The following is an excerpt taken from the new book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1746710590956000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3mFFTED3ygh0ikPBCW2jlP">American Intifada: </a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1746710590956000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3mFFTED3ygh0ikPBCW2jlP">Israel, the Gaza War and the new Antisemitism</a>,&#8221; by Uri Kaufman. (Republic Book Publishers/Simon &amp; Schuster, April 29, 2025)
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<h3>Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, and a Tale of Two Peace Processes</h3>
Prime Minister Netanyahu assumed office on June 18, 1996, and immediately set out to do the job the Israeli public elected him to do. When forced to choose, Rabin and Peres always made sure the cart was in front of the horse. First, one had to implement the two-state solution, and then Israel would (hopefully) get security. Under Netanyahu, the cart and the horse were put back into their rightful places. First, Israel had to get security, and then he would implement the two-state solution. In Netanyahu’s words, “One of the key goals in my first term as prime minister was to change the Palestinian perception that ‘terrorism pays’ to ‘terrorism doesn’t pay.’ I did this by insisting on security and reciprocity.”<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a>
He was tested almost immediately. On September 24, 1996, Netanyahu gave authorization to unseal the door to a tunnel that ran along the outer rim of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The door was nowhere near any mosque and opened into the Christian Quarter of the Old City. But Arafat, a human mushroom cloud, ordered his men to go on the attack using the very guns the Israelis had given them as part of the Oslo Accords, ostensibly to fight terrorism.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> By the time the mini-war ended, seventeen Israelis and about a hundred Palestinians were dead.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a>
Thousands of wars have been fought since mankind became cognizant of territory and the desire to control it — none were started over a door. Admittedly, this wasn’t just any door, just as the Wailing Wall isn’t just any wall. But for its American and Israeli champions, the peace process was supposed to be the forum for settling disputes, not the battlefield.
Clinton Administration officials blamed Netanyahu.
<div id="attachment_917131" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-917131" class="wp-image-917131 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-407x576.jpg" alt="Cover Design: Jim Villaflores. Republic Book Publishers" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-07-May-2025-11-37-AM-2988-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" /></a>Cover Design: Jim Villaflores. Republic Book Publishers</div>
They called for a summit where they demanded that Netanyahu make concessions. When he resisted, Clinton went into a dark rage so loud it could be heard in the next room. In the words of Dennis Ross, “Arafat now knew that Bibi was the desperate one.”<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> Violence was thus not only tolerated — it was rewarded.
When a semblance of security was eventually restored, Netanyahu advanced the peace process. He agreed to not one but two interim withdrawals — the Hebron Accords and the Wye River Memorandum — but he steadfastly insisted that progress be conditioned on Arafat fighting terrorism. American officials were outraged. After Netanyahu demanded that Arafat arrest thirteen suspected terrorists, Clinton “exploded,” according to Ross, who wrote bemusedly that he was “struck by [Netanyahu’s] belief that&#8230;he was the victim of mistreatment.”<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> On another occasion, Ross writes that the Clinton Administration saw Bibi’s complaints over a bombing as “an excuse to avoid negotiations” and that Bibi was “killing any prospect of peace.”<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a>
Meanwhile, the stubborn insistence on that which is most basic in a peace process — namely peace — paid off for ordinary Israelis. During the long, seemingly unending terror campaign that defined the Oslo Peace Process, the lowest loss of life occurred during the premiership of Netanyahu. Only one Israeli died per month on his watch. For Peres, the figures were seven and a half times worse.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a>
<div id="attachment_917179" style="width: 883px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-917179" class="size-large wp-image-917179" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-1147679-873x576.jpg" alt="President Clinton (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sit on a deck along the banks of the Wye River at the Wye River Plantation where peace talks continue between Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the third straight day at the secluded Maryland site October 18, 1998. (photo by White House)" width="873" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-1147679-873x576.jpg 873w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-1147679-300x198.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-1147679-768x507.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-1147679.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 873px) 100vw, 873px" />President Clinton (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sit on a deck along the banks of the Wye River in Maryland, October 18, 1998. (photo by White House)</div>
The Wye agreement — which required a sizeable withdrawal from West Bank territory by the Israelis — proved Netanyahu’s commitment to the peace process, at least while Israeli buses and pizzerias weren’t being blown to bits. Signed on October 23, 1998, it caused his right-wing coalition partners to bring down the government and trigger early elections.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a> By now, the Israeli public felt safer and, thus, more willing to take chances for peace. On May 17, 1999, Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu in a historic landslide. At the time, it was the widest margin ever scored by an Israeli challenger over an incumbent.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a>
The Israeli peace camp was jubilant. One left-wing activist said it was as if they had been freed from a foreign occupation.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a> The great obstacle to peace was removed — now they could finalize a deal with the Palestinians. The cart was finally back in front of the horse.
What happened next was probably inevitable. Barak formed his pro-peace government in July; Palestinian terrorists murdered three Israelis in August.<a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a> Through it all, Washington pressed the Israelis to continue the peace process and all the interim withdrawals that it entailed.<a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a>
To halt the transfer of territory to the Palestinians and end the talks would “give the terrorists what they wanted.” Israel’s intelligence service issued a classified report in late 1999 predicting that Arafat would go to war because Jerusalem would be blamed for it one way or the other.<a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a>
* * *
Uri Kaufman is the author of  &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1746710590956000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3mFFTED3ygh0ikPBCW2jlP">American Intifada: </a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/American-Intifada-Israel-Gaza-Antisemitism/dp/1645721043&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1746710590956000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3mFFTED3ygh0ikPBCW2jlP">Israel, the Gaza War and the new Antisemitism.</a>&#8221; His work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, The Independent, and numerous other publications. He lives in Lawrence, New York with his wife and four children.
This excerpt is published by permission from Republic Book Publishers/Simon &amp; Schuster.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
* * *
<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
<a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> See, e.g., The New York Times, February 7, 2023, p. A5; October 26, 2022, p. A4.
<a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> The New York Times, December 26, 2021, p. 4.
<a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> “Hamas In Its Own Words,” ADL website, January 10, 2024, https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/hamas-its-own-words.
<a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Ambassador Mark A. Green, “Hamas: Words and Deeds&#8230;,” The Wilson Center, October 24, 2023, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/hamas-words-and-deeds.
<a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> “The Truth Is Hard” brand campaign for New York Times, Droga5, https://droga5.com/work/the-new-york-times-truth-is-worth-it/.
<a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Alessandra Stanley, “A Terrorist, Plain-Spoken and Cold,” The New York Times, April 18, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/arts/television/19mcveigh.html?searchResultPosition=5.
<a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> The New York Times, April 20, 2019, p. D6.
<a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> The New York Times, July 23, 2023, p. 8.
<a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> Jeremy Scahill et al, “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” The Intercept, February 28, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/.
<a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> Dionne Searcey, “They Ordered Her to Be a Suicide Bomber. She Had Another Idea,” The New York Times, March 13, 2020, <a href="https://www.nytimes">https://www.nytimes</a>.com/2020/03/13/world/africa/Nigeria-Boko-Haram-bomber.html.
<a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> See, e.g., “U.S. Confirms Yemen Killing of Terrorist,” The New York Times, February 7, 2020, p. A7.
<a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> “CNN anchor Amanpour apologizes for calling terror attack on Dee family a ‘shootout,’” The Times of Israel, May 23, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/cnn-anchor-amanpour-apologizes-for-calling-terror-attack-on-dee-family-a-shootout/.
<a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> Avnery, Optimi II, p. 64

