POINT/COUNTERPOINT: Hillary Clinton: Pandering to Terrorists or Reaching Out to Muslims?
By Joseph J. Honick
The April 10 issue of Huntingtonnews.net brought the commentary by Jim Kouri
(link: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/100410-kouri-columnsterrorsupport.html) essentially
indicting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for allegedly granting a
visit to New York of a terrorist sponsor.
Kouri went into some considerable detail but did not indicate the rationale for the permission except for helping the President's efforts to gain closer relationship with the Islamic community.
While it is certainly worth investigating the issue, one wonders why Kouri and all those authorities he quoted had so little to say when the late President Ronald Reagan was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms, intelligence and other key support to Iraq's Saddam Hussein during that country's war with Iran.
Did Kouri likewise investigate the questionable deployment of nearly 300 Marines to Lebanon where they were eventually slain in their sleeping quarters?
If Clinton has indeed helped to feed the needs of real or suspected terrorists, that certainly should be made clear. On the other hand, Kouri alleges a pattern of "friendliness" of the Clintons with terrorists because of some courtesies to Yasser Arafat.
It should be noted that a lot of Americans at one point jumped on Arafat's bandwagon out of their opposition to Israel and because the Saudis among others had and still have a heavily financed anti-Israel PR program in action. But Kouri uses terms like "casual friendship with terrorists", an indictment itself that one wonders how probing Republican opponents would have left it alone.
Joseph J. Honick is president of GMA International Ltd., Bainbridge Island, Washington, and is a contributor to Huntington News Network.