1/18/11, "Palestinian flag allowed to fly over PLO’s Washington office," Jewish Review
"The Obama administration will allow the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington to fly the Palestinian flag
- and assume the title of “delegation.”
The change in status comes with no enhancement in diplomatic status, U.S. officials said.
The new privileges for the PLO office do not mean the representation has “any diplomatic privileges or immunities,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
“At the request of the PLO representative, which we have granted given the improvement in the relations between the United States and Palestinians, they have requested permission to fly the Palestinian flag,” he said. “And they have requested permission to call themselves the General Delegation of the PLO, which is a name that conforms to how they describe their missions in Europe, Canada, and several Latin American countries.”...
- Not everyone liked the decision.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking member on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, tied her efforts to eject the PLO from Washington to congressional efforts to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, another law that presidents have routinely waived since its passage in 1995.
“Instead of giving more undeserved gifts to the PLO, it’s time for us to kick the PLO out of the U.S. once and for all and move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, where it belongs,” she said in a statement....
PLO representation in Washington was made illegal under a number of laws in the mid 1980s, when the group
- was widely regarded as terrorist....
Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, have cultivated the PLO and its leadership of the Palestinian Authority as a means of stemming the influence of Hamas, a radical Islamist terrorist group."...
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- Reference: 7/23/10, "U.S. upgrades diplomatic ties with Palestinians in bid to woo Abbas," Haaretz
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