The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Administration is expected to announce today that it will close the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s office in Washington. Of course, the PLO described this as a “reckless escalation” of tensions and the US doing the bidding of Israel.
Personally, I’d question why we ever allowed a terrorist-supporting organization to have an office in our nation’s capital. Naturally, the PLO insists that the groups it supports – Hamas and the PLFP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) – aren’t terrorists, they’re “Palestinian political parties.” For the record, both the US State Department and the EU have Hamas and the PLFP on their lists of officially-designated terrorist organizations. The PLO itself may not be designated as a terrorist group, but it supports recognized terrorist groups and actually devotes a portion of its budget to a “martyrs’ fund” that gives direct support payments to the families of people who launch suicide attacks on Israeli citizens.
This has been said many times before, but it always bears repeating in the face of the never-ending flow of pro-PLO propaganda: for all the denunciations of Israel for not doing enough for the “peace process,” the simple fact is that if the Palestinians put down their weapons and stopped trying to kill Israelis, there would be peace tomorrow. But if the Israels put down their weapons, they’d all be dead tomorrow.