Bill Whittle narrates this clear summation of 20th and 21st century relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  It does not reflect well on the Arabs:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Once again, Israel is apparently blathering on about its willingness to agree to a two state solution.  This so irritates me.  There is already a two state solution.  It’s called Jordan, and has been Jordan since the 1920s.  What the loopy-loo wackos on the Left (and, increasingly, in the middle) don’t understand, is that the Arabs have never wanted and will never want a two state solution.  They want a Judenrein world, and they’re patient.

It is this desire for a one state (all Arab) solution, that explains why, as Rick Richman points out, no Middle East solutions have worked thus far.  Also, as one of Rick’s readers pointed out, we in the West further that goal by making Arab single-mindedness functional (emphasis mine):

In other words, not only is the two state solution redundant, it will never happen.

I’ve been reading two things that seem to twine together.  The first is the ongoing news out of Gaza, about Hamas continuously firing missiles into Israel (as well as into their own population).  Noah Pollak wrote a very good commentary in response to a question about why Hamas, through its outpost in Gaza, keeps fighting and fighting and fighting.  The answer, of course, is that Hamas fights because that is its nature.  Fighting is its raison d’etre.  Without fighting, there is nothing.

The second thing I’ve been reading, which at first glance seems unrelated, is Rabbi Joseph Teluskin’s Biblical Literacy: The Most Important People, Events, and Ideas of the Hebrew Bible — a very informative and enjoyable retelling of the Old Testament, along with Rabbinical commentary.

The story of Abraham and Sarah, of course, brings up the history of Hagar and Ishmael. Telushkin reminds us of two things about Ishmael. First, he repeats the prophecy that God’s angel made about Ishmael:  “He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.” (Genesis, 16:12.) The second is the fact that the Muslim Arabs claim descent from this same Ishmael.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

[Link fixed. Thanks, Gringo.]

Ymarsakar brought to my attention a post I wrote over three years ago.  I’m reprinting a slightly edited version here, not just because I think it describes well the Arab psyche that drives so much of current international politics (and fears) today, but also because I think it does a good job of describing the Leftist psyche, which sees all politics as personal, and which wallows in victimization and anger:

***

Neo-Neocon got hold of an Atlantic Monthly from October 1961 with a Martha Gelhorn article about the Palestinian refugees, who were still a reasonably new phenomenon back then. Neo-Neocon’s whole post, which excerpts large parts of the article is sad reading, and Martha Gelhorn is amazingly prescient.  I wanted to focus on just one part of the article, in which Gelhorn describes the fact that, despite the rather pathetic situation of many of the Arabs (and Gelhorn is clearly sympathetic to their plight), she simply cannot feel sorry for them:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why…It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless….

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser’s solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

There are a couple of interesting things about Gelhorn’s conclusion. First, I think it goes a long way to put to rest the Left’s drum beat about our being the logical victims of Arab hate because of the things we’ve done to them. America is not hated because she is the evil Imperialist boogey man of the world.  Instead, she is currently the most logical victim of Arab hate because hate is an integral part of Arab culture and we’re simply the biggest target — not to mention (at least to date) Israel’s staunchest friend.

Second, I found this 44 year old language made a nice bookend to a book review that the American Enterprise Institute did about a book written by a U.N. insider (hat tip: Power Line). The book being reviewed is The UN Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat, by Pedro Sanjuan, an American who served on the staff of the secretary-general for more than a decade. The review is aptly entitled A Stagnant Cesspool in Turtle Bay.

You don’t need a lot of imagination or insight to realize that both the review and the book describe an organization that, since its post-WWII heyday (or maybe its post-Cold War heyday), is nothing but a money-wasting boondoggle for professional bureaucrats hostile to the U.S. (Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you.) What makes the review interesting for purposes of this post is the fact that the U.N. has gone from being a Western dominated institution to being one in the thrall of multiple Islamic countries who draw their U.N. salaries from the West (mostly America), but are irrevocably (and corruptly) hostile to its interest and to Israel.

