Aaron Klein, strategic advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Breitbart News on Wednesday that diplomatic rhetoric drawing “moral equivalence” between Israel and terrorists is an asset to Hamas.
Klein joined Alex Marlow, host of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily and author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption, to discuss ongoing violence between Israel and Palestinians.
“To hear the international community talk about both sides and condemning both sides or calling for both sides to be calm is pretty outrageous given that there are no two sides,” Klein remarked. “If the international community wants calm [and] wants the violence to stop, then they need to fully back Israel’s right to self-defense, and they need to strongly condemn Hamas and make sure that every Palestinian entity that is participating in this — whether it’s Hamas or even to some extent the Palestinian Authority, at least in the incitement to violence — that those entities are held to full account.”
Klein went on, “Otherwise, if Hamas is firing rockets in to Israel and they hear, ‘Both sides should be calm,’ then in a way this actually emboldens [them]. This kind of diplomatic-speak about ‘both sides’ emboldens Hamas, because … while they’re firing rockets at Israeli cities — again from Palestinians civilian areas — they find themselves being compared to a democracy defending itself. I think that is very dangerous.”
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“The international community really needs to stop with this moral equivalency nonsense,” he added. “I’m not going to get into domestic American politics, but I will just in general say that that the international community should strongly back Israel’s right to self-defense and stop with the ‘both sides’ rhetoric, and I mean that about the the entire international community,” Klein stated, “because that kind of language it doesn’t work around here, and it’s not going to be helpful.”
“It actually has very little to do with Israel itself, and a lot to do with internal Palestinian politics,” Klein said of the origins of recent rocket attacks targeting Israel and Arab riots in Jerusalem. “About a week ago, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas unilaterally decided to cancel parliamentary elections in the Palestinian arena, and then basically also postponed his own presidential election.”
He continued, “In other words, the Palestinians haven’t had an election in 15 years. [Abbas] just unilaterally postponed — or cancelled — elections, where Hamas was probably going to do very well. So Hamas saw that as a major opening to try to galvanize the Palestinian street and incite them against Israel, but also it presents [Hamas] as sort of the saviors of the so-called Palestinian cause. So Hamas is largely engaging in this round of violence for that internal political reason.”
“And I think Fatah Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t mind the distraction from the fact that they just removed even the pretense of being democratic by unilaterally cancelling elections. So what you have now is a major escalation on the part of Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, and Israel will defend itself and Hamas will pay a heavy price for this.”
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