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.

Is Secretary Rice’s claim that Hamas is a “resistance movement” part of a larger pattern of sanitizing the Palestinian Arabs, their goals and conduct, and thus part of an attempt to force Israel into a path of further, disastrous concessions to the terrorist-supporting Palestinian Authority (PA)? This pressure has been exercised despite the clear PA failure to fulfill its commitments under the signed Oslo agreements and the 2003 Roadmap peace plan to jail arrest and extradite terrorists, confiscate their weaponry and close the bomb factories, as well as to end the incitement to hatred and murder in the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps that feed terrorism.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “We respectfully request that Secretary Rice both clarify and apologize to the victims of Hamas terror, which includes 27 Americans killed and 39 wounded and nearly 500 Israelis killed plus the many thousands more maimed in scores of suicide bombings and hundreds of other acts of Hamas terrorism. Hamas is one of the most murderous terrorist groups in the world and can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a ‘resistance organization.’”