Finally, an appropriate 9/11 commemoration: Trump Administration kicks terrorist PLO out of Washington

I’ve been writing this for many years, and often I catch heat for it because people think I’m saying we should “forget” 9/11. I’m not saying that at all. But for a long time – I think the first time I wrote it was all the way back in 2003 – I’ve believed the solemn, somber ceremonies every September 11 represented exactly the wrong spirit. I did not want any more sad recitations of the names of the lost, along with church bell chimes or moments of silence or whatever it was that we did. I didn’t want to see politicians standing there looking sad. I didn’t want to hear any more stories of the horror, the carnage – or even the valor.

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We were letting the terrorists set our agenda for a day of the year, every single year, and I hated it. I didn’t want us to stand there on cue and be sad. Would we do this on this day every year, forever? Bow our heads? Recite poems? Play Taps? No. If we did anything, I wanted us to go find some terrorists and kick their ******* asses, to remind them of the price they will pay if they ever try anything like that again. This has often brought me anger from people who think what I’m suggesting dishonors the dead. But I don’t think it does. I think the dead, if they could tell us, would tell us to stop acting all sad and pathetic and go destroy these people. That why I supported, and still support, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld War on Terror. It was the right thing to do. The nation lost its nerve for the fight, which is too bad because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld never did. We failed them, they didn’t fail us. But I will take, as a rare appropriate 9/11 commemoration, what the Trump Administration did yesterday. In a long overdue move (and yes, Bush Administration, you blew this too), the Palestine Liberation Organization has been kicked out of its Washington office. If the PLO is going to continue perpetrating its anti-Israel nonsense, it’s not going to do it from our nation’s capital anymore:

The Administration announced Monday that it is closing the PLO’s Washington office, citing lack of progress on peace negotiations. The PLO began as a terrorist organization but was allowed to open an office in Washington in 1994 after the Oslo accords produced hope for a new era of reconciliation between the PLO and Israel.

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That hope has never been fulfilled, notably since the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat began the second intifada after walking away from the historic and generous Israeli peace offer brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000. Long-term indulgence of the PLO’s recalcitrance has had the effect of allowing a toxic and reflexive anti-Israel sentiment to build in international institutions, not least among academics and students on U.S. campuses. The Trump Administration has tried to revive the Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it has also shown less tolerance for Palestinian resistance. Last November Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas used his speech at the United Nations to call for the investigation and prosecution of Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Trump Administration said then that the PLO’s Washington office was at risk of closure. Mr. Abbas’s call for an investigation of Israel by the ICC was consciously provocative, and the PLO’s Washington office would have known that. The U.S. Congress said in 2015—before Donald Trump became President—that the Secretary of State was required to certify that the PLO wasn’t trying to use the ICC against Israel.

The PLO has actually been trying to do exactly that, urging the completely illegitimate ICC to arrest Israeli officials on the grounds that they’re guilty of some international crime or something. That may be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there’s been plenty of reason for more than four decades to believe the PLO is nothing but a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel.

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That was never proven more definitively than in 2000, when the Israelis offered Yasser Arafat just about everything he’d ever demanded in exchange for peace, only to have Arafat walk away and order new attacks. That’s because even when the PLO is masquerading as a legitimate political organization negotiating terms of peace, it’s objective is never really peace. It’s always to set Israel up by leaving it as vulnerable as possible for the ultimate attack that will bring the Jewish state to its knees. That Republican and Democrat administrations have for so long indulged the illusion that the PLO wants anything other than this is an utter embarrassment to the United States, and it’s a pretty good example of how and why Donald Trump became president. To close the loop back to 9/11, one image I will never forget from that day was someone catching up with Arafat, who feigned shock and repeated over and over again, “Unbelievable, unbelievable.” And a naive world took that to mean . . . in a bad way. He was Yasser Arafat. That was not how he meant it.

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