In other words, they still are filled with hate, just as they were 44 years ago:

During the Cold War, the most serious problem posed by the organization was infiltration of the Secretariat by Soviet intelligence. Indeed, Mr. Sanjuan writes, “the Soviets actually controlled every important aspect of the U.N. Secretariat.” Some of his anecdotes are wildly funny–though they weren’t so funny at the time.

Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet hegemony at the Secretariat has been replaced by the growing influence of the Islamic bloc. Further, before 1989 the U.N. was basically a playground for representatives of irrelevant Third World states to pretend to be important (and enjoy shopping at Bloomingdale’s), while the U.S. and the Soviet Union confronted one another in more important places. Since the collapse of the latter, however, the Secretariat has refocused on undermining the United States–and the U.N.’s other bugaboo–Israel.

Indeed, the most shocking part of this book is the unwholesome obsession of the U.N. culture with Jews real or imagined, whether in Israel or the United States. Although Israel should have roughly 15 nominees working in the Secretariat, until recently there wasn’t a single one; even now, a disproportionate number are Palestianians with Israeli passports. As for the United States, it is alleged to be wholly under the thumb of Jews. When congressional critics like Senator Nancy Kassebaum or the late Senator John Heinz raise embarrassing questions that have nothing to do with Israel–say, about the U.N.’s finances–they are blithely dismissed as Jews themselves.

Apparently the first question put to Mr. Sanjuan himself when he joined the secretary-general’s staff (by his Soviet deputy) was “So your father was a Jew, yes?”) That such nonsense could take place during the tenure of a recycled Austrian Nazi like Kurt Waldheim can hardly surprise, but what are we to say when they continue under his successor, a low-rent Peruvian with the made-up name of Perez de Cuellar?

The only thing that saves the Jews from the malevolent obsession that the Islamic countries have brought to the U.N. is the organization’s gross inefficiency.  It burns up money, but does nothing (if you ignore school girl rapes and massive financial scandals, of course):

The principal characteristic of the organization, in Mr. Sanjuan’s telling, is its massive waste of resources. The Secretariat alone employs 6,000 people at annual budget of more than $2 billion. What do these people do? Nobody can actually say, and it is considered bad form to ask.  Its functionaries arrive at 10 a.m., take a three-hour lunch, and usually depart for their homes at 4 p.m. to avoid the evening traffic. Even during “working” hours many prefer to while away their time in a luxurious cafe-lounge on the top floor of the building.

It’s not clear, either, what useful tasks are performed by those who bother to remain on the floors below, since there is massive duplication of functions and no attempt whatever at rationalization or coordination. One example of expensive make-work is the U.N. publications department, which churns out thousands of documents that nobody reads in half a dozen languages, at a cost of $750 per page. Perhaps the most serious work being accomplished in the building takes place in the garage, where–during Mr. Sanjuan’s time at least–a very sophisticated drug-smuggling operation was under way.

Don’t rely on my summaries, though. Go to Neo-Neocon’s original post, and check out the American Enterprise Institute book review.

***

The above is (more or less) what I wrote in 2005.  The seething, churning, self-pitying hate, though, should be familiar to all who have watched the “progressives” suffer through the last eight (and, especially, the last eight) years of the Bush administration. Progressives have never really had a plan other than to destroy Bush and everything he respresents absolutely and completely. In this, they differ profoundly from conservatives.

As all of you have noticed, the reaction to this most recent election amongst mainstream (and defeated) conservatives is to engage in rational thought aimed at rejiggering conservatism to help Americans recognize that true conservativism will give the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people.  We’re not shrieking about stolen elections or about the terrible new evil resident in the White House (although I think that Obama, if he fails to recognize the innate evil that lives in Iran or Syria or North Korea or Venezuela, or other like places, is a fool, and possibly a dangerous one). Instead, we’re engaged in self-analysis, a bit of self-pity, and a lot of re-messaging.

