.S. government, the West and the media have chosen to play a preposterous game of presenting Abbas as the new, credible and moderate Palestinian leader whom Israel and the West could trust to at last bring peace through negotiations.
But President Trump should know that words are meaningless in the Middle East, and leaders do not change. Donald Trump should be aware that in reality Abbas has walked away from previous peace deals offered by different Israeli governments under the sponsorship of different American presidents.
Abbas was second in command to Arafat when the Palestinian Authority rejected Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital in the year 2000. After the death of Arafat in 2004, Abbas became the chairman of the Fatah branch and the PLO, and as president of the PA he rejected an offer of peace made this time by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008 and again a proposed framework for a peace agreement offered by President Obama in the spring of 2014, and chose instead to form a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas.
As a great negotiator, President Trump should be aware that appeasing and honoring Abbas while pressuring Israel will simply encourage him to further bad behavior. After Trump personally invited Abbas to the White House, he, among many other actions encouraging terrorism, failed to condemn the murdering of a 21-year-old British theology student in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist on Good Friday and rewarded the terrorist with a salary of more than $1,000 dollars a month.
In his Holocaust Memorial speech, Trump said, “We will never, ever be silent in the face of evil again.” When Trump meets Abbas in the White House, he should be aware that despite the expensive suit, conciliatory words, soft tone of voice and mild, grandfatherly manners, Abbas has been and is the face of evil.
Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli born and raised. She has lived in the United States since 1980 and in Kansas City since 1982. Horing is an attorney, a university law professor, a radio talk-show host, a national speaker and politically conservative. Since 1993, she has written over 100 op-eds, which were published by Ynetnews, American Thinker, Jewish Press, The Kansas City Star and KC Jewish chronicle. She blogs at www.shoularomanohoring.com.
