Bloodthirsty Liberal

What else can I say?

Ladies and gentlemen, David Warren:

To my mind, the idea of Mr Blair reviving the “roadmap,” while Ehud Olmert is releasing 250 Palestinian psychopaths from Israeli jails as a “gesture,” and making the same-old-same-old “overtures” to the “moderate” Arab “states,” is not a happy one. I used to think the Arabs never learn. Now I think that we don’t.

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It is one of those ideas, too clever by at least half, that has never worked in the Middle East, where all alliances are temporary, and no enemies are ever forgotten. The very concept of “national interest” does not exist among the Arabs. (I know that sounds strong, but it’s true.) This is not only because pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism have successively kept an alternative to the nation state alive, but because from the origin of modern Arab statehood, almost every Arab state has been almost constantly governed by a family clique. The Arab states remain today essentially dynastic, as well as essentially tyrannical. The interests being served are thus the interests of the clans — whether Sauds, Assads, Hashemites, Mubaraks, or the others. In each case, the nation is perpetuated only as a kind of monstrous family business, and organized on the principles of the Mob.

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In Palestinian society, no effort has been made, or been allowed, to create anything resembling the material, political, and cultural conditions for the creation of a state. To speak of a “two state solution” between Israel and Palestine is therefore to speak rubbish.

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In other words, it won’t happen. It is sad that it won’t happen, and cannot happen, but there you have it: some things are sad.

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Our side is not even smart enough to realize that the whole idea of a “roadmap to peace” between Israel and the Arabs is, in its very nature, absurd. This is a region where power alone counts, and agreements are for suckers.

I’m tempted to adopt the penunltimate comment as the motto of this blog.

We report, you decide:

An Egyptian newspaper reported Saturday that an Egyptian spy for Mossad whose body was found Wednesday in London died after losing his balance falling from the balcony of his home.

The body of Dr. Ashraf Marwan, who warned Israel ahead of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, was found on the sidewalk near his apartment in Carlton House Terrace in London.

The Al-Aharam newspaper Saturday quoted an associate of Marwan as saying that one of Marwan’s friends had seen him on the balcony of his home, lose his balance and fall to his death.

According to the same friend, Marwan’s health had deteriorated of late and he had begun using a cane as he would frequently lose his balance.

Another associate of Marwan, however, said that the railing on the balcony was too high for him to have fallen.

We would just note that certain Arabs favor this method of dealing with their opponents:

GAZA today is Hell on Earth. Hamas gunmen roam the streets hunting down their Fatah rivals. Men are thrown off high buildings.

How did Israel ever sink so low?

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday that he had no intention of providing maximal protection to all residents of Gaza periphery communities. “A country cannot protect itself ad infinitum, because there would be no end to it.”

The prime minister added that stepping up protection would be “just as [ineffective] as the demand to solve Sderot’s Kassam problem by wiping Beit Hanun and other towns in Gaza off the face of the earth.

The prime minister appealed to the residents of the Gaza periphery: “In the short term we cannot supply you with all of the personal security that we would like to provide, because such protection would draw from expensive resources that are needed for other critical security needs.”

He cannot defend Israel because he is too busy defending Israel???

Either Beit Hanun is wiped off the map or Sderot is—experience has proved there’s no other way. Except residents of Beit Hanun won’t be shelled out of their homes, playgrounds, schools, and houses of worship. Israel should, and under a more heroic government would, set up a security perimeter in Gaza, as deep as necessary to prevent Qassam attacks. And if the Palestinians switch to Katyushas, or other longer range missiles, the perimeter should expand accordingly, even if it reached all the way to the Egyptian border. Then the Palestinians would have to deal with the Egyptian military, not just the Israeli, whom they’d soon miss.

The abdication of Gaza, the proposed ceding of Golan, the potential for cutting loose Judea and Samaria—is it me, or is this noose getting tighter?

Not that I’m eager to repeat the event, but Fumio Kyuma gets it right:

Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war, a news report said Saturday.

“I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” Kyuma said in a speech at a university in Chiba, just east of Tokyo.

Kyuma’s remarks drew immediate criticism from Japanese atomic bomb victims.

“The U.S. justifies the bombings saying they saved American lives,” said Nobuo Miyake, 78, director-general of a group of victims living in Tokyo. “It’s outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim.”

Kyuma said later that his comments were misinterpreted. He told reporters he meant to say the bombing “could not be helped from the American point of view.”

“It’s too bad that my comments were interpreted as approving the U.S. bombing,” he said.

Sorry, fellas, but the point was to save American lives. There was a war on, if you remember, and the goal of most countries in war is to try to kill the enemy at the expense of themselves—see Pearl Harbor. If you have a problem with that, you should have taken it up with your emperor at the time.

But, seriously, were the Japanese about to surrender? Weren’t the lessons of Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Guam, and many other bloody battles, that the Japanese, like ‘em or not, fought to the last man? Did anyone want to see that played out on the home islands?

I wish no atomic bombs had been dropped, or failing that only one, or a demonstration of their power had been arranged—but I can see why history happened the way it did. We don’t have to like it, but we would do well to understand it.

Brother, can you spare a euro?

