Our Friends?
Perhaps it was President Clinton’s attempt to encourage industry in Gaza. It was, in any event, a Palestinian flag maker’s dream. Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags during demonstrations; so an industry has grownup to supply the mobs. When President Clinton visited Gaza, the flag makers went into overdrive to produce enough American flags to drape from the Parliament and hand out to the crowds. Nary a one was burned. Facing an oversupply of American flags, the flag makers worried about a slump in sales.
Perhaps it was President Clinton’s attempt to encourage industry in Gaza. It was, in any event, a Palestinian flag maker’s dream. Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags during demonstrations; so an industry has grownup to supply the mobs. When President Clinton visited Gaza, the flag makers went into overdrive to produce enough American flags to drape from the Parliament and hand out to the crowds. Nary a one was burned. Facing an oversupply of American flags, the flag makers worried about a slump in sales. So the President ordered the bombing of Iraq, drawing thousands of Palestinians into the streets to burn up the inventory.
OK, that part was (mostly) tongue-in-cheek, but little else seems to account either for the bombing or the burning. This next part is quite serious.
Nothing accounts for the shabby treatment accorded to long-term friends of the United States while people with the ashes of American flags on their hands – led by people with American blood on their hands – continue to receive our blessings and our money. According to reports on five PA TV stations and two PA radio stations, thousands of Palestinians rioted for two days to support Iraq and protest the American bombing raids. “Can’t show that around the world,” said the PA so they shut down the media. The US had a similar thought, according to Agence France Presse, “The United States has insisted the Palestinian Authority rein in violent protests as part of the US-brokered Wye River peace accord.”
We expect a knee-jerk repressive reaction by the PA. But the US is absolutely wrong to insist that the Palestinians stop demonstrating. The fact that the PA doesn’t want us to see it is precisely why the American media should flood the airwaves with the freely expressed opinions of the Palestinian people. Our President went to Gaza, blessed the children of murderers and showered $400 million on a corrupt and venal authority that stole and wasted tens of millions of aid dollars. It is time for America to understand what the Palestinian man-rioting-in-the-street thinks of our country and its policies. The real face of the Palestinian people is anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, pro-Saddam, violent and radical. Show it and know it.
No doubt the American people would understand better than the President did. Israel’s Arutz Sheva reported:
Clinton (was) shown on worldwide television comforting little girls whose Arab terrorist fathers are incarcerated in Israeli prisons. Clinton told one girl, “Your father would be proud of you.” Later, he told the Palestinian gathering of VIPs in Gaza: “I’ve had two profoundly emotional experiences in the last less than 24 hours. I was with Chairman Arafat and four little children came to see me whose fathers are in Israeli prisons. Last night, I met some little children whose fathers had been killed in conflict with Palestinians, at the dinner that Prime Minister Netanyahu had for me. Those children brought tears to my eyes. We have to find a way for both sets of children to get their lives back and to go forward. (Applause)… If I had met them in reverse order I would not have known which ones were Israeli and which Palestinian. If they had all been lined up in a row and I had seen their tears, I could not tell whose father was dead and whose father was in prison, or what the story of their lives were, making up the grief that they bore… (Applause)”
One Israeli journalist knew the difference. “The detained fathers of the Palestinian children murdered the fathers of the Israeli orphans. The Palestinian children visit their fathers in prison; the Israel children visit the cemeteries.”