Morton Klein
Morton KleinScreenshot

With the world concentrating on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's hard-hitting remarks at the UN General Assembly on Monday, the Zionist Organization of America turns attention to President Barack Obama's address to the UN – and what it calls his "baseless and offensive claim" that "the violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace."

Obama addressed the UN on Sept. 24, two days before PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of "genocide" from the same podium.

President Obama said in his address, "The situation in Iraq, Syria and Libya should cure anyone of the illusion that this conflict [between Palestinians and Israelis] is the main source of problems in the region."

He then mentioned the Muslim extremist violence "engulfing the region" in the same breath as the "too many Israelis [who are] ready to abandon the hard work of peace."

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, "It is remarkable that President Obama can deduce from current Middle Eastern developments and realities that Israel is to be chided for not pursuing peace."

"In fact," Klein continued, "it is the PA which has made not a single concession, while continuing unabated with its glorification of terrorists, incitement to hatred and murder, denial of Jewish history in Israel, non-acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state and publicly stating that a future Palestinian state will never allow Jews."

Klein further noted that the PA has "concluded a unity regime agreement with Hamas, the U.S.- and European Union-listed terrorist organization that calls in its Charter for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews," and has "refused without counter-offer U.S. and Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood throughout virtually the whole of Judea/Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem in 2000 and again in 2008."

"Instead of admitting his errors" in promoting the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic movements, and in concentrating on the Israeli situation so exclusively, "President Obama has chided Israel for supposedly tiring of peace, even as he now rightly claims that the Israeli/Palestinian issue is not the heart of the Middle East's problems at all -- a position the ZOA has long argued."