Howard Dean: Enemy of Israel By Andrew L. Jaffee, September 13, 2003	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

Howard Dean, now the front-runner for the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nomination, can be counted as an enemy of Israel. Since his campaign has begun, he has tried to appeal to the left and far left of Democratic Party. I guess he'll sacrifice the 2004 election to get the party nomination. America's heartland will not accept Dean's rationalization of and sympathy for homicide bombers. This week he said:

There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war.

Dean has rewritten history and current events, changing vicious Hamas murderers of civilians into "soldiers." According to the highly-respected Council on Foreign Relations, Hamas':

...founding charter pledges the group to carry out armed struggle, try to destroy Israel and replace Arafat’s government with an Islamist state on the West Bank and Gaza, and raise “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Hamas leaders gloated openly over a March 2002 suicide bombing that killed 28 Israelis at a Passover seder, calling it “a great success,” welcoming Israeli retaliation as a way to recruit more supporters, and hailing the weapon of suicide bombings as the “F-16” of the Palestinian people. Hamas believes “peace talks will do no good,” said the group’s main spokesman, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. “We do not believe we can live with the enemy.”

Dean's own Democratic Party officially designated Hamas a "terrorist organization." Even the European Union has frozen Hamas' assets and labelled them "terrorist." Please excuse the (intended) pun, but how far out in left field is Dean? But as if Dean's comments about Hamas weren't enough, he also said he didn't:

believe stopping the terror has to be a prerequisite for talking. You always talk... it's not our place to take sides.

So we should "talk" with Hamas? Would Dean advocate "talking" with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? Yes, let's sit down for coffee with all the world's terrorists and work things out. While we're sitting for coffee, one of the terrorists can pull his/her rip-chord and blow us up with a fire bomb packed with nuts, bolts, and screws. Or maybe they'll poison the coffee, or fly a plane full of civilians into the building in which we're meeting. I'm taking sides, and I side with Israel and the rest of the free world.

Other Democratic presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman quickly and rightfully condemned Dean's remarks:

When you start to say, in very loaded terms -- particularly when Israelis are under assault by terrorists, not unlike the situation we find ourselves in -- that America shouldn't take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, that's a break in more than half a century of the American foreign policies carried out by presidents of both parties, and it's very harmful.

Dean has since backpeddled -- a bit. Don't you believe this guy for a second. Dean is trying to appeal the partisan far left for votes. This far left is associated with apologizing for Palestinian terror.

According to CNN:

Several Democratic leaders of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, also circulated a letter Wednesday taking issue with Dean's comments.

If there any readers who are concerned with Dean's comments, please contact your elected representatives and express your condemnation of his statements: