Cal Thomas: Cautious celebration

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 16th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next, a fragile peace in the Middle East. Israel and Hamas are in phase 2 of their talks, but WORLD commentator Cal Thomas warns that true peace requires more than putting down weapons.

CAL THOMAS: In his address to Israel’s Knesset following the release of 20 living hostages by Hamas, President Donald Trump said several things that reflect wishful thinking.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: The forces of chaos, terror and ruin that have plagued the region for decades now stand weakened, isolated, and totally defeated…The enemies of all civilization are in retreat…the long and painful nightmare is finally over.

The president and his team of negotiators are rightly being given full credit for achieving this moment—even by many Democrats. This battle may be over, but Israel’s enemies don’t share the same view.

Palestinian Media Watch—or PMW—keeps tabs on what terrorist groups and others are saying about a post-Gaza future. It has compiled 20 examples that show the Palestinian Authority’s real intentions. In the PA’s October 2nd publication there was this: “It may be necessary to find a way to persuade Hamas to completely leave the area for a year or two. Later, when things become clearer, we can look for ways to bring Hamas back to operation.”

After Trump won re-election last November, PMW President Itamar Marcus told The Washington Free Beacon: “(Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud) Abbas and his people hate Trump. They think he's not up to their level of humanity. They mock the way he looks. They mock the way he talks. Now that Trump will be the president again, they think they can play him, but he should recognize exactly who they are. They see themselves as in a camp with Russia and China and the Islamic world, and they are diametrically opposed to American policy around the world."

In a September 29th speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas claimed the PA had "rejected violence and terrorism" and "adopted a culture of peace." And yet the day before, the PA's official daily continued to glorify the terrorist murderers who killed six in an attack in Jerusalem three weeks earlier as Palestinian and Islamic heroes. This is another example of the duplicity in which Israel’s enemies have engaged at least since 1948 when the modern state was restored in its ancient Jewish homeland.

Need more examples for why this latest “peace” is not what the West has been hoping for?

Palestinian schools aren’t teaching children to lay down their rhetorical arms against Israel, but to ratchet them up. PMW found a young girl in a Hebron school who said that the October 7th massacre and hostage taking by Hamas was—in her words—a “beautiful dream…We woke up to the sounds of laughter…it was impossible to express the emotions in our hearts, and we never imagined such pride in our people on our faces. The sense of honor that we felt is indescribable.”

And don’t count on so-called “journalists” to tell the truth. They’ve been pressured and threatened by Hamas to carry only their storyline. As Marcus wrote for PMW on September 1st: “Journalists in Gaza, whether working for Palestinian media or foreign newspapers, know that deviating from Hamas's version of events places their freedom and even their lives in danger. Survival comes first; truth comes second.”

Celebrating the release of hostages and mourning the dead is a legitimate response to the end of the current Gaza conflict. But Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world should not engage in self-delusion. Especially since Israel’s enemies have not repealed their charters calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, nor have they heard from Allah that he has changed his mind and told Muslims to live at peace with Israel.

Given that indisputable truth, based on history and common sense, this is not the time for Israel to beat its swords into ploughshares.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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