Given that those same very self-pitying, perpetually victimized Leftists now hold the reins of American power, I think one of the best things we can hope for is that, like a U.N. populated with Islamic Jew-haters, bureacratic inefficiency will outweigh the hatred.  The desire to change will be there — and the Democrats will undoubtedly effectuate a good many changes — but the sheer weight of their commitment to the governmental, bureaucratic process is going to slow them down.  And if Fred Barnes is right, they’ll manage to do just enough to create openings for thoughtful conservatives who have refined their messages and positioned themselves for a victory predicated, not on victimhood and hatred, but on optimism and a belief in American exceptionalism.

UPDATE:  One of the other things that occurred to me about a commonality between the Left and the Arabs is that they’re not only sore losers (with the most recent evidence amongst the Left being the savage response to the will of the people vis a vis Prop. 8), it’s also that they’re ungracious, vicious winners.  This should be a reminder to Israel (who seems to need this reminder on a perpetual basis) that, when the inevitable upcoming “peace” talks begin with the Obama presidency, she’s still in a no win situation:  win or lose, Arab rage and pity will continue unabated.

I don’t have much time to write now, but I read a trio of stories at the Jerusalem Post that remind us why moral relativism regarding Israel is wrong.  Israel, for all her flaws, is a better, more moral country that the surrounding Arab nations, and that’s regardless of any of their virtues:

Another Arab resident in Israel used his vehicle to try for mass slaughter.  Fortunately, he was the only one to die.

An Arab woman crossing at a checkpoint into Israel threw acid on a soldier, potentially blinding him in one eye.  Keep in mind that the check points exist precisely because those crossing into Israel (by the grace of Israel, because no Israelis are crossing into Arab countries) are trying to achieve maximum bodily arm.

And just so you keep in perspective what these Arab countries are all about, let’s look at Iraq, which is a country that America has sort of, kind of, managed to turn into a Democracy:

First his two sons were murdered. Now he faces prosecution. The reason for Mithal al-Alusi’s troubles? Visiting Israel and advocating peace with the Jewish state – something Iraq’s leaders refuse to consider.

The Iraqi is at the center of a political storm after his fellow lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to strip him of his immunity and allow his prosecution for visiting Israel – a crime punishable by death under a 1950s-era law. Such a fate is unlikely for al-Alusi, though he may lose his party’s sole seat in parliament.

Because he had visited Israel, many Iraqis assume the maverick legislator was the real target of the assassins who killed his sons in 2005 while he escaped unharmed.

Now he is in trouble for again visiting Israel and attending a conference a week ago at the International Institute for Counterterrorism.

“He wasn’t set to speak, but he was in the audience and conversed with a lecturer on a panel about insurgency and terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel,” said conference organizer Eitan Azani. “We didn’t invite him. He came on his own initiative.”

Al-Alusi has a German passport, allowing him to travel without visa restrictions imposed on other Iraqis. Lawmakers accused him of humiliating the nation with a trip to the “enemy” state.

Keep in mind as you read the above that it is just one day’s news from the Middle East, and just a small handful of stories about Israel and her neighbors’ attitude towards her.

Let me reiterate the sentence at the start of my post:  Israel, for all her flaws, is a better, more moral country that the surrounding Arab nations, and that’s regardless of any of their virtues.

David Suissa has created a series of ads to remind people of all the marvelous contributions Israel has made to the world during its short time as a country (and, impressively, a country perpetually under siege).

I think it’s time to create some ads for the Muslim and Arab world too (click on thumbnails to enlarge):

Hat tip:  Seraphic Secret

Hamas never enters into truces with an eye to peace.  It enters into truces with an eye to getting its troops rested and rearmed before the next offensive.  Israel, equipped with knowledge of both core Islamic doctrine (hudna) and Hamas’ own past behavior, nevertheless keeps giving its opponent a breather, rather than keeping the pressure on when Hamas is on the ropes.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, common currency in the Jewish community was the joke about how much smarter Jews were than their Arab opponents.  The one I remember best from the 1973 Yom Kippur War (although it’s certainly not the best joke) went this way:

Shocked by their losses, the Arabs regrouped and began studying their Israeli enemy.  They realized that one out of every three Israeli soldiers was named David.  They therefore came up with a new strategy.  When they were within shouting distance of the Israelis, the Arab soldiers would holler out “Hey, David,” confident that the David’s would rise up, ready to be shot down by snipers.  It didn’t work quite as planned.  When the Arabs yelled out “Hey, David,” the Israelis would holler back, “Is that you, Mohammed?”  Half the Arab soldiers would then rise up and get shot down by snipers.

