PALM BEACH– Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized his Democratic rivals and promised to work for peace in the Middle East if re-elected, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday in Florida.
The meeting capped a week in which Netanyahu addressed the US Congress and held talks with Joe Biden.
Kamala Harris snubbed Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when protocol required her to be alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson, and invented an event on her schedule as a pretext for not attending and to please radical extremists who burned US flags in Washington and painted symbols analogous to Palestinian Hamas terrorists on statues. For two days, left-wing extremists vandalized a monument in the US capital in protest of Netanyahu’s visit.
“We have incompetent people running our country,” Trump told Netanyahu, before describing Harris as worse than Biden.
“Peace, not war”
“If we win, it will be very simple. Everything will be fixed, and very quickly,” the Republican said. “If we don’t, we could end up with major wars in the Middle East and perhaps a third world war.”
Trump’s campaign later issued a statement about the meeting, in which he “pledged that when he returns to the White House, he will do everything in his power to bring peace to the Middle East and prevent anti-Semitism from spreading to America’s college campuses,” where violent acts have been reported in protests against the war in Gaza.
Trump welcomed Netanyahu and his wife Sara at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in southeastern Florida.
The Israeli leader posted a photo online showing himself holding a hat emblazoned with “TOTAL VICTORY” – which he has pledged to achieve against Hamas in Gaza – as he stood next to Trump.
Friday’s meeting was much friendlier than the one Netanyahu and Harris had on Thursday, after she skipped his speech in a show of contempt. Harris had told reporters she would not remain “silent” on the plight of the Palestinians in the face of Netanyahu’s presence in Washington.
On Friday, Trump described Harris as a “radical leftist person” and said he found her comments “disrespectful.” “They were not very nice in relation to Israel,” he added.
The Palestinian enclave has been the victim of more than nine months of Israeli operations against Hamas, which launched an attack in October that left 1,200 people dead in Israel, hundreds wounded and hostages taken, most of them civilians, according to official Israeli figures.
Israel is determined to exterminate Hamas and end the state of terror and death that this terrorist organization has sown and caused the current war.
Source: With information from AFP.