Posted on 03/21/2016 4:47:44 PM PDT by smoothsailing
Good evening. I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true friend of Israel. I am a newcomer to politics but not to backing the Jewish state.
In late 2001, weeks after the attacks on New York City and Washington - attacks perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists, Mayor Giuliani visited Israel to show solidarity with terror victims. I sent him in my plane because I backed the mission 100%.
In Spring 2004, at the height of violence in the Gaza Strip, I was the Grand Marshal of the 40th Salute to Israel Parade, the largest single gathering in support of the Jewish state.
It was a very dangerous time for Israel and frankly for anyone supporting Israel - many people turned down this honor –I did not, I took the risk.
I didn't come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That's what politicians do: all talk, no action. I came here to speak to you about where I stand on the future of American relations with our strategic ally, our unbreakable friendship, and our cultural brother, the only democracy in the Middle East, the State of Israel.
My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making and let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic - for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East.
The problem here is fundamental. We have rewarded the world's leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion and we received absolutely nothing in return.
I've studied this issue in greater detail than almost anybody. The biggest concern with the deal is not necessarily that Iran is going to violate it, although it already has, the bigger problem is that they can keep the terms and still get to the bomb by simply running out the clock, and, of course, they keep the billions.
The deal doesn’t even require Iran to dismantle its military nuclear capability! Yes, it places limits on its military nuclear program for only a certain number of years. But when those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-size military nuclear capability ready to go, and with zero provision for delay no matter how bad Iran's behavior is. When I am president, I will adopt a strategy that focuses on three things when it comes to Iran.
First, we will stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region. Iran is a very big problem and will continue to be, but if I'm elected President, I know how to deal with trouble. Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen, and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to their puppet states.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has received sophisticated anti-ship weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, and GPS systems on rockets. Now they're in Syria trying to establish another front against Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
In Gaza, Iran is supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad - and in the West Bank they are openly offering Palestinians $7,000 per terror attack and $30,000 for every Palestinian terrorist's home that’s been destroyed.
Iran is financing military forces throughout the Middle East and it is absolutely indefensible that we handed them over $150 billion to facilitate even more acts of terror.
Secondly, we will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetrated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the western hemisphere very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach.
Third, at the very least, we must hold Iran accountable by restructuring the terms of the previous deal. Iran has already - since the deal is in place - test-fired ballistic missiles three times. Those ballistic missiles, with a range of 1,250 miles, were designed to intimidate not only Israel, which is only 600 miles away but also intended to frighten Europe, and, someday, the United States.
Do you want to hear something really shocking? As many of the great people in this room know, painted on those missiles – in both Hebrew and Farsi - were the words “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.”
What kind of demented minds write that in Hebrew? And here's another twisted part - testing these missiles does not even violate the horrible deal that we made!
The deal is silent on test missiles but those tests DO violate UN Security Council Resolutions. The problem is, no one has done anything about it. Which brings me to my next point – the utter weakness and incompetence of the United Nations.
The United Nations is not a friend of democracy. It's not a friend to freedom. It's not a friend even to the United States of America, where as all know, it has its home. And it surely isn’t a friend to Israel.
With President Obama in his final year, discussions have been swirling about an attempt to bring a security council resolution on the terms of an eventual agreement between Israel and Palestine. Let me be clear: An agreement imposed by the UN would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto. Why? Because that's not how you make a deal.
Deals are made when parties come to the table and negotiate. Each side must give up something it values in exchange for something it requires. A deal that imposes conditions on Israel and the Palestinian Authority will do nothing to bring peace. It will only further delegitimize Israel and it would reward Palestinian terrorism, because every day they are stabbing Israelis – and even Americans.
Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West Point grad who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in the street by a knife-wielding Palestinian. You don't reward that behavior, you confront it!
It's not up the United Nations to impose a solution. The parties must negotiate a resolution themselves. The United States can be useful as a facilitator of negotiations, but no one should be telling Israel it must abide by some agreement made by others thousands of miles away that don't even really know what's happening.
When I'm president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the UN to impose its will on the Jewish state. You see, I know about deal-making - that's what I do. I wrote The Art of the Deal, one of the all-time best-selling books about deals and deal making. To make a great deal, you need two willing participants.
We know Israel is willing to deal. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table, without pre-conditions, for years. You had Camp David in 2000, where Prime Minister Barak made an incredible offer – maybe even too generous. Arafat rejected it.
In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made an equally generous offer. The Palestinian Authority rejected it. Then John Kerry tried to come up with a framework and Abbas didn't even respond, not even to the Secretary of State of the United States of America!
When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the entire region.
Meanwhile, every single day, you have rampant incitement and children being taught to hate Israel and hate the Jews. When you live in a society where the firefighters are the hero’s little kids want to be firefighters.
When you live in a society where athletes and movie stars are heroes, little kids want to be athletes and movie stars. In Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder Jews - we can't let this continue. You cannot achieve peace if terrorists are treated as martyrs. Glorifying terrorists is a tremendous barrier to peace.
In Palestinian textbooks and mosques, you’ve got a culture of hatred that has been fermenting there for years, and if we want to achieve peace, they’ve got to end this indoctrination of hatred. There is no moral equivalency. Israel does not name public squares after terrorists. Israel does not pay its children to stab random Palestinians.
You see, what President Obama gets wrong about deal making is that he constantly applies pressure to our friends and rewards our enemies. That pattern, practiced by the President and his administration, including former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has repeated itself over and over and has done nothing but embolden those who hate America. We saw that with releasing $150 billion to Iran in the hope that they would magically join the world community - It's the same with Israel and Palestine.
President Obama thinks that applying pressure to Israel will force the issue, but it's precisely the opposite. Already, half the population of Palestine has been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS in Hamas, and the other half refuses to confront the first half, so it’s a very difficult situation but when the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace actually rise. That's what will happen when I’m president.
