Sunday, October 18, 2015

3rd intifada: Israel under terror (October 18, 2015)

More than 30 dead in Israel as Palestinians armed with knives attack innocents. What’s responsible? A campaign of incitement, which slanderously accuses Jews of intruding on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and murdering Arab children in cold blood.

And who is legitimizing this campaign? None other than Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whom President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have long held up as a peacemaker. “I think nobody would dispute that whatever disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who has committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue,” Obama told writer Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014.

That’s a strange view of commitment. This is the same Abbas, remember, who rejected then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s absurdly generous 2008 peace offer. The same Abbas who resisted negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the 10-month settlement freeze in 2010, which Obama demanded explicitly on the grounds that it would give Abbas the cover he needed to begin talks. Abbas finally relented to Saudi pressure, and attended a few meetings with Netanyahu that September. But under no definition of what the word “negotiation” actually means were these meetings for real: The freeze was about to expire, the get togethers were perfunctory, and nothing of significance was discussed. The farce ended soon after.

It is a lie to say that Mahmoud Abbas is committed to a diplomatic resolution. Just as it was a lie when, the other day at Harvard, Secretary Kerry attributed the bloodshed to “a frustration that is growing” because of the “massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years.” As Elliott Abrams points out, there has been an increase in the population of the settlements, but not in their size. As if the settlements have any connection to what’s happening in the first place: The terror gripping Israel is the result of a Palestinian leadership so adrift and corrupt, so aggrieved and conspiratorial, that it encourages the radicalization of its youth and promotes an atmosphere of hatred and murder.

More...
















































































































































Posted by Watcher at 10/18/2015 11:33:00 AM | | E-mail this article

Labels: , , , , , ,

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)