I thought about writing a post on it earlier, but held off. I respect Walter Russell Mead, and I didn't feel like tearing down his essay for its disastrous moral equivalence. It's not as though he doesn't raise considerable questions of historical injustice facing the Palestinian diaspora. I'm more concerned with his legitimation of Palestian demands for the "right of return" (which are really demographic plans for the destruction of the Jewish state), and particularly the article's troubling omission of Palestinian jihad, which is a greater threat to peace than anything eminating from Tel Aviv.
Mead's essay is also noteworthy for its Obama-worship: The coming Obama administration has an historic opportunity "to improve the chances for peace and to align the United States with key Palestinian aspirations without moving away from or against Israel."
Move away from Israel?
Come on ... if the Obama administration really does align itself with "Palestinian aspirations" it would be essentially endorsing terrorism, since for Palestinian society jihad against Israel and the United States has become the defining element of the terrorists' "solution" to Middle East peace process since Yasir Arafat's renunciation of the Clinton administration's plan for a comprehensive peace in the early 1990s.
I'm returning to the Middle East peace process after reading Harold Evans' article at U.S. News, "Palestinians Training Kids to be Suicide Bombers: Teaching Children Murder and a Warped, Dangerous History":
Even when times are very bad, we take solace, irrespective of creed, in the hope symbolized by the Christmas story of birth and renewal. We indulge children and proclaim a season of peace and goodwill. Alas, this Christmas is darkened by a Bethlehem story that is not about peace, but about killing; not about how children may fufill their promise, but about how they should glory in their own extinction. There are no wise men on this horizon.Evans suggests that Hillary Clinton, Obama's incoming Secretary of State, can start the administration's Middle East agenda by demanding an end to the indoctrination and incitement to killing.
The Bethlehem that the New Testament tells us is the birthplace of Jesus is also the center of Palestinian culture and the headquarters of the Governorate of the Palestinian Authority. The Bush administration believed and hoped that the PA chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, cared enough about his people to make a decent peace with Israel, leading to a new, independent state of Palestine. Abbas has shattered those hopes. Worse, he and his associates are ensuring that the next generation of Palestinians will be incapable of making peace. They will be paralyzed by the hate and fear that they have been taught in their schoolrooms and by the national television controlled by the PA.
The extent of this corruption of children's minds was vividly exposed last week by the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, who produced a Web documentary (hosted by thedailybeast.com) based on videos culled from television by Palestinian Media Watch. It is deeply shocking to observe children being programmed for terrorism through the exaltation of suicide bombers as heroes. "Martyrdom is bliss," a child hostess says, referring to a 14-year-old suicide killer. The clips show incessant indoctrination that Islam wants the death of adults and children for Allah and will reward those who achieve Shahada, which Palestinian Media Watch equates with death for Allah. "I have let my land drink my blood, and I have loved the way of Shahada," intones a young boy.
Children being taught murder by rote is child abuse, a mental deformation more damaging than physical injury. Equally disgusting is the demonization of Jews based on a phony history of the Holocaust. Remember the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews? Well, take a look at the scene from a PA Fatah "educational video" in which children acting and singing about history recite: "They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust, their knife cuts to the length and width of our flesh. They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings. ... When an oven stops burning, they light 100 [more]." A body called the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust organized an exhibit, one feature of which, according to al-Ayyam, one of the largest Palestinian newspapers, is "an oven and inside it small [Palestinian] children are being burned. The picture speaks for itself."
This endlessly fraudulent education has had devastating effects on the prospects for peace. The world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84 percent of Palestinians approved.
This aspect of a movement toward a "comprehensive settlement" is not mentioned in Walter Russell Mead's essay at Foreign Affairs.
7 comments:
Yes, Mead is typical of all too many in the foreign policy establishment, not to mention our political elites. They've bought into the "two state" business.
I salute you, Donald, for mentioning the Palestinian demand for a "right of return." Most all news stories you read ignore it and simply talk about "land for peace."
"Land for peace" was possible with Egypt and Jordan because they had and have sane leaders. The Palestinians do not.
Who among them are we even supposed to negotiate with? Fatah or Hamas? The former is only nominally in control, and the latter is part of the rejectionist camp. Any Palestinian state would be in a constant state of civil war, with most of it in full terrorist mode.
The left claims that granting them a state would pull the rug out from under the radicals, but I don't see that at all. Until they can behave themselves negotiations are a fools errand.
As with most of the articles in Foreign Affairs, this one requires being printed out and read slowly -- and I have more reading to do. I shall read it more slowly.
But I have been reading articles in that august journal for many years now, from important people like Walid Khalidi to Henry Kissinger, and one common thread runs through all of them: the problems of the Levant are described in Western terms, addressed to a Western audience, with proposed solutions which work very well in a Western mindset, yet are just so much garbage to the people who must actually make peace and live together.