President Clinton with Netanyahu and Arafat

Clinton Vs. Netanyahu: How Peace And Terror Collided In The 1990s

Benjamin Netanyahu

Bill Clinton

Books

Congress

Israel

Jerusalem

Jews

Middle East

Muslims

Yasser Arafat

History has an interesting way of softening the hard edges of a past president’s term of office. Time, combined with more information coming to light as well as a more complete verdict re: the long-term impacts, good and bad, of policies will do that. As such, the placement along the scale of best to worst of those who sat in the Oval Office is always shifting.
But 39th President James Earl Carter, Jr., who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jimmy-carter-americas-39th-president-dead-at-100?topStoryPosition=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">passed away</a> at age 100, is a presidency difficult to encapsulate. Peruse the media obituaries and a common theme will no doubt emerge. That he was a man of personal character and decency, the “real deal.” Indeed, his will be hailed as “the ideal former-presidency” given his image of skating above politics and keeping his focus on initiatives more beneficial to mankind, whether it be building a house for the poor or monitoring elections abroad. It will be said of him that he lived out his Christian virtues staying faithful to the same woman for 77 years.
But this does not alter the fact that his term in office from 1977 to 1981 was, to put it bluntly, a failure.
From a foreign policy standpoint, Carter attempted to affect statecraft grounded in the promotion of “human rights”. But what many in this country at the time may have seen as noble ambitions, especially coming in the aftermath of Vietnam, was read by enemies abroad as weakness arising from an almost quaint naiveté. This perceived weakness gained validation when in November 1979 anti-American Islamists overthrew the Shah of Iran and stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran — sovereign U.S. territory as per international law. 52 embassy staff were taken hostage and subsequently held in very public and humiliating captivity for 444 days.
<div id="attachment_851055" style="width: 862px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-851055" class="size-large wp-image-851055" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-2669616-852x576.jpg" alt="An American hostage being paraded before the cameras by his Iranian captors. Following the Iranian revolution over fifty American hostages were taken and only released after four hundred and forty-four days. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)" width="852" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-2669616-852x576.jpg 852w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-2669616-300x203.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-2669616-768x519.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-2669616.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 852px) 100vw, 852px" />MPI/Getty Images</div>
This affront to our national honor was made ever more acute when six months into the crisis, after fruitless diplomatic overtures, a mission to rescue the captive U.S. citizens resulted in a humiliating failure in the Iranian desert. The mission was scrubbed due to equipment breakdowns and eight servicemen were killed when a helicopter collided with a transport plane during the evacuation. Images of the charred bodies of our dead troops were splashed across headlines around the world, and a somber Carter took to the airwaves to accept responsibility.
The botched raid was not just a shameful blow to our national pride, it underscored a deeper sense that U.S. power was eroding, and that our best days were behind us. The military that once defeated the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan couldn’t even get out of its own way in the desert? Maybe we really were in decline? The hostages would languish for all the world to see — and the anti-U.S. forces from Moscow to Beijing to Tehran to gloat over — for another 270 hapless days.
When in 1980 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Carter’s boycotting the Olympic games in Moscow seemed a tepid, and largely symbolic response that only served to punish our own athletes while not changing Russian actions one iota. Whether or not there was more the Carter administration could have done given the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal is a matter for round tables to discuss. At the time, however, this was viewed as yet another anemic response to flagrant enemy aggression; Americans came to believe we had a lamb in the White House when a lion was needed. And as not-so-clandestine support for the Mujahadeen throughout the Reagan era demonstrated, the U.S. did have more capacity to put the thumb on the scales in the region than Carter seemed willing to do.
The thing about Carter, however, is that not only was he unable, or unwilling to recognize certain bad actors on the world stage, he failed to understand who were the true friends to the U.S. as well. One must consider his double-standard leveled against Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians. In particular the PLO, which by any impartial definition was a terror organization. And its leader, the vile, murderous kleptocrat Yasser Arafat, a bona fide terrorist. It was the Israelis, however, whom Carter targeted for restrictions and even grotesquely drew an analogy between their efforts to combat terrorism and the growling hounds of Bull Connor. Certainly if the recollections of respected columnist William Safire and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance are to be believed, Carter was rabidly anti-Israel. For the Israelis, it was very fortunate Carter did not win a second term.
But what about the Camp David Accords? Certainly they were a worthy effort and seem to be among the only such accords between ancient enemies that have survived more or less intact. But, as Jay Nordlinger writes in National Review, Sadat and Begin had already hammered them out prior to inviting Carter in to provide the carapace of legitimacy — and financial support — only the U.S. could offer. It is not a stretch to say that no matter who was president, Camp David would have still occurred.
<div id="attachment_851047" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-851047" class="size-large wp-image-851047" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-1826042-864x576.jpg" alt="WASHINGTON - SEPTEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) (L-R) Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin join hands after the Camp David Accords September 18, 1978 in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-1826042-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-1826042-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-1826042-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-1826042.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images</div>
At least the Carter presidency promoted the legitimate democratic process, right? Well, it did in that he even went so far as to praise Yasser Arafat’s election. Indeed, Carter was perhaps the PLO chairman’s biggest fan in the halls of the U.S. government. Although as CIA director Jim Woolsey once joked, “Arafat was essentially ’elected’ the same way Stalin was, but not nearly as democratically as Hitler, who at least had actual opponents.”
And, of course, given Carter’s wish to be remembered as the champion of the downtrodden and oppressed (although it depends on who is wearing the jackboots, as Carter seemed to have a look-the-other-way affinity for Marxist dictators whether in Beijing, Havana, or Managua) then it is natural that he would side with the weaker, if morally depraved, Hamas and Hezbollah. As his Bull Connor comparison shows, he would be quite at home today among the throngs of Intifada wannabes on the college campus who view the Arab-Israeli conflict not through the lens of morality but power. In 2014, Carter wrote of Hamas: “Only by recognizing its legitimacy as a political actor—one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people—can the West begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons.” Seems a bit optimistic since October 7. Even though the body may change, the intransigent mind of the true believer may remain fixed in place,but this is the disastrous Carter naiveté in the main.
And then there was the economy.
Since the mid-1980s, even with the occasional recession (often of our own making) the U.S. has experienced a sustained economic boom that makes it hard to remember the years leading up to this age of prosperity. But when Carter was in office things were quite different. The middle class especially was hammered with inflation that surged from <a href="https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet">6.3%</a> in November 1976 when Carter was elected to a peak of <a href="https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet">13.6%</a> in June 1980. Rising interest rates saw 30-year mortgages balloon from 8.8% in November 1976 to briefly touch 18.44% in October 1981, only months into Reagan’s first term. Although there is a lingering misconception that unemployment also soared during the Carter years the data shows this is not the case. In fact, unemployment would not peak until 1983, well into Reagan’s first term. But this could be attributed to Fed policies to crush inflation with exorbitantly high rates leading to a deep recession that had a delayed effect.
I admit that such wonkish analysis gets into the weeds of economics and as the expression goes, “if you lay every economist foot-to-head around the world they couldn’t reach a consensus.” But what is certainly true is that during the Carter years, the “<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/miseryindex.asp">misery index</a>”, economist Arthur Okun’s formula he created in the 1970s to quantify the true impacts of the economy’s performance on the lives of the average American, reached an all-time high of 21.3% in May 1980. (By contrast it currently runs at 7.2%).
As such, the most powerful argument his GOP opponent Ronald Reagan would make during the 1980 presidential campaign was simply to look into the camera and ask the American people: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The voters answered and Carter was defeated.
<div id="attachment_851051" style="width: 837px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-851051" class="size-large wp-image-851051" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-487170453-827x576.jpg" alt="NEW YORK CITY - AUGUST 14: Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter attend Democratic National Convention on August 14, 1980 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)" width="827" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-487170453-827x576.jpg 827w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-487170453-300x209.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-487170453-768x535.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/12/GettyImages-487170453.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 827px) 100vw, 827px" />Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter attend Democratic National Convention on August 14, 1980 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)</div>
The common narrative of Carter’s post-presidential years is that of the farmer who returned to his humble roots in Plains, Georgia, and lived a modest life that all ex-presidents should emulate.
Well, yes and no.
Carter’s work in founding the Carter Center, a non-profit dedicated to the advancement of human rights, as well as his hands-on (literally) involvement building homes for the poor with the Habitat For Humanity project has earned him justified accolades from across the political spectrum. But at the same time he did his share of meddling in U.S. affairs, and sometimes questionably so. While in 1990 George W. Bush was cobbling together his Gulf War coalition, Carter was writing letters to the UN trying to thwart his efforts. Given that his friend Arafat sided with Saddam, one is not surprised. But considering the media’s pouncing on Trump for just weighing in (while a candidate for president no less) on the Democrats’ sham border bill, one can only see a double-standard here. There are other examples but this is the most egregious. One thing is for sure, had Trump engaged in such behavior the word “treason” would be tossed around like a football on Sunday.
And so Jimmy Carter’s story is really one compiled of two narratives. Unfortunately, being a supposedly good man (I never met him ) does not always lead to being a successful president. No man is a saint to his valet, and Carter is no exception. I have no doubt many reading this can offer up less favorable language for him. Who am I to judge? But Carter’s legacy after some five decades in politics from Georgia governor to one-term president, is starting to reveal itself, warts and all. In the end, Jimmy Carter should be remembered for leading a successful life, but a failed presidency.
* * *
Brad Schaeffer is a fund manager and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD" target="_blank" rel="noopener">three books</a>. His articles have appeared on the pages of Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, The Blaze, Breitbart, Zerohedge and other outlets. You can follow him on <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener">X</a> and <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Substack.</a> 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

1976 Democratic National Convention

Jimmy Carter’s Unavoidable Legacy

Jimmy Carter's Unavoidable Legacy

Afghanistan

Democrats

Inflation

Iran

Jimmy Carter

Opinion

Presidency

Ronald Reagan

Soviet Union

Happy talk is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because it gets people killed. It leads people to believe foolish things. Out of idiotic hopes and fatuous dreams, leaders tend to believe what they want to believe. That is precisely the opposite of their job, particularly when it comes to national security: Foreign policy ought to be the preserve of cold-eyed men and women capable of making hard but correct decisions.
Unfortunately, politics tends to draw those with starry visions — or, at least, cowards who will mask their own cowardice with those starry visions.
It’s hard to tell which one President Biden is these days.
As Israel’s war against Hamas continues — and make no mistake, it will continue until Hamas is utterly destroyed — Biden is starting to waver. Biden has made many of the right sounds: He has expressed support for deposing Hamas and has correctly stated that Israel has a difficult task in doing so while minimizing civilian casualties.
Yet now, prodded by a radical Left-wing legacy media and young, daft staffers, he seems to be wavering.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1858-stupid-cowardly-happy-talk-isn-t-the-answer-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
Thus, yesterday, Biden issued the following <a href="https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1729621217089323431" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweet</a>: “Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace. To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace.
To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek.
We can’t do that.
&mdash; Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1729621217089323431?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 28, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
What, precisely, did Biden mean by this tweet? It seems to create a catch-22. You can’t give Hamas what they want, apparently — which is more violence. But it also takes violence against Hamas to destroy them. 
So is Biden arguing for leaving Hamas in place … in the name of defeating Hamas? Or is he simply setting up deeply unrealistic expectations for any military in the face of a terrorist group that purposefully embeds itself in civilian areas in order to prey on Western softheartedness with regard to civilian casualties?
Either way, Biden is harming Israel’s war effort with such rhetoric. He is falling victim to the propagandistic efforts of the legacy media, which continue to promote four claims: first, that Hamas isn’t as bad as it seems; second, that Israel is much worse than it seems; third, that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to defeat Hamas; and fourth, that Biden’s electoral prospects rely on believing the first two claims.
First, there is the claim that Hamas isn’t all that bad.
It’s astonishing to watch Holocaust denial form in real time, but we’re watching it happen. That’s the only phenomenon I’ve seen similar to what’s happening: the active attempt to rewrite Hamas into some sort of political protest group, who is just a little more passionate. This has involved outright lies — the lie, for example, that Hamas didn’t kill people at the Nova Music Festival and that Israeli helicopters did — or obfuscation (Do you have tape of Israeli women being raped, or merely medical reports of their broken pelvises?).
But more often, it’s taken the form of downplaying Hamas’ evil altogether. Thus, we get Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC’s claiming that Hamas is a reasonable negotiating partner.
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We get the legacy media claiming that Hamas’ hostage release strategy spells the beginning of a broader round of negotiations with Israel’s supposed new peace partner — the same people who just murdered 1,200 Israeli citizens six weeks ago and took 240 hostages.
Then there’s the second claim: that Israel is morally equivalent in some way to Hamas. 
This claim usually takes the form of suggesting that Israel is “carpet bombing” Gaza or “indiscriminate” in its use of firepower. That’s absurd. According to Hamas — a terrible source — Israel has dropped some 40,000 bombs on Gaza during this conflict and has killed some 15,000 people. Normally, bombs kill more than 0.3 people. 
What’s more, Israel is protecting civilian evacuation routes Hamas is attacking; Israel is giving weeks of warning before striking sites; Israel is using “knock bombs” to empty buildings; Israel is allowing Hamas terrorists to merge into civilian populations rather than killing too many civilians. 
Israel is being more careful than any army in modern history. It is also dealing with a terrorist group hiding in a heavily urban area. That means civilian casualties will be high, by necessity. Again, that isn’t uncommon in war. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261/full" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A paper</a> in the Journal Frontiers of Public Health gives account of civilian death rates by modern war (meaning civilian deaths over total deaths): 74% in the Korean War; 46% in the Vietnam War; 88% in the Persian Gulf War; 56% in the Balkan War; 28% in Afghanistan; 36% in Pakistan; 67% in Iraq. 
Yet the media are participating in Hamas’ moral equivalence to the hilt. They are, in fact, acting as though Hamas ought to be granted immunity and permanence specifically for their evil tactic of hiding among civilians. Which of course means that every terrorist group in the future will do just that. 
Yesterday, Jake Tapper of CNN asked former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett one of the media’s typical silly questions: Won’t killing members of Hamas just create new members of Hamas? 
Bennett answered that if that’s the case, you can literally never win a war. <a href="https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/israel-news/2243131/were-not-magicians-naftali-bennett-defends-idf-against-attacks-over-palestinian-casualties-video.html">He reminded Tapper</a>, “It depends what we do next. I want to remind you that Nazi Germany, in the final months of the war, there were many, many civilian casualties. Yet Germany was denazified after the war and we had a new Germany.”
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Yet the Biden administration is falling for this obvious ploy. John Kirby of the Pentagon <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-displacement-south-operation-biden-788b05c51b5582b39aeb2466b7825525">said</a>, “It’s even all that more of an added burden on Israel to make sure that as they start to plan for operations in the south, whatever that looks like, that they have properly accounted for … the extra innocent life that is now in south Gaza.”
And according to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-urges-israel-to-change-tactics-in-gaza-c275ed12" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Wall Street Journal</a>, “The U.S. push to have Israel fight a more targeted war signals a shift away from President Biden’s full-throated support at the outset for the campaign to oust Hamas, and is the focus of intensive consultations between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to handle the conflict.”
