By any measure the State Department’s recently released “Country Reports on Terrorism: 2016” is a real stunner.
The terrorism report, required annually by Congress, says we are not to understand Palestinian terror in terms of willful, horrific attacks against innocent civilians but, rather, must attribute it to a Palestinian “lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank….”
Notwithstanding the many clear anti-Israel incitements of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, the State Department report says that “While some PA leaders have made provocative and inflammatory comments, the PA has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement [italics added].”
And of the widespread outrage over the PA’s ultimate incitement of granting official stipends to the families of terrorists killed or incarcerated in the “line of duty,” the report says only that in 2016, “As part of a policy codified in 2003, the PA provided financial packages to Palestinian security prisoners released from Israeli prisons in an effort to reintegrate them into society and prevent recruitment by hostile political factions.”
Financial packages? Reintegrating cold-blooded murderers into society?
And so the report went, simply glossing over the damning evidence of Palestinian malevolence. In truth, one might be forgiven for thinking that the report was prepared by the Obama State Department. In fact, most of the portions dealing with terrorism in the Middle East were imported wholesale from the reports issued under President Obama.
(Relatedly, every administration from the Clinton years on has routinely certified to Congress that the Palestinian Authority is not responsible for terrorist violence against Israel in order to qualify the PA for certain foreign aid programs.)
But the official downplaying of Palestinian terror against Israel is not the only patently fallacious holdover practice from the Obama years. In June, President Trump, at his first opportunity, invoked the six month so-called national security waiver provision of the Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act of 1995.
That law requires that the American embassy in Israel be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and imposes restrictions on State Department overseas spending as the penalty for non-compliance. But the law also provides for a presidential waiver of the penalty if the ensuing reduced spending would jeopardize U.S. national security interests.
So President Trump continued in the footsteps of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, falsely claiming the waiver applied to the statutory obligation to relocate the embassy itself and not to the penalty for not complying with the obligation.
And then there was the sham recertification of Iranian compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. (The president is required to inform Congress every 90 days as to whether or not Iran is living up to the agreement.)
This time around President Trump said he believed the process in place to monitor Iranian compliance was wholly inadequate and that his inclination was not to certify Iran’s non-violation of the agreement. But as The New York Times reported, at a meeting in the White House Mr. Trump reluctantly gave in to “all of [his] major security advisers [who] recommended he preserve the Iran deal for now.” According to the Times, Mr. Trump spent 55 minutes telling them he did not want to do so.
Recent events have demonstrated that there are institutional roadblocks confronting President Trump that prevent him from having a clear path to implement the policies he was elected to put in place. However, while we think a Lone Ranger presidency is not a wise solution, a bit more resoluteness on his part certainly seems in order.