As a great supporter of President Trump, I was saddened to see the leader of the free world welcome to the White House the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has been a tyrant, Holocaust denier and the cofounder of modern Islamic terrorism. What is the most disturbing is the fact, that this meeting has elevated the untrustworthy Abbas’s prestige and credibility and made him relevant at the time when he is a weakened political figure who is unpopular among his own people and the moderate Sunni states who see the Palestinian issue as an obstacle to getting closer to Israel and America in a united front against Iran.

How do you explain the fact that Trump said during the meeting that it was “an honor” to have the Palestinian president, who was the cofounder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and modern Islamic Terrorism, and who was second in command to the notorious Yasser Arafat, whose sole purpose was the total and complete destruction of the Jewish state?

How do you explain the fact that Trump greeted Abbas, the unelected figure of a dysfunctional, corrupt, nonstate entity outside the West Wing of the White House in the same way he greeted the democratically elected prime minister of the state of Israel and one of America’s closest allies, Benjamin Netanyahu? Abbas has stayed in power for the last nine years without holding any new elections and recently consolidated his power by jailing journalists. 

How do you explain President Trump having lunch in the White House with a Palestinian leader who has been the author of fake news and history as an infamous Holocaust denier? Mr. Abbas in 1982 argued in his PhD dissertation that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and incited violence against the Jews, living under Nazi rule, to spur more Jewish immigration to Palestine and denied that six million Jews were murdered.

Why does Trump believe that peace is possible with the head of the Palestinian Authority, who in 2010 instituted government regulations stipulating that the amount paid to terrorists’ families, would be on the sliding scale, with the highest payments going to those who proved the most brutal in murdering Jews? For the last few years, the Palestinian Authority led by Abbas paid over 1 billion dollars to imprisoned terrorists and dead terrorists’ families.

Why did Trump express confidence in the chances of an Israeli Palestinian peace agreement to Abbas, who sponsored a new 2016-17 Palestinian school curriculum, which includes textbooks for children in grades 1-4, teaching them to be suicide bombers, demonizing the Jews as rodents and monkeys, denying the existence of the Jewish state, rejecting peace, and focusing on the return of all Palestinians to an exclusively Palestinian state, without Israel?

For those with short memories, Abbas, like Arafat, was a founding member of Fatah, the PLO's main faction since 1969. While Arafat was the face of the PLO, Abbas was always number two to Arafat and the main financier of numerous terrorist attacks which have maimed and killed thousands of Israeli civilians as well as 54 Americans in airplane hijackings, school massacres, suicide and bus bombings, and more.

In the autobiography of former PLO official Muhammad Daoud Oddeh, published in France in 1999, he wrote that the plan to murder the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was concocted in Rome at a meeting he held with senior PLO officials, including Mahmoud Abbas, who, he said, was responsible for securing the funding for the massacre.

Since then, most of the PLO terrorists involved in the Munich attack have been executed by Israeli Mossad agents. But Mahmoud Abbas has not been held accountable.

The time has arrived for Mahmoud Abbas not to be invited by any U.S. president or treated as a legitimate, civilized leader but to be held responsible by the United States for his involvement in the Munich Olympic Massacre and his long history of sponsoring anti-American and anti-Israeli terror and inciting and indoctrinating his own people including children to hatred and martyrdom.

For many years, previous U.S. governments, the West as a whole, and the media has chosen to play a preposterous game of presenting Abbas as the new, credible, and moderate Palestinian leader with whom Israel and the West could trust to at last bring peace through negotiations.

It seems that President Trump has convinced himself to join this game by attempting to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to prove himself as the ultimate deal maker. But President Trump should be aware that, in reality, Abbas has walked away from previous peace deals offered by different Israeli governments under the sponsorship of different American presidents.  

Abbas was second in command to Arafat, when the Palestinian Authority (PA) rejected Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital in the year 2000 and through the subsequent five years of Arafat’s war of terror against Israel which killed over 1000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005. After the death of Arafat in 2004, Abbas became the chairman of the Fatah branch and the PLO and as president of the Palestinian Authority he again rejected another offer of peace made this time by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. In the spring of 2014, after nine months of negotiations and an Israeli settlement freeze, Abbas refused again to respond to a proposed framework for a peace agreement offered by President Obama, which granted the Palestinians a state based on the 1967 borders. and chose instead to form a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas, which two months later coordinated the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers and instigated another war in Gaza with Israel.  

As a great negotiator, President Trump should have been aware that appeasing and honoring Abbas while pressuring Israel, will simply encourage him to further bad behavior. Just two week ago, Mahmoud Abbas, among many other actions encouraging terrorism, failed to condemn the murder of a 21-year-old British theology student in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist on Good Friday and rewarded the terrorist with a salary of more than 1000 dollars a month.

As the most politically incorrect president in American history, I had hoped that Trump, after meeting Abbas and hours of self-reflection, would admit that Abbas has been and still is the face of evil. However, in reality, a few hours after the meeting, Trump tweeted “It was honor to host President Mahmoud Abbas at the House White, today. Hopefully, something terrific could come out it between the Palestinians and Israel.” 

Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli born and raised. Her blog: www.shoularomanohoring.com