Certainly if the U.S. has a magic wand it has been hiding, Israel will be all ears. Until then, this is empty verbiage that lends credibility to Hamas’ lies about supposed Israeli evils.
Then there’s the third claim: that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to somehow curb Hamas. 
This is the claim of simpleton Thomas Friedman, august foreign policy columnist for the execrable New York Times, who has never met an Israeli concession he didn’t like. Today, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/opinion/israel-palestinians-war-iran.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">writes</a> “a revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all three wars. It is the keystone for reviving a two-state solution… the Palestinian Authority, which since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two-state solution based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war.” 
To believe this, one must truly be an imbecile. 
The Palestinian Authority, from the outset of Oslo, saw the Oslo Accords as a Trojan Horse. Their leadership said as much. 
Yassar Arafat <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-minister-equates-negotiations-to-medieval-pact-made-to-be-broken/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in 1994, “This [Oslo] agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraish.” That agreement was the prelude to the slaughter of the Quraish tribe of Mecca a few years after Mohammed signed a false peace agreement. This is why Arafat increased terrorist activity after Oslo. It is why he walked away from the Camp David Accords in 2000, and, instead, launched the Second Intifada. It is why his successor, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, did the same with Ehud Olmert in 2008. 
The PA has never wanted a two-state solution. The PA is a terror group. It remains a terror group. That’s why the PA has claimed that Israel fabricated evidence of October 7.
Concessions to terrorists breed terrorism. It is that simple. But the Biden administration continues to pretend that a “two-state solution” led by the PA is somehow an answer to Islamic extremism.
Every day proves that thesis totally wrong. Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Palestinian population, radicalized over the course of generations. By polling data, that population does not want peace with Israel. They like Hamas. They like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In fact, according to the most recent polling data from AWRAD, the Palestinian Authority has the support of approximately 10% of the population — which is approximately the same level of support as the Western media itself.
There is video of the Palestinian population who is supposedly so ready for peace. There is <a href="https://twitter.com/AdamAlbilya/status/1729574608271978686" target="_blank" rel="noopener">footage </a>of Palestinians <a href="https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1729639958900576753" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mocking</a> Israeli hostages being released, including children and old women.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
‘Innocent Gazan’ civilians again. People with such a clear line between them and Hamas, obviously. Bravely taunting &amp; jeering elderly Jewish women. <a href="https://t.co/CDNYBmK69C">pic.twitter.com/CDNYBmK69C</a>
&mdash; Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) <a href="https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1729639958900576753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 28, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Clearly the answer is more Israeli concessions like, say, turning over the Gaza Strip entirely to Hamas. That worked out amazingly well last time.
Then there’s the final claim: that Biden is in electoral danger specifically because of Israel’s war to exterminate Hamas.
That, too, is a lie. The data simply don’t exist to suggest that Biden’s electoral trouble is because of the Gaza War. On October 7, Biden was riding at 44% in polls against Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Today, he’s riding at 45%. On October 7, he was at 40.5% approval; today, he’s at 40.4%. In other words, he’s just unpopular.
But the media are beating the drums: If Biden doesn’t cave to Hamas, then he’ll lose the youth vote! And he needs citizens like the ones from Oakland, who went wild when the city council considered condemning Hamas.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Last night the Oakland City Council voted on a resolution to call for a ceasefire. 
A city council member tried to insert language condemning Hamas. 
This was the reaction… <a href="https://t.co/r7aTb2mkrQ">pic.twitter.com/r7aTb2mkrQ</a>
&mdash; Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1729630529199432095?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 28, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
These are core parts of Biden’s supposed constituency. According to a <a href="https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Harvard Harris Poll</a>, as explained in the Wall Street Journal, “Roughly half of Americans 18 to 24 years old think Hamas’s October attack was justified by grievances of the Palestinians. Just 9% of people aged 65 and older feel the same.” According to the media, this is the real danger to Biden’s 2024 efforts.
This is, once again, ridiculous. Biden will either be running against Donald Trump — the most pro-Israel president in American history — or Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley — the most pro-Israel candidates in American history. Are all these Hamas-lovers going to stay home and watch one of those three be elected? What’s more, those 65 and older vote far more than those aged 18-24. So an incremental gain among those voters would likely be outweighed by an incremental loss among older voters.
But the media have their story. And they’re pushing it.
In any case, Israel isn’t stopping. They can’t. The IDF spokesperson <a href="https://www.idf.il/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explained</a>:
<blockquote>Where this is going forward from here, is that we are ready, and as soon as we will get the green light from the government of the State of Israel to continue operations we will do so because we understand that there is a direct link between ground operations and pressure on Hamas and their willingness to hand over the hostages. And we are ready and equipped to do so. And I hope that that will commence as soon as possible. Every day that Israeli hostages are returned is great. But we are preparing for the next stage of operations. And we have our site firmly focused on the aim, to dismantle Hamas to make sure that never again will any terrorist organization in Gaza have the ability to do what Hamas did on October the seventh.</blockquote>
That’s exactly correct.
Israel can’t stop. They’ll either do it alone, or they’ll do it with Western help. So what does it matter if the West backs Israel? 
It certainly means one thing above all others: a West perceived as a weak, cowardly horse is a West ripe for the taking.
And a happy-talking West is a weak West.
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Screenshot 2023-11-29 at 4.22.45 PM copy

Stupid, Cowardly Happy Talk Isn’t The Answer

Ben Shapiro

Biden Administration

Hamas

Hostages

MSNBC

Readers Pass

President Joe Biden told a room full of rich Democrat donors that ailing former President Jimmy Carter had asked him to deliver his eulogy.
Biden, who was first elected to the Senate career in 1972, four years before Carter was elected to the presidency, made the boast at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Carter, who at 98 is 18 years older than Biden, entered hospice care last month.
“He asked me to do his eulogy,” Biden said, before adding, “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” according to a pool report.
“I spent time with Jimmy Carter, and it’s finally caught up with him,&#8221; Biden <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics/jimmy-carter-eulogy-biden/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">continued</a>. “But they found a way to keep him going for a lot longer than they anticipated, because they found a breakthrough.”
Carter announced in August 2015 that he had brain cancer. Ironically, despite Carter’s well-documented animus toward the state of Israel that led him to <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/10/carterpalooza-jay-nordlinger-2/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">write speeches</a> for Yasser Arafat, it was an Israeli-tested drug called Keytruda that <a href="//721AC273-A7FF-4330-99CC-E020902A221E/v" target="_blank" rel="noopener">helped</a> Carter battle life-threatening tumors. By December 2015, Carter revealed doctors found no evidence of the four lesions discovered on his brain.
In September 2019, having lived longer than any other president, Carter, just before his 95th birthday, commented on the two leading prospective Democratic candidates for president, saying of the presidency, “I hope there’s an age limit. If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president.”
Carter was answering questions during his annual report at the Carter Center in Atlanta, according to the <a href="https://apnews.com/868124c2ad2b410bbcac74418d77468d" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Associated Press</a>, which noted at the time that Biden and primary opponent Bernie Sanders would turn 80 during their terms if elected.
Carter’s comment came after someone asked if he had thought of running in 2020. He added that the presidency requires a president “to be very flexible with your mind,” adding, “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way.”
Although he is still revered by many Democrats, Carter&#8217;s presidency is generally viewed as one of the greatest failures in the history of the American presidency. He oversaw a botched attempt to rescue 52 hostages held for 444 days by Iran; pulled U.S. missiles out of South Korea without consulting the Pentagon; signed the Panama Canal Treaty, thus giving up control by the year 2000; implemented price controls, and presided over an economy that by 1980 featured interest rates at a staggering 21%, inflation at 13.5%, and unemployment at 7%.

Senator Joe Biden and President Carter Campaigning in Delaware

Biden Boasts That Jimmy Carter Asked Him To Deliver His Eulogy

Death

Joe Biden

U.S.

On the subject of relations between Israel and Arab nations, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said in 1973, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
This famous quip is a light and yet brutally honest summation of the decades-long “quest for peace” between Israel and the Palestinians.
After Palestinians rioted in Jerusalem and Hamas terrorists fired rockets into Jewish civilian areas from the Gaza Strip earlier this week, the same tired arguments reappeared, suggesting that Israel is an “apartheid” state actively suppressing Arab and Palestinian populations and that Israel is the one roadblock which stands between the Palestinians and their own nation state.
The truth is, however, that the Palestinian leadership has repeatedly — and arguably intentionally — scuppered their own hopes for a Palestinian state. Here’s a brief overview of the multiple times the Palestinian leadership “missed an opportunity.”
1947
UN Resolution 181 — the “Partition Resolution” — was passed in November 1947, and called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state. The country of Israel would be split, with Jerusalem as a separate independent district.
The Jewish Agency, which represented existing Jewish residents of the region, supported the plan, while the Arab Higher Committee rejected it, threatening war alongside other Arab countries.
Violating Resolution 181 and the UN Charter, Arab nations invaded and were defeated. Had the Arab Higher Committee accepted the resolution instead of choosing to invade, a Palestinian state could have existed since 1947.
2000
President Bill Clinton hosted peace talks at Camp David between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, with a proposed peace plan known as the “Clinton Parameters.” 
Despite the impactful requirements of Israel put forward by the plan — including “custodianship” over the Temple mount, sovereignty on all Islamic and Christian holy sites, and three of Jerusalem’s four Old City quarters — Barak accepted the plan. Arafat rejected the offer, and refused to make an immediate counter-offer. He then returned home, after which the second intifada occurred, including suicide bombing attacks against Jewish civilians.
2008
After talks between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a comprehensive peace plan was proposed, which would annex Israeli settlements to Israel in return for the same territory in Israel being given to the Palestinians. In addition, Jerusalem would also be divided.
“In all, Olmert’s peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it’s almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further, wrote Jackson Diehl of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803614.html">The Washington Post</a> in 2009.
Abbas turned the deal down, saying “The gaps were wide.”
In 2015, it was reported by <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-admits-he-rejected-2008-peace-offer-from-olmert/">The Times Of Israel</a> that Abbas admitted he rejected the peace offer because he wasn&#8217;t allowed to study the proposed map, which included &#8220;near-total withdrawal from West Bank and relinquishing Israeli control of Jerusalem’s Old City.&#8221;
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/ighaworth">@ighaworth</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Three Times The Palestinians Turned Down A Deal For Statehood