We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem - and we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.
The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable. They must come to the table willing and able to stop the terror being committed on a daily basis against Israel and they must come to the table willing to accept that Israel is a Jewish State and it will forever exist as a Jewish State.
Thank you very much, its been a great honor to be with you.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
Good speech. I'll just link to my comment on the thread where he flushed it down the toilet. The news cycle will be about his demand that Israel pay the US for it's defence, as though we defend Israel. Israel isn't Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan. Too bad.
Thanks for the info, glad to hear he handled it well.
I only caught the last five minutes and never noticed the prompter. I did notice that his words were powerful, flowed smoothly, and he never missed a beat.
LOL, I’m with you on that!
Great speech, well-delivered and well-received. I’d love to know who wrote it. I hope Trump puts him/her/them on the payroll so we can expect more like it.
the nasty woman on CNN right after the speech on Blitzer said something to the effect that poor Trump has to use a teleprompter to give an address, and she started calling it the teletrumpter
I thought... this coming from an Obama person?
They are running out of ammo.
He didn’t make a Palestine error - stop saying he did. What he said was the UN would force a deal with Palestine - that they’d call it Palestine. It’s obvious unless you’re looking to foster the preposterous notion that you’re smarter than Trump.
I agree.
Don’t know who wrote it, but I bet Trump had a lot of input.
I didn’t watch all of the speeches, but is Trump the only one that looked like he may have used a teleprompter? Don’t the rest of them use teleprompters all the time? Not sure why a teleprompter used for an important speech is considered a negative. His delivery was spot on.
He was spectacular. Folks walking away from that event must have felt the man had already been elected. He is so assured and assuring. Not just a man of words but a man who takes action after studying the situation. The entirety of today belonged to D J Trump. He owned the day. From dawn till dusk and time beyond.
Go TRUMP!!
I was certain we were working with Israel on weaponry, armament, etc. And, we have supplied (and maybe still do) a certain missile counter-strike weapon .. which takes out the enemy missile while it’s still in the air.
Are we not doing that anymore ..??
I thought his delivery was great.
I didn’t see the other speakers, just flipped on the TV to get to about the middle of this one.
He used the prompter, but he was talking in his normal tone, which is great I thought. It didn’t sound rehearsed or read, he didn’t do the Harvard Law School cadence of speech.
I would almost reckon that he had talking points or bits of pieces on the prompter, just to help him hit all the boxes he intended to hit instead of a full script, but I’m just guessing.
I thought it was great.
The woman (forgot her name, she’s on CNN often enough bashing Trump) was just trying to get the word “teletrumpter” out there I think, because she said it like 4-5 times.
The Palestinians are an imaginary people. Prior to 1948, the only people that call themselves “Palestinians” were the Jews of what became Israel in 1948. If you look at the main newspaper there on the morning after Israel declared independence, it was the Palestinian Post, a Jewish newspaper, which announced it. Up until that time, all of the non-Jews living in and around what became Israel called themselves Arabs. They did not distinguish between Arabs from Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Palestine or Egypt. They were just Arabs, according to their own preference.
There NEVER was a country called Palestine. When the Romans put down the second Jewish Revolt in approximately 135, part of the punishment inflicted upon the Jews was the renaming of their country and their capitol. The Romans insultingly named that province (because at that point the Jews were denied any vestiges of independence) after the Philistines, Israel’s most famous biblical enemy. There was never any distinct people known as Palestinians, nor did such an imaginary people have a language or literature of any kind, quite unlike the Jews. The entire concept of a Palestinian people is a fiction created in the late 1940s and early 1950s to give some international credence to the idea of these Arabs having their own nation.
As an aside, no people or nation has ever claimed Jerusalem as its capitol, except for the Jews in both ancient and modern times. Moslem claims to Jerusalem as the “third holiest city in Islam” because of the presence of the Dome of the Rock originated in the 1920s. They originated do to extreme tensions between the Moslem and Jewish populations in what was then called Palestine at the time. The Moslem leadership understood that the Jews were trying to re-create their own nation, and they did this as a counterweight to Jewish claims to sovereignty. In point of fact, Jerusalem is not mentioned one single time in the Koran, and Mohammed purposely had his followers turn their back toward Jerusalem while praying, because of the Jews had rejected him as their savior. The Dome of the Rock itself, this supposedly holy place, was nearly in ruins in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time during which the Moslem Ottoman Turkish Empire ruled the entire area. That shows how much the Moslems actually cared for the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Crock is a more accurate description of the place.
He's being compared to Lincoln now. I thought the comparisons to Washington were the top, guess not.
Who's next? Moses?
My comment is to Trumps poor campaign performance. He makes a fine speech, but on the same day does a 180 in 4 seconds of a 20 second soundbite. And the press will pick up on the nonsensical "Israel will pay for our defense" comment. Might not be fair, but it is politics, and he needs to learn to play. Not to win the Republican nomination, but the Presidency. Which comments like this will not help.
BTW, as to his “neutral” position, what about our military aid and training to the palestinians, stabbing Israelis daily.
Oh, you don’t know the code.
Amazing speech from Mr. Trump. I can just imagine the liberal heads exploding all across America, not just because he’s such a friend to Israel, but because he delivered a POWERFUL speech. Very Presidential, imho.
Very well stated.
It does seem that Trump’s education in the debate at the hands of the foreign policy master Ted Cruz have gone well.
Trump seems much reduced in his ignorance of the Middle East in this speech.
I hope he can keep it up.
Can’t believe they would criticize the use of the teleprompter considering Obama always has one.
Heck Obama even brought a teleprompter to speak to an elementary school class one time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.