[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E753-E755]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

ADDRESS OF MAJORITY LEADER TOM DELAY ON RECEIVING THE FRIEND OF ISRAEL
AWARD

______

HON. TOM LANTOS

of california

in the house of representatives

Thursday, April 10, 2003

Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to call the attention of my
colleagues to an outstanding speech given by Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
His remarks were made when he received the ``Friend of Israel Award''
at the Washington Briefing of Stand for Israel--an organization under
the aegis of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. This
statement is of unmistakable importance in its application of American
values and moral clarity to the political problems of the Middle East.
Mr. Speaker, the acts of terrorists--blowing up school buses, bombing
markets, killing innocent children--are unmatched in their cowardice. I
fully share Congressman DeLay's belief that murderers should neither be
trusted nor rewarded for their crimes. He eloquently stated: ``As a
friend of Israel, and a lover of liberty for all God's children, we
must reject any suggestion that its government negotiation from
weakness, stand on an even moral footing with suicide bombers or trust
the promises of terrorists.'' These words should serve as the
foundation of U.S. Peacemaking in the Middle East.
Majority Leader DeLay understands that there can be no such thing as
evenhandedness between good and evil. As Americans we can do nothing
less. America did not

[[Page E754]]

waver when our British friends were imperiled by Nazi force during
World War II. We did not tremble when Stalin and his successors
threatened the destruction of our NATO allies in Europe. Mr. Speaker,
as America confronts evil at home and around the world, we must stand
with the democratic State of Israel and against the terrorist scourge
that threatens its people and its existence.
Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to read Congressman DeLay's
principled statement.

Speech of Majority Leader Tom DeLay at Stand for Israel Washington
Briefing Dinner, April 2, 2003.