Once you convert the problem to one of Western definitions, it becomes very simple: everyone splits the difference, and agrees to give up part of what they'd like in order to secure what they want most. It is simply assumed that, in the end, everybody really wants peace.
Foreign Affairs position as the most prestigious scholarly journal on the subject naturally means that it draws the articles from the top names, the most influential people. They are willing, and eager, to put forth Their Solution, the one they have pondered carefully, and fine-tuned diligently, the one which just might succeed where all others have failed.
But it's an illusion. The Western solutions have simply not been very different over the past 41 years. They all involve some form of Palestinian state, guarantees of security for Israel, mutual diplomatic recognition -- albeit occasionally delayed -- and one form or other of great power guarantees. Two decades ago, some expected the Soviet Union to have some major role in the pushing for and guaranteeing of peace. Now, with the USSR gone, we see proposals for the UN to take over, or US guarantees, or the so-called "Quartet," but those are simply the minute details, the slightly different brush strokes on what is the same paint-by-numbers picture.
What we have missed, and what our esteemed host noted obliquely, is that the people and culture of the region are so foreign to our Western concepts and logic as to make Westernized solutions ridiculous.
Let's specify one thing here, something that is never really considered by our learned Western scholars: right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Palestinians primarily, and some of the Israelis as well, are much more interested in victory than they are in peace, especially a split-the-differences negotiated peace.
What we have are two sides in a long, bitter, usually low-level war, one with an occasional flare-up, but a war that nobody has won -- and nobody has lost. The great Israeli victories in 1967 and 1973 were not victorious wars, wars which actually defeated their enemies, but strong pushes that were ended not with defeat by anyone but simple agreements to stop fighting for a time. Why should the Arab irredentists surrender in the pursuit of their stated goal -- the expulsion of Israel -- when they have never truly been defeated?
I want to know why the media is AWOL regarding the Palestinian training of kids to hate another race? They certainly expose it when the Klan inculcates their kids into their beliefs (and rightfully so). I guess there's no political benefit for them.
Mr. Mead is mentally somewhere between La-La Land and Oz. Let's get this straight, just a couple of years ago Israel held out an olive branch by pulling all its soldiers and about 10,000 Israelis out of the Gaza Strip. There was a wonderful moment when we thought that a two state solution was near. Israel was ready to offer a connecting route between the West Bank and Gaza. Please remember that this is a very, very small area of the world...in a few hours of driving you can go from Eilat in the South all the up to the Lebanonese border to go skiing.
And what did Israel get in return. The residents of Gaza voted in Hamas, a terrorist organization that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Hamas has done nothing but prepare itself for battle and send rockets into southern Israel.
If there are Palestinians who want peace and a two state solution now is the time to stand up. Not next week. Now. Israel just brought down to the Gaza border a whole division that has spent the last few months training to do only one thing....invade the Gaza Strip. Hamas knows this. Egypt is trying its best to get in the middle and Livni is going to Cairo to talk. But time is precious. Once Israel goes after Hamas, one does not know where it will end. Unintended consequences.
Israel needs the Palestinians as partners in peace. Obama and Clinton can dance on the head of a pin, but without the Palestinians it is meaningless. Mead's article is his version of the past and is totally meaningless...worthless. It's now that counts.
It reminds me of the story of the frog and the scorpion. I'll go ahead and paste/clip the end. The moral of the story is that we are human animals who will act according to nature. When the Western minds expect the Palestinians to pursue peace, projecting a different nature of the Palestinian conflict - in Western terms - they don't realize that nature will drive the Palestinians to die to kill the Israelis. There is no way to solve the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The religious natures are in opposition and there can be no peace in the brotherhood of man between them. Israel is forced, by militant religious extremism, to maintain peace through strength. Palestine is the aggressor in it's religion of hate. Any efforts to take the side of Palestine is advice to the destruction of Israel and cannot be morally justified, imo. A religion that produces child suicide bombers is a "scorpion religion" producing the nature of the conflict, imo. The only solution is to convert Palestinians to a peaceful religion and I don't see that as feasible. Israel must be supported unilaterally against a hostile aggressor bent on genocide against Israel. Here's the scorpion story. I think people need to go back to basics... and this is pretty basic. Should be required reading by any who suggest Palestine can be allowed to politically ride piggyback in relation to Israel in any way... as if they could be trusted.
http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html
So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.
Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.
"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.
"I could not help myself. It is my nature."
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
Self destruction - "Its my Nature", said the Scorpion.
Trackback by Yet another Western solution.
"Palestine is the aggressor in it's religion of hate. Any efforts to take the side of Palestine is advice to the destruction of Israel and cannot be morally justified, imo. "
Grace, you keep wowing us with your sound reasoning skills, where did you get this supposed fact from? Another one from thin air, or where you hearing Jesus in your head again?
Proof that religious fanaticism is a live and well in Christianity.
We just have to read you.
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