Palestinians

The Nobel Peace Prize was established in 1895, and is one of five “Nobel Prizes” established by the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments manufacturer. In addition to the Peace Prize, there are Nobel Prizes for Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature.
Every year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards the Nobel Peace Prize “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The Peace prize is presented on December 10, and is the only prize that is sometimes awarded to an organization instead of an individual.
With nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize beginning to trickle in, including Jared Kushner, Stacey Abrams, and Black Lives Matter, we should remember that this is not the first year that nominations and recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize have stirred controversy. Here is a list of previous recipients whose awards raised eyebrows.
Barack Obama (2009)
Then President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and because Obama’s “diplomacy [was] founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority.” 
In 2015, former Nobel secretary Geir Lundestad <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34277960">said</a> that he regretted awarding Obama the prize, saying, “No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama.”
“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” he <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34277960">said</a>. “In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”
In 2016, a <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/revoke-obamas-nobel-peace-prize">piece</a> titled “Revoke Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize” was published by the Cato Institute, which criticized Obama’s foreign policy.
“Four years [after Obama’s award], Christof Heyns, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama’s drone strike program threatens 50 years of international law by encouraging other states to violate long‐​standing human rights standards.”
“The New York Times also reported that President Obama has taken military action in a total of seven countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen — without the authorization of Congress. If you include covert military actions taken by special operations forces, the list is longer and the impact much broader.”
Yasser Arafat (1994)
Alongside Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 “to honour a political act which called for great courage on both sides, and which has opened up opportunities for a new development towards fraternity in the Middle East,” after peace negotiations in Oslo.
Arafat was the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004, and President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) from 1994 to 2004. He was also a founding member of Fatah, a Palestinian political party which was viewed as a terrorist organization by the Israeli government and the United States Department of State and United States Congress until it renounced terrorism in 1988. The PLO had multiple links with terrorist and military groups, including Black September which carried out the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972.
In reality, Arafat routinely scuppered opportunities for peace, preferring an endless cycle of accords and violence. When he refused peace agreements in 2000, for example, President Clinton responded, “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.” In 2002, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said that Arafat “did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying no to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own.”
In 2003, the International Monetary Fund <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150402172134/http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=arNczoMikRug">audited</a> the PNA, stating that Arafat had diverted $900 billion in public funds. Later, a team of American accountants hired by Arafat’s own finance ministry claimed that the Palestinian leader’s secret portfolio was valued at almost $1 billion, and <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/07/60minutes/main582487.shtml">that</a> “although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian taxes, virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people; it was all controlled by Arafat. And none of these dealings were made public.”
Aung San Suu Kyi (1991)
From 2016 to 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi served as State Counsellor of Myanmar, and was arrested in a military coup on February 1 after the 2020 general election in Myanmar was declared as fraudulent by the military.
Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.” However, in 2017 critics called for her prize to be revoked in response to her silence regarding the persecution of Rohingya people, Myanmar’s Muslim minority. In <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24651359">2013</a>, she denied that Muslims in Myanmar had been subject to ethnic cleansing, and insisted that the tensions were due to a “climate of fear” caused by “a worldwide perception that global Muslim power is ‘very great.’”
In 2017, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-tillerson/myanmar-faces-defining-moment-must-stop-the-violence-u-s-idUSKCN1BP2GG?edition-redirect=uk">said</a> that Myanmar was facing a “defining moment,” noting “I think it is important that the global community speak out in support of what we all know the expectation is for the treatment of people regardless of their ethnicity&#8230; This violence must stop, this persecution must stop.”
In March 2018, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Holocaust_Memorial_Museum">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</a> revoked Suu Kyi&#8217;s 2012 Elie Wiesel Award, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-holocaust-rohingya.html">citing</a> her failure &#8220;to condemn and stop the military&#8217;s brutal campaign&#8221; against Rohingya’s Muslim minority, and in May 2018, Britain’s International Development Committee released a <a href="https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/05/23/the-rohingya-crisis-bears-all-the-hallmarks-of-a-genocide">report</a> which considered Suu Kyi complicit in the crimes against Rohingyas.
Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ (1973)
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese revolutionary Lê Đức Thọ were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize “for the 1973 Paris Peace Accords intended to bring about a cease-fire in the Vietnam War and a withdrawal of the American forces.”
All U.S. combat activities were suspended on January 15, 1973, and the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27 1973. All US forces personnel were completely withdrawn by March that year.
Lê Đức refused to accept the prize, saying that such “bourgeois sentimentalities” were not for him, and that the agreements had not been followed. Kissinger told Soviet ambassador Dobrynin “I figure it like Groucho Marx said ‘any club that took him in he would not want to join.’ I would say that anything Lê Đức Thọ is eligible for, there must be something wrong with it.”
While critics cited Kissinger’s actions during the Vietnam War, he was also a controversial selection having supported the Turkish Intervention in Cyprus and being allegedly complicit in Operation Condor.
Notable Mentions
In addition, there were multiple other award recipients whose prizes were viewed as highly controversial. These included:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Cordell Hull (1945) was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, and was awarded as a “prominent participant in the originating of the UN.” However, Hull was among those who vehemently opposed allowing the St. Louis — a ship which carried over 950 Jewish refugees seeking asylum having escaped Nazi persecution — to enter the United States. Forced to return, over one quarter of the passengers on the St. Louis were murdered in the Holocaust.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Al Gore (2007) was awarded the prize alongside the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,” despite the winners’ work having nothing to do with achieving peace.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The European Union (2012) received the prize for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” for over sixty years. This was <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nobel-peace-prize-2018-winners-shortlist-when-how-a8564381.html">viewed</a> as controversial “given that several countries within the bloc maintained arms manufacturing industries and because its handling of the contemporary Greek debt crisis left many people’s lives the worse for the intervention.”</li>
</ul>
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/ighaworth">@ighaworth</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Barack Obama Nobel

Nobel Peace Prize: The Most Controversial Winners

Barack Obama

Nobel Peace Prize

On a recent trip to Israel, I met a Palestinian student who studies at a diverse international school. I asked her if any of the Palestinian groups believe in Gandhian non-violence to redress their grievances. She knew of only one group — the small communist party to which she belonged. Only one.
If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is not by much. Nor is it surprising. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has inculcated a culture of violence and hatred of Jews in each successive generation of Palestinians since it was founded by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964.
Israeli journalist Eliezer Whartman <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/When-Egypt-was-in-Gaza">wrote</a> that when he visited Gaza in 1967, after Israel had driven out the Egyptian army, he found that:
<blockquote>&#8220;Indoctrination to hatred of Israel started at the very tenderest years. I saw pictures which children had drawn, with the encouragement of their teachers, depicting themselves killing Israeli children. The textbooks dripped venom. One text for the third grade, entitled Arabic Islamic History read: &#8216;The Jews are always the same, in every time, every place. They live only in darkness. They secretly plan to do evil; they fight only from hidden places because they are cowards. We must purify holy Palestine from their filth in order to bring peace back to the Arab homeland.'&#8221;</blockquote>
This trend has continued, unbroken, to the present day.
In Lebanon in 1982, Israel encountered hundreds of preteen and early teenage Palestinian boys specially trained by the PLO to use rocket-propelled grenades.
In 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of this phenomenon:
<blockquote>&#8220;I want you to imagine a day in the life of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, I&#8217;ll call him Ali. Ali wakes up before school, he goes to practice with a soccer team named after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the murder of a busload of 37 Israelis. At school, Ali attends an event sponsored by the Palestinian Ministry of Education honoring Baha Alyan, who last year murdered three Israeli civilians. On his walk home, Ali looks up at a towering statue erected just a few weeks ago by the Palestinian Authority to honor Abu Sukar, who detonated a bomb in the center of Jerusalem, killing 15 Israelis.&#8221;</blockquote>
&#8220;Imagine your child undergoing this brainwashing,&#8221; Netanyahu said. &#8220;Imagine what it takes for a young boy or girl to break free out of this culture of hate. Some do but far too many don&#8217;t. How can any of us expect young Palestinians to support peace when their leaders poison their minds against peace?&#8221;
The PLO has signed peace agreements before, each time with forked tongue. One notable occasion was the 1993 Oslo peace process, which earned PLO head Yasser Arafat the Nobel Peace Prize. While he spoke of peaceful coexistence at the White House, he was singing a very different tune to Arab and Muslim audiences. On May 10, 1994, Arafat was secretly recorded speaking at a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa. He <a href="https://iris.org.il/arafats-johannesburg-speech/">said</a>:
<blockquote>&#8220;This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Mohammed and Koraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and [considered] it a despicable truce.
But Mohammed had accepted it and we are accepting now this peace offer. But to continue our way to Jerusalem, to the first shrine together and not alone. We are in need of you as Moslems, as warriors of Jihad.&#8221;</blockquote>
(The treaty with the Koraish, known as the Treaty of Hudaybiya, was a peace treaty Mohammed signed with the Koraish tribe of Mecca at a time when his army was not strong enough to conquer the city. Two years later, however, Mohammed&#8217;s forces had gained in strength, so he abrogated the treaty and conquered Mecca.)
A few years later, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat everything he asked for as part of the agreement, Arafat rejected the offer and subsequently launched one of the bloodiest waves of terrorism in modern Israeli history.
In 2015, Palestinan Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas said: &#8220;We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every shaheed (martyr) will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.  &#8230; Al-Aqsa is ours, and the (Church of the) Holy Sepulcher is ours, everything is ours, all ours. They (the Jews) have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet and we won&#8217;t allow them to.&#8221;
The PLO is poison. It has destroyed the prospect of peace and it holds hostage the aspirations of the Palestinians. If there is to be peace someday, it will be when the legacy of the PLO is undone.

