What on earth was she thinking? Blowing up civilians in pizza parlors and on buses is “resistance”?
A press release from the Zionist Organization of America:
New York — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has asked the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, for a retraction and apology to the victims of Hamas terrorism for describing the Islamist terrorist group, Hamas, as a “resistance movement” when speaking to reporters in Europe (State Department, January 18, 2007). Hamas’ Charter calls for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (Article 7) and quotes the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as justification for its war on Jews (Article 32). It is listed on the State Department list of terrorist organizations. Since the start of the Palestinian Arab terrorist wave in September 2000, Hamas has murdered nearly 500 Israelis and maimed thousands more in scores of suicide bombings and hundreds of other terrorist attacks targeting civilians. Since winning Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, Hamas has explicitly refused to recognize Israel, accept its legitimacy as a Jewish state, or foreswear and denounce terrorism.
Unfortunately, this sort of inappropriate positive spin on troubling aspects of Palestinian Arab society does not seem to be an aberration, but in fact is pattern for Secretary Rice. In a speech she made last October, Rice drew an analogy of Palestinian actions and dreams to the American struggle for independence, which implied an odious comparison of Yasser Arafat and Hamas leaders to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, thereby legitimizing the Palestinian promotion of Israel’s destruction and their hatred and murder of Jews. She also echoed Palestinian propaganda statements, criticizing Israel for the “daily humiliation of occupation,” thereby ignoring that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not occupied territory, but disputed territory, and that Israel has given away half of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza, where 98% of Palestinian Arabs live. She also claimed that “there could be no greater legacy for America than to establish a Palestinian state” (State Department, October 11, 2006).
On previous occasions, Rice has demanded that Israel accept the 2003 Roadmap peace plan with no changes and pressured Israel to give up control of security routes on the Gaza-Egypt border, ease control at checkpoints, transfer weapons to Palestinian security personnel and release terrorist Marwan Barghouti from jail. She also pressured Israel into the disastrous decision to relinquish security control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border, thus allowing Palestinian Arab terrorists to smuggle into Gaza huge amounts of weaponry.