PLO official says Netanyahu speech full of 'hate language and slander'

PLO Executive Committee Member Hanan Ashrawi issued her statement to the media shortly after Netanyahu addressed the opening session of the 69th UN General Assembly in New York on Monday.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
PLO Executive Committee Member Hanan Ashrawi accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of blatantly manipulating facts and misleading the United Nations by delivering a speech filled with “hate language, slander and argument of obfuscation.”
She issued her statement to the media shortly after Netanyahu addressed a session of the 69th UN General Assembly in New York on Monday.
“Obviously Netanyahu has lost touch with reality, particularly in refusing to acknowledge the fact of the occupation itself or the actions of the Israeli army of occupation in committing massacres and war crimes,” Ashrawi said.
Instead of attacking Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the UN Human Rights Council, Netanyahu should have taken responsibility for those crimes, Ashrawi said.
“The UN podium would have been the most appropriate place for Netanyahu to announce his acceptance of all relevant UN resolutions and his adherence to international law and universal human rights,” Ashrawi said.
She charged that Netanyahu had turned to the Arab world instead of accepting at two-state solution on the pre-1967 lines to buy “more time to create facts that will destroy the chances of peace for the foreseeable future.”
“By creating false analogies between the Nazi concept of ‘master race’ and his view of militant Islam as upholding a ‘master faith,’ he is extending in effect the analogy to Israel as a ‘master state.’ Blaming the victim has always been the failed policy of the politically and morally bankrupt, and Netanyahu is no exception,” she said.