Bad joke, but you get the point.  These jokes have no currency now.  Israel has been strategically out-thought at every turn.  All she has left is brute force.

I’m a scientific ignoramus.  Although I’ve been skeptical of global warming from the start, my skepticism hasn’t been rooted in a sound grasp of facts and scientific principles.  Instead, it arises because of my source problems:  I deeply distrust the people touting climate change.

From the moment Al Gore started mouthing off about it, and triggered massive hysteria in the MSM, Hollywood, and the Leftosphere, I backed off.  To me, these people’s embrace of the issue lacked any coherent thought or rigorous analysis.  For them, it was simply another nail in the Bush Derangement Syndrome coffin, and a convenient way to do indirectly what they’ve been trying to do directly : handicap America’s ability to compete in world markets.  That’s why, even though I agree with some of the goals — most notably getting the whole world off Arab Oil so that we’re not funding the Islamist instruments of our own destruction — I’ve absolutely refused to buy into the whole Global Warming mantra.

Others, fortunately, have more knowledge than I do, and they’re not buying into it either.  The latest knowledgeable person to speak out is Brian Sussman, a metereologist, who explains that the Global Warming crowd has made its case by ignoring some facts and exaggerating other facts completely out of recognition.  And he does it all in lucid prose, easy for the lay man to understand.

One of the things that has infuriated me for years in the roiling battle between Israel and her neighbors is Israel’s utter ineptitude at courting the media.  For decades, after ever single “event,” the Palestinians offered dozens of sympathetic people up for interviews with the MSM, while the Israelis offered terse, uninformative commentaries from tight lipped “military spokesmen.”  It allowed the Palestinians to gain complete control over the dialog.  No matter what was going on on the ground, Israel was steadily losing in the war of ideas.

I’m not the only one, of course, who has noticed this.  Michael Phillips has come up with an idea:  a simple chart that examines, not the facts of every event, but simply the number of times Hamas and its ilk have been caught in lies.  I’m not the only one, by the way, who likes this idea.  Michael got over 3,000 extra daily hits from people interested in the concept.  It might actually impress the Arabs too:  as many have been impressed by Israel’s willingness to go after a corrupt Prime Minister.  It can be very useful to separate facts from ideology.

Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has accused American Jews of McCarthyism for being critical of Israel’s critics. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The pattern, repeated over and over as we learn more about Obama’s advisers, is that one of them speaks fondly of the Palestinians or harshly of Israel, Jews get upset and someone then accuses Jews of making any rational dialog about Israel impossible. Jews, they say, are casting a pall on the debate by insisting on unconditional love for Israel as a prerequisite for any discussion about solutions in the Middle East — and that makes it impossible to achieve a solution, since it essentially cuts the Palestinians out of the debate entirely.

In a normal situation, the Obamanites might have a point. Ordinarily, if the world were focusing like a laser on a dispute between two small, bordering countries about riparian rights (or trade agreements, or power plants, or any of the ordinary disputes that might rile adjoining nations), it would be fatal to a peaceful conclusion if the external mediators entered with a preconceived bias in favor of one of the countries. But what Obama and his fellow travelers fail to understand is that the relationship between Israel and her neighbors is not a garden-variety dispute about concrete matters such as borders and water. Instead, it is a binary, existential dispute that demands the answer to a single question: Does Israel have the right to exist?

