Rubio Campaign Press Release - This Is Why America Needs to Stand By Israel Right Now

October 8, 2015

Over the past month, Palestinians have staged a series of riots and terrorist attacks targeting Israelis. Last week, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem and injured two others, including a two-year old boy. Several days earlier, a terrorist ambushed an Israeli family driving through the West Bank, murdering two parents in front of their four children, ages four months to nine years. Those attacks were only the start. On Wednesday alone, Palestinians reportedly staged over 100 rock attacks, 35 fire bombings, and another series of stabbings.

This terrorism follows weeks of growing violence against Israel, from firebomb attacks on Israeli security forces at the Temple Mount to Palestinian rock throwers, who stoned a Jewish driver in Jerusalem, forcing him off the road and killing him. Reminiscent of the days when Yasser Arafat talked peace in English and jihad in Arabic, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — a man President Obama regularly hails as a peacemaker — is inciting the bloodshed. "Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah," he recently declared on Palestinian television. "Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre . . . [Israelis] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet."

Abbas has used such anti-Semitic language to promote lies that Jews are defiling the Al-Aqsa mosque area and attempting to alter the status quo, in an attempt to take it over. He followed this incitement by declaring at the United Nations last week that he was no longer bound by peace agreements with Israel. The very next day, Fatah claimed responsibility for the brutal terrorist attack in the West Bank — an attack which killed an American citizen.

And what has been the Obama administration's response to weeks of official Palestinian incitement, anti-Semitism, and violence?

Click here to read the rest of Marco's op-ed on Medium.