Condi's cop-out

From the New York Daily News, October 5, 2006, by Sidney Zion ...

Rice feeds fiction that Palestinian state is key to peace

Secretary of State Rice, who used to know better, is now on the road to nowhere, like her predecessors in the State Department. Flying around the Middle East, she promotes once again the old fixation that only a Palestinian state can cure the troubles of the world - and that the route requires pressure on Israel.

She has chosen a tough time for this message. The Palestinians are on the verge of a civil war, if they're not in it already. Fatah targets Hamas leaders for assassination while Hamas rules the parliament. The real deal is who will run the virtual army. Fatah has the guns, 70,000 men in charge, and is not about to turn it over to the hated Hamas.

Yesterday, the so-called moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, said his attempts to reach a power-sharing agreement with Hamas have broken down. Against this reality, Rice attempts to corral the so-called moderate Arab world behind Abbas. But Abbas, called a "man of courage" by President Bush, is nothing more than his old boss Arafat, without a kaffiyeh. Abbas financed the murders of the Olympic athletes in 1972 and wrote a book denying the Holocaust. Now he is the moderate hero of the State Department Arabists.

And as far as the Arab world is concerned, forget about it. They never cared about the Palestinians. They left them in refugee camps forever, just to show the world that Israel should not exist. The idea promoted again by Rice, that a Palestinian state would bring peace to the world, is a sick joke.

As is the notion that the Palestinian people want peace, but are prevented by their leaders. This nonsense should have ended when they elected Hamas to rule them last year. The apologists in the media, particularly in The New York Times, decreed that the vote was not for terrorism but for clean government and clean streets. Except they had ignored one thing: Would Yasser Arafat have lost the election? He looted the people - gave them nothing but disaster - and everybody knows he would have won hands down. Hamas wouldn't have dared to run against him.

And so, it comes out this way. The Palestinian people, not only in the election of Hamas, but in most polls, want Israel off the map. So some things are not soluble by reason. Certainly it would be in the best interests of the Palestinian people to run out Hamas, to reject the intransigence of Fatah, to just say let's live together with the Jews.

But the Arabs do not always do what is in their best interests.
Condi Rice, what the hell.