A newly appointed Middle East director at the State Department with a dangerously shallow understanding of Middle East reality - by Stephen M. Flatow

...Someone who perceives Israel’s legitimate self-defense actions as “inflammatory,” “provocative” and “unhelpful,” and who thinks that Israel and Palestinian terrorists are equally to blame for the erosion of hope, has a dangerously shallow understanding of Middle East reality.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
10 August '17..

The newly appointed Middle East director at the State Department has a long record of criticizing and pressuring Israel. Isn’t anybody at the White House paying attention to who’s being hired over at Foggy Bottom?

David Satterfield, who is slated to become assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs next month, played a significant role in U.S. policy and diplomacy concerning Israel and the Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A look at some of his comments from that period reveals he repeatedly suggested a moral equivalency between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism.

Consider Satterfield’s remarks at the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (CPAP) Nov. 2, 2001. The date is important. It was the height of the second intifada. There was Palestinian terrorism on a daily basis. In the weeks prior, suicide bombers had struck at the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem (15 dead, 130 wounded) and the Nahariya train station (three dead, 94 wounded). In the midst of this bloodshed, Satterfield criticized Palestinian terrorism—and then proceeded to criticize Israel.

Making the aggressor and the victim appear to be equivalent, Satterfield declared (according to The Associated Press): “The intifada, whatever its origin, has become an ongoing process of calculated terror and escalation, reciprocated by actions which all too often by Israel proved inflammatory and provocative. Steps must be taken to bring this to a halt.”

And a brief word about Satterfield’s troubling choice of venue.

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