To the surprise of many, President Barack Obama stood up at the UN to oppose giving Hamas-ruled Palestine the august status of an official UN-recognized nation-state, even threatening an American veto if necessary.
The usual suspects on the left, including the New York Times in what purported to be a news article, were not amused.
For Mr. Obama, the challenge in crafting the much-anticipated General Assembly speech was how to address the incongruities of the administration’s position: the president who committed to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians a priority from Day One, now unable to get peace negotiations going after two and a half years; the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the United Nations last year, now threatening to veto that membership.
Regardless of the Times' protests, Obama's plainspoken reasons why the Palestinians don't deserve statehood are incontrovertibly true.
Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side... Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map.
Hmm, something missing here... |
For as long as Israel has existed and quite some while before, the Palestinian Arabs have been willing, nay eager, to ruin and beggar themselves to have a chance at shedding Jewish blood. Rather than put in place sewer systems or even use the ones they have, Palestinians prefer to use sewer pipe to make makeshift rockets that rarely hit anything noteworthy but occasionally pulverize a hated Jew. Rather than try to teach peace, the official Hamas TV station broadcasts funny-animal children's shows glorifying suicide bombers and portraying Jews as murderers.
Is it any wonder that Israel doesn't trust an entity that, in its very bid for UN statehood, displays a map showing Israel as 100% Palestinian Muslim? There can't be peace until the loser wants peace. The inhabitants of the Palestinian territories, such as they are, are the very definition of barbarians unworthy of civilized acceptance.
It is for precisely this reason that they should be granted their wish and declared an independent state with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.
No, Palestine doesn't deserve independent-nation status, but it should get it anyway.
The terrorists who run, reside in, administer, and otherwise infest Palestine no doubt figure that being an independent country would further their evil cause. In the short term, perhaps that's true.
In a conflict that's gone on for millennia, though, it's wiser to take the long view, and to stay out of the way of your enemy when they're making a mistake. The Palestinians are forgetting several important details: being a nation grants rights, but also imposes responsibilities under the same international laws. One of which, note, is not attacking or invading your neighbors.
For lo these many years, hardly a day goes by when Hamas doesn't shoot rockets or throw bombs over the border against Israel. Up until now, they have been able to portray these murderous attacks as "resistance against an occupier."
If, however, they become officially their own nation, this won't be true anymore - no occupier, no war, thus officially no conflict. Yet we have every confidence that Hamas will still murder Israelis, by religious force of habit if nothing else. What excuse will they have then?
No doubt they'll cook something up, and no doubt the left will at least pretend to buy it. The fact remains, however, that invasion by a foreign nation has always been a legally valid reason to fight back, always will be, and will be extremely difficult to spin as anything else.
When responding to an attack by forces of a foreign nation-state, it has also always been legal to conquer them. Israel has done this before, in conquering the Sinai during the Six-Day War after Egypt committed an act of war by closing the international Straits of Tiran.
Unfortunately, they didn't expel the Palestinians into the Sinai then, and as a result the world has bled for the past forty years. Giving the Palestinians their state, which we all know full well they'll abuse, gives Israel a second chance to correct that historic mistake.
With a little luck, the Palestinian state will be as short-lived as they wish Israel would be and we'll finally have done with their barbarism.
What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
Hmm, interesting theory, but doesn't it go against the Scragged grain? It would seem to oppose the previously published opinion that the best thing for the region would be mass deportation, not unlike that imposed on the Native Americans or Acadians of the past. Surely statehood would get in the way of this "Great and Noble Scheme"?
You kind of missed the point, Werebat. Palestinian statehood would make their ultimate mass removal possible, feasible, and practical - by triggering the laws of state-to-state war due to their own bad faith, bad behavior, and inability to abide by international law.
Hmmm....Never thought of it that way. Seems like a "BODACIOUSLY" good idea.
Very well-put case. I had not thought of it that way before. Now, I'm confused on what I want. Thanks.
No worries Ifon, Palestine has confused the greatest thinkers ever since Lawrence of Arabia, who didn't know what to do with it either.
Didn't someone say that the Bible promised the land to the Jews and that the Palestinians would be at war with everybody forever?
If it's God's problem, only He can sort it out. No wonder we're all confused.
This is the most outrageous conflabation of truth I have ever seen. Lawerce of Arabia and Palestine? What do these two things have in commo...nothing. Its not Gods problems its a zionist problem. Bet you are one that thinks the zionists were there first and the Palestinans invaded them. European Jews (zionists) invaded palestine in 1948...killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinans. UN gave both borders and only the Israelies have never honored those borders. European Askenazi communist Jews never stepped foot in the Holy land until 1948....the slaughter began then. Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon blew up the King David hotel, they were considered "terrorists". But lets not let facts get in the way of your stupidity.
@spktruth - it is a sad fact of history that history is written by the winning side. Ben Gurion et al won, so they were whitewashed to being freedom fighters, not terrorists. If you win, you get to be a freedom fighter and maybe Prime Minister like Golda Meir and Begin, if you lose, you stay a terrorist and maybe get dead like bin Laden.
Lawrence of Arabia won the PR war so he is a hero. He died young which helped him achieve immortality.
The facts in the Middle East are irrelevant. No Democrat can get the White House if he loses the New York State electoral votes which are swung by Jews, all you have to do is count 'em.
No Republican can get the white house without winning the South which is Bible Belt which thinks God will smack the US if the US doesn't support Israel to the bitter end.
Ttakes care of the Presidency. Need we discuss the lobbying efforts which affect the house and senate? Israel gets beaucoup balloons of foreign aid because their hearts are pure?
I wish the Liberty guys luck, but they are barking up a VERY tall tree.
Until another Middle east interested party can swing a national election in the US, their views are irrelevant.
@Petrarch -- "Palestinian statehood would make their ultimate mass removal possible, feasible, and practical"
Which is the real goal here, regardless of any other facts. No, I think I got the point exactly.
Some 5% of the Palestinians on the West Bank are Christian. That's an awful lot of Christians for other Christians to advocate throwing under a bus, isn't it?
But I guess if we just think of them as "human units" to be tallied up and down with an abacus in some sort of "ends justifies the atrocity" formula, your devil's arithmetic does add up nicely.
@spktruth -- I wholly disagree with the tactic prescribed in this article, as I'm a proponent of the two-state solution, though I believe we're still a long way off from such a reality. While I appreciate your desire to bring in the facts, yours are just a little off.
Zionists had been moving to the territory known as Palestine as early as 1881 during the first aliyah. Though that first attempt proved to be a failure because the immigrants were fully unprepared, it paved the way for many future aliyot. Most of these immigrants hailed from Russia or Poland, which would classify them as "European Ashkenazi communist Jews." For example, 30,000 Russian and Eastern European Jews with a constructive socialist agenda moved to Palestine between 1919 and 1923 during the third aliyah (after the Balfour Declaration).
Slaughter did not begin in 1948. Throughout the third and fourth decades of the 20th century, a large number of Arab riots led to violence against Jewish immigrants. In 1929, an Arab riot led to the massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron. This is not to cast blame or point fingers as to who started the violence first (in fact, many local Arab families helped to hide Jews during the riot, protecting their neighbors); it merely shows that violence occurred well before 1948.
And as for blowing up the King David hotel...that was done by the Irgun, a more radical paramilitary organization that broke off from the Haganah (the group which Ben-Gurion recognized as authentic). Ben-Gurion actually later criticized the Irgun for their actions.