Israel and her friends say she does have the right to exist. They believe that she and her citizens should not have to worry daily that they will be utterly annihilated by one big bomb or thousands of small ones. The Palestinians and their friends, however, whether speaking through their charters, their rhetoric, their religion, or their actions, say she does not have any such right to exist — and that this is true whether one considers her as a whole nation or as a collection of individual citizens. The Palestinian side to the “debate” has made it patently clear since Israel’s inception (and before), that the beef with Israel is not about a village or a river or a water well. It’s about the genocide of a people and the destruction of a nation.

Keeping the above in mind — and I think you’ll find it a hard conclusion with which to quarrel given a sixty year history of writings, speeches, wars and bombs — the dispute about Israel cannot accurately be framed as “Israel vs. the Palestinians.” Instead, the correct framing is “Israel, alive or dead?” As I said earlier, it’s binary. There is no middle ground. Israel chooses life; the Palestinians and their cohorts choose Israel’s death. To the extent the Palestinians talk of a two state solution, they perceive this, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, a useful diversion to keep Europe and the American Left busy and happy while the Palestinians, Arabs and Iranians move forward with the plan for Israel’s ultimate demise.

Given that Israel’s enemies plan to deny her, not a border or a town or a river, but her existence entirely, Israel, Jews and friends of Israel have to accept that those who consistently support the Palestinians are either fools or they have an agenda. That is, they’re fools if they go around spouting off about two state solutions and peace, and completely ignore that the Palestinians give this concept lip service only. Only fools, after all, could ignore entirely the fact that, when the two-state issue was really available on the negotiating table, Arafat said no. Likewise, fools consistently overlook the reality that, when Israel makes concessions, Palestinians make none. Fools claim that no meaning can attach to the Hamas charter, Hamas rhetoric and Hamas actions, all of which make clear that Hamas seeks a Jew-free, one-state solution. And it’s clearly a fool who pretends it’s just rhetoric when Iran barely bothers to hide the fact that, once she builds the bomb, her first target will be Tel Aviv. Only a fool could pretend that a two-state solution would work if only Israel (not the Palestinians, just Israel) would give a little more, and a little more, and a little more, and a little more.

Of course, if these advisers who keep pushing the Palestinian viewpoint, all the while loudly proclaiming their support for Israel, are not fools (and how many are really that stupid?), then they must be aware of the actual Palestinian (Arab, Iranian, Muslim) final solution to the “dispute” between Israel and the Palestinians: The end of Israel’s existence, along with the slaughter of every Jew living in Israel. It is no stretch, therefore, to call these Palestinian mouthpieces in the West antisemitic.  No matter how loudly they proclaim that they love Israel and the Jews and just want peace, their goal is precisely the same that Hitler sought — a Judenrein (Jew-free) world. (Remember, it was the Romans who made a desert and called it peace.)

Ultimately, when one side wants only to live in peace, and the other side seeks only blood or destruction, you have to choose your sides. There is no middle. And one when Presidential candidate consistently chooses as his advisers those who opt for the side that advances death and destruction, no matter how prettily they wrap it up in nice phrases about two state solutions and peace, you begin to get suspicious (to put it mildly).

The moment the Palestinians stop calling for and acting to achieve Israel’s destruction, I will take seriously their claim that they seek a second state (and we’ll just ignore that Jordan was created out of whole cloth decades ago to be precisely that), and I’ll be less suspicious of those in the West who are their champions.

As long as the situation on the ground is binary, though, I’m going to view as hostile those who choose the side of death over the side of life — and that’s true no matter how they protest their deep and abiding philosemitism. Until they assert that an absolute precondition for any negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is that the latter completely renounce their ultimate goal of Israel’s complete destruction (a renunciation that must prove itself by word and deed), I have to conclude that these “peace seekers” in fact view Israel’s destruction as an acceptable result at the end of the negotiating day.

As many have said before me, if Israel were to put down her arms today, she would be destroyed utterly. If the Palestinians were to put down their arms today, there would be peace in that area of the Middle East.