Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has lashed out at Secretary of State John Kerry for saying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen by some leaders as promoting violence and helping the Islamic State (ISIS) recruit terrorists.
“Kerry's statements on their face are absurd … This administration has this idea that if we could just solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," McCarthy said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"Of course from our government's perspective, [that] means pressure Israel into cutting a terrible deal with people who will never make a deal because they won't be satisfied with anything less than Israel's destruction.
"If only we could do that, all of our terrorism problems, our national security problems would go away and, of course, it's preposterous."
McCarthy is the former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
"I was involved in cases in the 90s when the terrorist threat first hit us domestically and it was remarkable how little conversation there was among the jihadists at the time about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute," he said.
"I'm not saying that it never came up, but they regarded America as the head of the snake and they … they'll be satisfied with nothing other than the hegemonic imposition of their version of Islam."
McCarthy said the fact that a new indictment against a suspect in the Benghazi attack doesn't mention al-Qaida isn't surprising.
"It really doesn’t change the story that the government is running with beyond the original indictment … that was actually designed to sit comfortably with the Obama administration's political claims about what happened in Benghazi," McCarthy said.
"You don't need to know anything that went on before then, including the serial jihadist attacks in eastern Libya, including an attack on that diplomatic mission itself ...
"All the al-Qaida stuff you don't need to know about it. The only thing you need to know is that this was a spontaneous sort of uprising that got out of control and that somehow terrorists, we don't want to say who, got involved in it."
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