Thank you. I'm not a great award recipient. There are so
many people that need to be thanked that worked so hard for
so many reasons to support Israel. It's great to see so many
of my friends in the audience that came to be with us
tonight, and all the others that I haven't met yet, I just
say to you and you'll understand when I say, to God belongs
the glory.
So I really want to thank you for this honor and I
especially want to thank my good friend Tom Lantos for being
here and he greatly deserves this award for his longstanding
work in the Congress as well as work with Israel. He stands
like a rock on behalf of Israel and has always stood that way
and you can tell the worth of a man by the woman who stands
beside him, and Annette is here tonight. She is always by
Tom's side, and they work as a team and we greatly appreciate
them. I just really have the utmost respect for Tom Lantos
and have become closer to him over the last year or so, and
greatly appreciate my friendship with him, and I do love him.
He is really a wonderful, wonderful man.
As we meet here tonight, something extraordinary is
happening on the other side of the world. Hundreds of
thousands of trained and dedicated volunteers, an army of
virtue, are liberating a nation. Pretty Amazing. Mile by
mile, a blood-thirsty dictator's grip on a noble people
slips. Town by town, Iraqi families realize what smiling
people in camouflage uniforms have won for them. And day-by-
day, children wake up for the first morning of their lives to
God's freedom. This is the meaning of Operation Iraqi
Freedom.
We all know greater love hath no man than this, than he lay
down his life for his friends. Yet today, in Iraq, liberating
armies are risking their own lives in a land and for a people
they have never before met. Decades long Iraqi pleas for
freedom and justice will soon be answered. But my friends
theirs is not the only voice that cries out in the desert.
For as we meet tonight, in that same part of the world,
violent men plot the deaths of school children. These men
view innocent human life as a means to an end and murder as a
propaganda technique. These men act outside the boundaries of
humanity and these men support a career terrorist too long
tolerated by the civilized world.
Tonight our thoughts are with the people of Israel, and it
is on their behalf, the courageous who live everyday in the
cross-hairs of such men, that I accept this award and proudly
count myself as a friend of Israel.
You know after Operation Iraqi Freedom is won, and it will
be won, international attention necessarily focused on the
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime will disperse. There will
be the re-building of Iraq and its welcomed return to the
community of nations, there will be a simmering crisis in
North Korea, there will be strained relationships with old
friends to address, and a blossoming alliance with the
surging powers of new Europe to solidify.
And there will be, as we all well know, calls on Israel to
set aside decades of experience and once again trust the
words and paper of a terrorist entity bent on her
destruction. Voices will call on the United States to serve
as an honest broker in negotiations between the Palestinian
Authority and the Israeli government. They will call on
Israel to take risks for peace. As a friend of Israel, and a
lover of liberty for all God's children, we must reject any
suggestion that its government negotiate from weakness, stand
on even moral footing with suicide bombers, or trust the
promises of terrorists. The United States stands for justice
and that means we stand for Israel.
Our qualms are not with the Palestinian people, but their
self appointed leaders. Yasser Arafat and his thugs do not
serve the interests of the Palestinian people, they are
exploiters, in business today as always, only for themselves.
They perpetuate violence and misery in a country that has
known too much of both. Negotiating with these men who
sharpen their tongues like swords is folly, and any agreement
arrived at through such empty negotiations would amount to a
covenant with death as generations of Israelis have already
witnessed.
Yasser Arafat and his cronies are enemies of peace and a
threat to the community of civilized nations. The Palestinian
people, used as pawns by Arafat's regime, do not desire this
existence. More and more of them are coming to realize the
barriers to this new life are not in Ariel Sharon's cabinet
but Yasser Arafat's compound. Palestinians and the Arab world
at large tragically have only their corrupt leaders to blame
for their economic depravation, not Americans and not
Israelis.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in Iraq today we are making a stand
against oppressive terror. It is not the first time and it
won't be the last. The United States and it allies will no
longer live in fear of terrorist networks of global reach,
nor of their state sponsors. That is why we are in war
tonight in Iraq. We are disarming a dangerous regime because
it threatens the security of the world. The President has
directed his advisors to craft a plan, to do it with speed
and precision never before witnessed in the history of war.
The plan is working, the military is advancing, and the
under-informed talking heads of the media elite are just dead
wrong.
We thank God every day that the President is a man of faith
and a man of confidence. But it must frustrate him to hear
the incessant carping of blow dried Napoleons hunkered down
in their air-conditioned studios night after night on the
twenty-four hour news networks. Peter Arnette thinks a war
plan that advanced hundreds of miles in a week, in less than
a week, is a failure. Geraldo Rivera drew a map in the sand
of American positions for our enemies to see. Well
thankfully, President Bush has also drawn in the sand. He has
drawn a line beyond which the civilized world will not accept
the behavior of evil men. We will free ourselves from
terrorist threats and free those who live under terrorist
regimes.
Americans have defended our freedom for more than two
hundred years and Israelis have done the same for more than
fifty. We are opposed by many of the same enemies who use
many of the same tactics. Israel's fight is our fight against
terror and for humanity. The United States therefore can not
serve as a disinterested broker between an ally and its
terrorist enemy. There is no moral equivalence between an
aggressor and a man who defends himself against aggression,
just as there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and
the Israeli government sworn to stop them, despite the absurd
assertions of the State Department's newly released human
rights reports.
This report just boggles my mind. This report is designed
to document human rights conditions in countries all around
the globe, however it compares the human rights record of a
free, tolerant, and pluralistic nation with that of a
terrorist network. There is no comparison and to assert one
is absolutely ridiculous. Israel is governed by
democratically elected representatives. The Palestinian
Authority is governed by a gang of murderers. Experience and
common sense lead to one conclusion about America's proper
role in the Middle East. We are absolutely right to stand
with Israel and our opponents are absolutely wrong. The moral
ambiguities of our diplomatic elites not withstanding, Israel
is not the problem, Israel is the solution.
The House of Representatives said as much, they shouted in
fact, by a margin of 352 to 21, by passing the resolution
that Tom Lantos and I sponsored last year. The resolution
affirmed America's solidarity with Israel, supported Israel's
right to self-defense, urged all Arab states to denounce all
forms of terrorism and encouraged the alleviation of the
needs of the Palestinian people. Any viable plans for peace
must require the Palestinian Authority to do the same and to
permanently sever ties with those who do not.
President Bush has laid out a bold vision to this extent.
He has made it clear Israel must have a right to defend
herself and that the Palestinian Authority must stop its acts
of terror once and for all. Certain parties to the peace
process, more interested in appeasing aggression than
combating terrorism, have forfeited their right to leadership
on this issue. The United States is the world's defender of
freedom, and Israel is one of our greatest allies. We won't
allow anyone to reward terrorists and terrorist acts, least
of all nations and organizations who appease Saddam Hussein
and who continue to appease Yasser Arafat.
This struggle is one of good versus evil. Nations and
organizations who fail to distinguish between the two
disqualify themselves from input on this matter. The
President understands Israel must not be asked to negotiate
with the men terrorizing its innocent citizens even as speak.
The Palestinian Authority and their state sponsors must end
the violence. This must be an act of principle, not some
gesture of goodwill. The Palestinian Authority's words have
no meaning, their actions do. The violence must stop--period.
No negotiations.
And when it does, and not before, the Palestinian people
will have a real, viable opportunity for peace. Thankfully,
President Bush understands that no peace process worthy of
its name can be obscured by appeasers or moral relativists.
He understands that process for its own sake is not the goal,
the security of our allies is the goal, and no quartet of
appeasement will obscure that fact.
You know, though tested by generations of fire, the people
of Israel do not exhibit malice or even seek revenge. Much
like everyday Palestinians, they just want peace and the
security to live their own lives, free from want and free
from fear. They are not fools, and should not be expected to
bargain with murderers. But when a new generation of
Palestinian leaders arise, with a real and lasting peace as
their goal, and more importantly the authority and will to
deliver on it, a comprehensive solution may finally be
attainable. But Israel should not be expected to offer
substantive concessions while the Palestinian leaders offer
only empty promises. Israel should have the freedom to defend
its national security and to negotiate at a time and on terms
set by its democratic government, not those imposed by anyone
else.

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To be a friend of Israel demands no less than supporting
her through these very difficult days, as well as the better
ones we all know await her, and await her people in the
future. And despite decades of terror in the holy cradle of
faith, we must hope, as did a fifteen year-old girl hiding in
Amsterdam writing in her diary less than a month before she
was taken to Auschwitz, ``I somehow feel that everything will
change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that
peace and tranquility will return once more.''
You know Ladies and Gentlemen, through God's grace, the
friendship of the United States and Israel will endure to see
the dreams of that little girl fill the whole world with
light and truth forever.

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