The overrated Palestinian "cause"

Aaron David Miller writes another story touting the supposed importance of a Middle East "peace" agreement, and makes the factual error of asserting that the Bush administration has "for almost seven years, the Bush administration has hung a 'Closed for the Season' sign on serious Arab-Israeli diplomacy."

He must have a short memory. When former Gen. Anthony Zinni was the "peace" envoy every trip was greeted by multiple exploding Palestinians doing their worst to prevent any hope of such an agreement. Hamas was turning its children into ordnance to prevent such an agreement, and the Palestinians were celebrating this homicidal nonsense.

He can talk about weak leaders on both sides, but at its heart the reason there is no agreement is because the Palestinians have nothing of value to offer the Israelis. No one ever focuses on this reality. In fact people like Miller adopt the fiction that the Palestinians actually have the ability to offer peace when it is blatantly obvious they could not even if they had a government that wanted to. This is not the fault of the Israelis either.

The Palestinians have the equivalent of war lords who operate several factions whose main purpose is a genocidal war against Israel. There is no effective control over these factions nor is their any desire to control them. The so called leadership finds them convenient to prosecute an informal war while pretending to seek peace in order to get funds from the US and Europe. If the Palestinians had a leader who did want to make peace with Israel, he would be murdered by one or more of these groups......

More here

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In preparation for an event that may possibly happen

I got the post below from Norm Geras. For an expert on Marx, Norm is a rather jocular soul. The point he makes below is a fun one but it assumes that you can read Italian. Being a bit of a language freak, I can (sort of) do that but very few denizens of the Anglosphere could. Assuming that readers have command of various foreign languages (from Greek to French) is an old trick of Britain's educated elite that I rather miss. Why? Because educational standards have so declined that younger writers would simply be unable to play that little one-upmanship game. The Italian below translates literally as "Ring only in case of necessity". Because I read the Italian first and thus understood what was intended, I did not get the point of Norm's post straight away but I eventually got it

Sign beneath a bell in a public lavatory at a tourist site in Florence:

Sonare solo in caso di necessita.

Underneath it, this English translation:

Please ring just in case of emergency

Which isn't quite the same thing, is it? Though 'just' can often be substituted for 'only', the substitution doesn't work for 'only in case'.

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ELSEWHERE

Light bulbs that don't signify ideas: "Everything's difficult, isn't it? In the Democratic presidential candidates' debate, Sen. Barack Obama was asked what he personally was doing to save the environment, and replied that his family was "working on" changing their light bulbs. Is this the new version of the old joke? How many senators does it take to "work on" changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008."

French self-hate: "The French dislike themselves even more than the Americans dislike them, according to an opinion poll published on Friday. The survey of six nations, carried out for the International Herald Tribune daily and France 24 TV station, said 44 percent of French people thought badly of themselves against 38 percent of U.S. respondents who had a negative view of the French."

All Your Toilets Are Belong To Us: "I'm not sure of whether I should laugh or cry when I read recently how the Kansas City International Airport has decided to install "foot basins" in the restrooms at the airport to accomodate growing number of Muslim cab drivers at the airport. I suppose I wanted to laugh because in in all my years throughout Indonesia and Malaysia, I have never seen these so-called "foot basins" installed in a toilet for Muslims to wash their feet. If they need to wash their feet, then they need to go do that at a mosque and not in an airport toilet. What made me feel like crying was the fact that these naive Americans are diving headlong into appeasement without coming to the realization that this now steady flow of "demands" will not ever cease."

Hizbullah won propaganda war: "Hizbullah won the Second Lebanon War by achieving a propaganda victory over Israel, a Harvard University study has concluded. Aided and abetted by a compliant and credulous press, Hizbullah achieved victory by convincing the world that Israel was the aggressor and that Israel's retaliatory offensive was a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers. Israel's defeat came not at the hands of Hizbullah, however, but through the internal contradictions of being the region's sole functioning democracy in the Internet age. "An open society, Israel, is victimized by its own openness," Marvin Kalb and Dr. Carol Saivetz of the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University concluded in their research paper, "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict."

Leftists help the poor? "Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s appears to be free to continue subverting democracy in his country; oil revenues are insulating his regime from the consequences of its economic mismanagement. Venezuela has dropped by two on the 2006 United Nations Human Development Report’s list of poorest nations, with over 2 million of the country’s 25 million people live on a daily income of US$1.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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