Charles Krauthammer certainly
doesn't mince any words when he goes after US Secretary of State John FN Kerry.
Forget about Israeli interests. Forget about Arab interests. The
American interest is to endorse and solidify this emerging axis of
moderate pro-American partners (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, and the Palestinian
Authority) intent on seeing Islamist radicalism blunted and ultimately
defanged.
Yet America’s secretary of state doesn’t see it. Speaking of Hamas-run Gaza, Kerry actually said in Paris:
“The Palestinians can’t have a cease-fire in which they think the
status quo is going to stay.” What must change? Gazans need “goods that
can come in and out . . . a life that is free from the current restraints.”
But
the only reason for those “restraints,” why goods are unable to go in
and out, is that for a decade Hamas has used this commerce to import and
develop weapons for making war on Israel.
Remember the
complaints that the heartless Israelis were not allowing enough imports
of concrete for schools and hospitals? Well, now we know where the
concrete went — into an astonishingly vast array of tunnels
for infiltrating neighboring Israeli villages and killing civilians.
(More than half a million tons, estimates the Israeli military.)
Lifting
the blockade would mean a flood of arms, rockets, missile parts and
other implements of terror for Hamas. What is an American secretary of
state doing asserting that Hamas cannot cease fire unless it gets that?
Moreover,
the fire from which Hamas will not cease consists of deliberate rocket
attacks on Israeli cities — by definition, a war crime.
Whatever
his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas’s war criminality. Which makes his
advocacy of Hamas’s terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a
U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a wall-to-wall Arab front
wants to see it gone — but a moral disgrace.
Read the whole thing.
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