Bush mentioned Jordan, S Arabia,
Iraq as victims — not Israel
New York – The ZOA has expressed deep concern that President George W. Bush, in a major speech in Annapolis yesterday, omitted any mention of the Jewish state of Israel when referring to countries that have been victim of Islamist terrorism. Israel is of course Islamist terrorism’s most consistent target.
In his speech, President Bush said, “The terrorists in Iraq share the same ideology as the terrorists who struck the United States on September the 11th. Those terrorists share the same ideology with those who blew up commuters in London and Madrid, murdered tourists in Bali, workers in Riyadh, and guests at a wedding in Amman, Jordan. Just last week, they massacred Iraqi children and their parents at a toy give-away outside an Iraqi hospital” (www.whitehouse.gov , November 30).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “In this speech, President Bush made mention of seven countries that have been hit by Islamist terrorist groups, yet Israel was conspicuously absent. This is despite the fact that Israel is attacked or attempted to be attacked by Islamist terrorists on a daily basis. Israel has also suffered far more from this Islamist horror than any other country in the world. In fact, over 1,700 of its citizens have been murdered and 10,000 more maimed by Islamist terrorism since 1993.
“It’s also remarkable that President Bush mentioned three Arab countries affected in the Middle East yet not the one Jewish country in the Middle East most affected. He even mentioned Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the Saudi regime is the world’s biggest supporter of Islamist terrorism, raising funds for suicide bombers and promoting hatred and murder of Americans and Jews in its Wahhabi mosques around the world. The President also referred to specific terrorist attacks, including terrorist massacres that occurred months and even years ago, but he did not refer to any of the innumerable terrorist massacres in Israel.
“None of the countries mentioned by President Bush have suffered anything like the on-going, massive brutality meted out by the terrorists striking Israel. The President could have referred to any one of a number of terrorist assaults on Israel, from the murder of 21 and maiming of 90 people in the suicide bombing of the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium discotheque in 2001, or the murder of 26 people and the wounding of 140 more in a packed Passover Seder at Netanya’s Park Hotel on Passover Eve, 2002, or the suicide bombing in the Hadera market just over a month of ago, which killed five and wounded over 30 Israelis, not to mention the hundreds of missiles that continue to land in Israel from Gaza.
“We at the ZOA cannot understand how Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy and the United States’ most reliable ally, could have been omitted from the President’s list of countries targeted by Muslim terrorists. We urge President Bush to clarify this omission of Israel immediately. It is not in the interest of the U.S. war on terrorism to appease the Arab and Islamic countries by not mentioning Jews of Israel as the major victims of this terrorist onslaught. Omitting Israel from this victims list can only make the Western world and the Arab/Islamic world feel that the U.S. does not really care about the plight of the Jews of Israel, which can only increase the danger to Israel and its people.”