The United States and Israel have had a long running standard of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, but that has changed with the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, allowing the terror community to "dictate reality," international lawyer Michal Cotler-Wunsh told Newsmax on Tuesday.
"Well, here we are with that good old double standard that Israel is held to and the understanding or the ramification is, as you said, that it turns out we do negotiate with terrorists," Cotler-Wunsh, an antisemitism expert, said in an interview on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
"We have been negotiating with terrorists, and we negotiate with all those that support those terrorists," she added.
Cotler-Wunsh said she includes NATO countries of Qatar and Turkey after "the worst attack of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, that burned and raped and pillaged and massacred and mutilated and abducted" hostages.
"Abduction is a standing violation of international law," Cotler-Wunsh added. "Every second of every minute of every day, of every 333 days that have passed since is another offense to international law. It is another war crime."
And by negotiating, "we have enabled terror to dictate reality," she said. "These are just terror proxies. Hamas is just one proxy, Hezbollah, the Houthis, are all proxies of an Islamic murderous regime in Iran that holds its own civilians, just like these proxies use them, as human shields, as weapons, as sacrifices, and as currency."
The international community, she added, is failing to see the "axis of evil" that is forming.
"Iran is but one party," said Cotler-Wunsh. "I would add to that [Vladimir] Putin's Russia; I would add to that China. We are, in fact, on the brink or in an existential moment, the existential moment with Israel on the front lines."
But the negotiations were not to be happening with terrorists, she added.
"When you do negotiate with terrorists or level the playing field, or apply a false moral equivalence between a democratic country defending itself from genocidal entities, [you are] openly declaring the intent to annihilate it, to murder Jews," said Cotler-Wunsh.
"What we have done is emboldened those entities to dictate reality, discourse, and equations, and that's not just an existential moment," she said.
When asked if that means wider war with Iran, Cotler-Wunsh called on keeping sanctions on the country, but also with Turkey and Qatar, which "houses Hamas at the Four Seasons as we speak."
By negotiating with terrorist entities, "we empower it, we embolden it, and we make clear that there are prices that democracies are willing to pay, and these prices will continue to rise," she said.
That does not only include Israel and Jews around the world, but an "attack on our shared civilization by barbarism," Cotler-Wunsh added.
She also pointed to the pro-Palestinian and anti-U.S. protests in New York City, which "didn't even take a day to respond" after the execution of Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages over the weekend in Gaza.
"If he had been executed by ISIS, we would not have seen thousands in the streets of New York City," said Cotler-Wunsh. "We would have had sheer shock and horror as we did with ISIS. If we apply these double standards differentiating between Hamas and ISIS, you think ISIS is not empowered, too, and so this becomes a problem for the world."
Meanwhile, "not one country" has stepped up to apply pressure against countries that harbor terrorists, and that is "clearly a failure of the international community," she said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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