Mahmoud Abbas at U.N.

MITSOTAKIS: The PLO’s Poison

Foreign Policy

Mahmoud Abbas

The oh-so-very conscientious Middle East historians at Vox, who once landed themselves in hot water barely three months after website launch with the <a href="https://freebeacon.com/blog/in-praise-of-vox-media-max-fisher-and-zack-beauchamp/">dissemination of laughable fake news</a> about a purported <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2014/07/17/voxs-motto-should-be-explaining-the-news-incorrectly-repeatedly/">land bridge</a> connecting the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-israel-must-destroy-hamas-once-and-all-josh-hammer">Hamas</a>-controlled Gaza Strip with the biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria (i.e., the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-yes-palestinian-state-far-more-dangerous-josh-hammer">&#8220;West Bank&#8221;</a>), are apparently <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/12/24/rashida-tlaib-would-no-doubt-be-very-pleased-with-voxs-inexcusably-dishonest-reporting-on-israel-and-israeli-jews/">up to it again</a>.
As highlighted by <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/12/24/rashida-tlaib-would-no-doubt-be-very-pleased-with-voxs-inexcusably-dishonest-reporting-on-israel-and-israeli-jews/">Twitchy</a>, Vox has written a piece about the post-Oslo Accords modern history of the city of Bethlehem that is, in the words of one venerable pro-Israel Twitter user, &#8220;<a href="https://twitter.com/AG_Conservative/status/1209497608122703872">inexcusably dishonest</a>.&#8221; And it is.
Seven years following 1993&#8217;s <a href="https://honestreporting.com/the-second-intifada-israeli-society-terrorized/">fateful</a> signing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_I_Accord">Oslo I</a> between the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the late Palestinian-Arab unrepentant jihadist Yasser Arafat, Vox informs its readers, &#8220;tourism in Bethlehem &#8230; took a nosedive when the Israeli military invaded many of the West Bank’s major cities that were under Palestinian jurisdiction.&#8221; Vox continues: &#8220;As a political stalemate and expanding Israeli settlements led to the bloody Second Intifada, or uprising, the devastation and Israeli curfews kept tourists away; hotels closed and restaurants went out of business.&#8221;
This is not merely historical revisionism or tendentious distortion. It is an outright lie.
In reality, it was the terrorist Arafat who was singularly responsible for commencing the bloody Second Intifada — a four-plus-year sustained jihad during which over a thousand Israelis paid the ultimate price and thousands more were also wounded.
Although Arafat strategically waited to launch the Second Intifada until after then-Likud party prime minister candidate Ariel Sharon had the oh-so-shocking temerity to visit the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, in September 2000, it is now commonly known that Arafat had been planning the civilizational jihad at least since he rejected then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak&#8217;s <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bill-clinton-palestinians-were-offered-temple-mount-in-2000/">exceedingly generous</a> &#8220;two-state solution&#8221; offer (96% of Judea and Samaria) at the U.S.-hosted Camp David Summit two months prior. The U.S. government&#8217;s own <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-mitchell-report-may-2001">Mitchell Report</a> on the subject, overseen by former Sen. George Mitchell (D-ME), made this quite clear (emphasis added):
<blockquote>&#8230; [T]he immediate catalyst for the violence was the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations on July 25, 2000 and the &#8220;widespread appreciation in the international community of Palestinian responsibility for the impasse.&#8221; In this view, Palestinian violence was planned by the PA leadership, and was aimed at &#8220;provoking and incurring Palestinian casualties as a means of regaining the diplomatic initiative.&#8221; &#8230; The Sharon visit [to the Temple Mount] did not cause the &#8220;[Second] Intifada.&#8221;</blockquote>
Lest there be any doubt as to which party was to blame for the negotiation breakdown at Camp David in 2000, furthermore, let us defer to then-U.S. President <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/23/israel3">Bill Clinton</a>: &#8220;[Arafat] did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying no to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own.&#8221;
In short, the unrepentant terrorist Arafat deliberately tanked the Camp David negotiations and used his own destruction of the possibility for a sustained peace as an excuse for launching a years-long bloody jihad to murder as many Israeli Jews as possible. Contra Vox&#8217;s despicable lying, all subsequent Israel Defense Forces (IDF) incursions into Palestinian-Arab strongholds in Judea and Samaria were in direct response to Arafat&#8217;s preplanned war. In short, it was Arafat&#8217;s deliberately beginning to kill Israeli civilians en masse that prompted the IDF&#8217;s military response.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Vox apparently wants readers to think Israel invaded Bethlehem out of nowhere, and suggests the second intifada *followed* the invasion. 
Of course, that &quot;uprising&quot;—ie the murdering of Israeli civilians in cafes, buses, and markets—prompted the invasion of West Bank cities. <a href="https://t.co/lkMCaEvUho">pic.twitter.com/lkMCaEvUho</a>
&mdash; Gilead Ini (@GileadIni) <a href="https://twitter.com/GileadIni/status/1209496422778900480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 24, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Second Intifada was a uniquely harrowing time to live in Israel. Here is how Matti Friedman, who lived in Israel during part of the jihad, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/israel-election-netanyahu.html">described</a> it at The New York Times in September:
<blockquote>No single episode has shaped Israel’s population and politics like the wave of suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians in the first years of the 21st century. Much of what you see here in 2019 is the aftermath of that time, and every election since has been held in its shadow. The attacks, which killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, ended hopes for a negotiated peace and destroyed the left, which was in power when the wave began. Any sympathy that the Israeli majority had toward Palestinians evaporated. &#8230;
I remember standing at a bus stop when I heard a suicide bomber blow himself up and murder 11 people one street over, at Café Moment. My mother passed through the Nahariya train station right before a suicide bomber struck there, and my sister was in a cafeteria at the Hebrew University campus when Palestinians blew up a different cafeteria. I’ve got many more memories like that, all of them standard for the time.</blockquote>
There are a <a href="https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2019/12/24/rashida-tlaib-would-no-doubt-be-very-pleased-with-voxs-inexcusably-dishonest-reporting-on-israel-and-israeli-jews/">myriad other problems</a> with Vox&#8217;s duplicitous holiday season smear job about Israel and Bethlehem. But outright lying about how the Second Intifada started — in contravention of the U.S. government&#8217;s own review of the facts, no less — stands atop the sordid list of Vox&#8217;s falsehoods.
Of course, what else might we expect from the folks who once claimed Israel restricted Palestinian-Arab &#8220;traffic&#8221; on a &#8220;land bridge&#8221; connecting Gaza to Judea and Samaria? &#8220;Fake news&#8221; is very, very real.

