From FoxNews.com, March 25, 2011, by Mitchell Bard:
While Arabs throughout the Middle East engage in ...[an] effort to overthrow the dictatorial regimes that have enslaved them for decades, the Palestinians have watched ...their plight [fall] off the media’s radar.
The longstanding claim that the “Palestinian question” is the crux of all problems in the Middle East has once again been exposed as a fallacy as the Arabs in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere have shown no interest in them or Israel.
The Palestinians now are responding to the lack of attention by launching new terror attacks, which may garner headlines but also remind Israelis and the rest of the world they are not interested in peace.
We do not know yet if the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem is the start of a new wave of terror patterned after the war instigated by the Palestinians from 2000 to 2005 that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis....
...Hamas will use civilians as shields in the hope they will become casualties in Israeli counterstrikes, which will then arouse international ire against Israel. Israel will, as it always does, try to carefully target the terrorists, but as happened this week, despite their best efforts, innocents are sometimes injured.
...It is ironic that Arabs are fighting for freedom across the region, but the Palestinians continue to tolerate a leadership that denies them freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press and denies rights to women and gays.
Rather than demanding that these leaders negotiate peace with an Israeli government that has repeatedly called for talks without preconditions, the Palestinian people support hapless figureheads who still believe they can bomb Israel out of existence or who think they can win independence by asking the international community to recognize a non-existent state in lieu of negotiations....
It is time ...to demand that the Palestinians implement democratic reforms and put an end to the culture of incitement that leads to the horrific murder of Jewish children and their parents in their beds, attacks on public buses and rocket attacks on playgrounds and kindergartens.
International tolerance of this behavior over the years has given Palestinians reason to believe terror is the way to achieve their goals...
The Palestinians want attention; they should get it. ...the obstacle to peace is a Palestinian leadership that is undemocratic and represses its people, that refuses to compromise or negotiate, that is unwilling to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state and that engages in incitement and terror that is perpetuating the conflict. Like the other despotic leaders in the region, they must either change or they must go.
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