This week, we mark the 30th anniversary of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was formally ushered in with great fanfare on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993.
The Oslo process was predicated on the assumption that the PLO had turned the corner and renounced the terrorism that had defined it.
This assumption was exposed as entirely false almost immediately after the ceremony. Despite this, Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, his ministers, the Israel Defense Forces, intelligence agencies and the media refused to walk away from the fraud that was Oslo. Still today, Israel operates in a strategic environment dictated by a false peace process with the unrepentant and active terror group.
Caroline’s guest in this week’s show was one of the first people to expose the situation. Yigal Carmon, founder and president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), brought translations of Yasser Arafat’s speeches calling for jihad to the attention of leading Israeli media figures and politicians in real-time, only to be demeaned as a biased political lobbyist for having the temerity to tell the truth.
Carmon is a former senior intelligence officer and adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Rabin.
He and Caroline discuss the reasons for the political, intelligence and media failures in responding competently to Arafat’s bad faith, as well as the disastrous consequences of Israel’s 30-year commitment to a policy based on a flawed, false premise.
They also discuss a similar intelligence failure that occurred before the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and Pentagon—circumstances that continue today by American politicians and a media that misidentifies, and in some cases ignores, the real threats and enemies.