Israeli flag Old City Jerusalem

HAMMER: Vox Lies About Israel. AGAIN.

Fake News

Israel Defense Forces (IDF)

Judaism

Media

Media Bias

Murder

Twitchy

Violence

Despite the fact that the Senate <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/senate-unanimously-passes-bill-marking-50-years-since-jerusalem-reunification/">recently voted unanimously</a> to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel &#8212; a bill co-sponsored by 17 senators, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) &#8212; media and religious figures have emerged from the woodwork to condemn the Trump administration for the supposedly precipitous step of announcing just that fact. And it is a fact: Jerusalem has always been and will always be the eternal capital of the Jewish people and Israel, the site of the Temple Mount and the place where Jacob was informed by God, &#8220;I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying&#8230; All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.&#8221;
The president&#8217;s decision to verify what Congress has made law since 1995, and to recognize a reality that&#8217;s been true for several thousand years, shouldn&#8217;t be all that controversial. But it is, largely thanks to misinformation put out by enemies of Israel, who suggest that to say true things amounts to provocation of violence.
Here&#8217;s the reality: recognizing the unification of Jerusalem under Israeli authority isn&#8217;t what causes violence between Israel and its neighboring Muslim enemies. It&#8217;s the anti-Semitic religious fervor of Israel&#8217;s neighboring Muslim enemies. That&#8217;s been true since before there was a State of Israel, and before Israel controlled Jerusalem.
Here&#8217;s a brief history of violence and Jerusalem.
1929. Conflict began in British Mandate Palestine after Jews made the &#8220;provocative&#8221; move of bringing chairs for the elderly and the infirm to the Western Wall for prayer purposes. In October 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem decided to build atop the Temple Mount, and purposefully led mules through the Western Wall area, excreting in the holy area to spite the Jews. All of this led to a Jewish march to the wall in August 1929. The next day, Muslims marched to the wall to show their sovereignty, even though the Western Wall isn&#8217;t holy to Muslims. The following day, Arabs stabbed a Jew to death in the city. By August 23, Muslims were rioting across Jerusalem. 17 Jews were murdered and a hospital was attacked in the city in Jerusalem itself. In Hebron, Arabs massacred more than 60 Jews.
The British Shaw report described the events thusly: &#8220;Arabs in Hebron made a most ferocious attack on the Jewish ghetto and on isolated Jewish houses lying outside the crowded quarters of the town. More than 60 Jews &#8211; including many women and children &#8211; were murdered and more than 50 were wounded.&#8221; Remember, this was long before Israel existed or Jerusalem was in Jewish hands. There were also anti-Jewish riots in 1920 and in the 1930s.
1948. Israel&#8217;s creation was supposed to lead to a peaceful coexistence in Jerusalem. Instead, Arabs cut off all roads to Jerusalem and prevented Jews from reaching the city, blockading the inhabitants inside. Thousands of Israelis died attempting to reach their brethren in Jerusalem. The outcome: the split of the city between West Jerusalem, which did not include the Western Wall, and East Jerusalem, controlled by Jordan. Under Muslim rule, Jews were not able to visit Jewish holy sites; under Jewish rule, Muslims were. Muslims used gravestones from the Jewish cemetery Mount of Olives to pave their roads. During this period, while East Jerusalem was fully controlled by Muslims, the Palestine Liberation Organization (later the Palestinian Authority) was formed. It openly stated that its goal was the destruction of the State of Israel. Remember, this is before Israel controlled Jerusalem.
1967. Israel wins control of Jerusalem and unifies the city. Muslims are not just granted access to holy sites, the Islamic Waqf is given full control over the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Jews are still forbidden from praying at the Temple Mount to this day, despite Israel&#8217;s sovereignty over the site.
1993. In the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to negotiate with the terrorist Palestinian Authority over a future Palestinian state. In return, the PA stated that it would acknowledge Israel&#8217;s right to exist (it never has) and cease violence (it never has). The Oslo Accords never made any statement about transfer of Jerusalem to Muslim rule. Despite that fact, the number of terrorist attacks on Israel dramatically increased in the aftermath of Oslo, with 27 Israelis murdered in October 1994 alone through Muslim terrorism.
2000. At the Camp David summit, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, of the Labor Party, offered Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat control over East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount itself. That&#8217;s according to Bill Clinton. Arafat refused the deal and walked away from the table without a counteroffer, then used Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon&#8217;s visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext to begin a terrorist wave that would result in the deaths of hundreds of Jews from terrorism (I was in Israel during the Second Intifada, and remember walking by the remains of murdered Jews in a Sbarro pizzeria).
2008. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered new Palestinian terrorist dictator Mahmoud Abbas &#8212; a man who was working hand in glove with Palestinian terrorist group Hamas &#8212; international control of Jerusalem&#8217;s Old City, which includes the holy sites. Olmert stated, &#8220;Remember my words, it will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I am offering you now. Don&#8217;t miss this opportunity.&#8221; Olmert also offered near-complete withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, with retention of just 6.3% of the territory for existing settlement blocs, and even agreed to hand over Israeli land equivalent to 5.8% of the territory, as well as a land bridge between Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Abbas turned it down, and launched another round of violence instead in coordination with Hamas in Gaza. Incessant Muslim terrorism against Jews in Jerusalem has not ceased.
So no, sovereignty over Jerusalem has nothing to do with increased Muslim violence. Muslims in the region will not tolerate Israel&#8217;s existence; Jerusalem is just a convenient proxy issue for that inconvenient fact. Muslims launched violence against Jews in Jerusalem for the sin of visiting Jewish holy sites long before Israel existed; they pushed for Israel&#8217;s annihilation long before Israel had control over Jerusalem; they have turned down multiple peace offers including division of Jerusalem and opted for violence instead.
Don&#8217;t believe the lie that anti-Semitic Muslim regimes and populations require the pretext of Israeli sovereignty over the eternal capital of the Jewish people in order to excuse violence. They don&#8217;t, and they never have.

No, Trump Verifying That Jerusalem Is Israel’s Capital Won’t Be The Cause Of Violence. Muslim Anti-Semitism Will. Here’s The Proof.

Donald Trump

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