European Union funding for an African peacekeeping force in Darfur has run out, and the United States and Arab League should help cover the costs until a replacement force arrives, the EU’s aid chief said on Friday.

“At the Commission level we are dry and we cannot find any more additional resources,” European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Louis Michel told a news conference.

It’s not that they don’t care, you understand. They just have other priorities:

Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, has called for the opening of the border between Israel and Gaza to enable vital relief supplies to reach the people inside the Gaza Strip.

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The European Commission has a relief package of almost €30 million for Gaza, including €10.2 million just released from its food aid reserve for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for emergency food aid in the Gaza Strip. This comes from an overall humanitarian budget of €67.4 million for the Palestinians….

I lambast, lampoon, and laugh at international hand-wringing (and impotence) over Darfur—but if I had to waste 67.4 Euros (just over $90 million), I’d waste it on the Darfurians over the Palestinians. In a heartbeat.

Well, at least one country passed a law to protect migrant labor:

The Chinese legislature passed a law Friday to provide more protection to the millions of farm youths who leave home and become cheap labor in the factories and construction sites that have mushroomed in China’s booming economy.

The Standing Committee of the China People’s Congress, in approving the law, presented it as a bulwark against widespread abuses of the often-uneducated migrant workers, such as forced labor, withholding of pay and unwarranted dismissal. The country was alarmed two weeks ago, for example, by the discovery that hundreds of Chinese were forced to work in conditions resembling slavery at dozens of brick kilns in Shanxi province while local Communist Party officials did nothing to stop it.

China abandoned communism long ago—but the party apparatus has remained useful:

Laws and regulations have long been in place to protect workers. But as is frequently the case in China, the enforcement of the rules has often been frustrated by collusion between local entrepreneurs and party officials eager to promote economic development and supplement their own bank accounts.

China forbids independent labor unions. The official All China Federation of Trade Unions, tied to the same party bureaucrats, functions as an arm of the government — and thus of economic development — more than as a watchdog for workers.

Slave labor, one-party rule, no independent unions—not to mention creeping militarism and rampant counterfeiting—how is the government of China not one giant Tong running the whole country?

Sometimes it is useful to read the Washington Post’s coverage of Israel and the Palestinians—not for any edification, mind you, but to see how the liberal establishment still tries to sweep the crimes of the Palestinians under the rug:

Since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, Israel has faced an increasingly complex set of military options to stop attacks from the territory, and a debate over its humanitarian responsibilities for the strip’s 1.4 million people.

The political split between the West Bank and Gaza has also strengthened calls in Israel to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state, which was at the core of the Oslo peace accords signed in 1993.

Gaza is now ruled by an ascendant Islamic movement that calls for Israel’s destruction, and the West Bank by a disorganized secular party seeking immediate peace negotiations. That divide has cast doubts on whether the formula of a Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel is still viable.

What’s so bad about that? Rather than the substance being correct, and only a few details wrong, this is the other way around. Yes, Hamass is an ascendant Islamic movement in Gaza…and that’s about it. The only thing accurate about the description of Fatah is “disorganized”. They are secular only in comparison to Hamass; they seek peace negotiations with Israel in one breath and defame her in another (leaving aside, for the moment, their terrorist actions which have always belied their words—leaving aside, also, their insistence on “right of return”, which would erase Israel from the map as surely as it is already erased from Palestinian textbooks); they “rule” the West Bank by that unique Palestinian combination of corruption and intimidation. And why no mention at all of the other terrorist groups, who handily carried on shelling, rocketing, etc. while Hamass and Fatah claimed to be holding their fire?

But what does Israel have to do with a fantasy known as the Palestinian state anyway? Israel leaving Gaza gave the Palestinians a chance to show what they were made of—and they did. You could call it a state now, but the name Somalia is already taken.

The Oslo accords are 14 years old, and have yielded nothing. One might as well cite the treaty of Versailles, for all the relevance they have.

Wrong, WaPo. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Does it occur to you, as it does to me, that the multi-car-bomb terrorist attack narrowly avoided in London was intentionally set for the second day after Tony Blair left office?

Why? Well, new PM Gordon Brown has let it be known he is less enthusiastic about our adventures in Iraq than Blair. His new Foreign Minister has promised to listen and be patient. The entire left-wing apparatus of their society has labeled Israel an apartheid state, and undertaken a boycott against it.

How do Islamists usually answer such initiatives of appeasement and accommodation? They spit on them. We don’t want to live with you, they say, we want you to live under us.

This is a last-chance message to Britain, but I don’t have much hope that the message was received and understood.

Remember Farfour, the Palestinian Mickey Mouse, who preached jihad to Palestinian yoof?

Mossad greased him:

Hamas TV on Friday broadcast what it said was the last episode of a weekly children’s show featuring “Farfour,” a Mickey Mouse look-alike who had made worldwide headlines for preaching Islamic domination and armed struggle to youngsters.

In the final skit, Farfour was beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour’s land. At one point, Farfour called the Israeli a “terrorist.”

“Farfour was martyred while defending his land,” said Sara, the teen presenter. He was killed “by the killers of children,” she added.

What manner of mouse was this?

This is more along Aggie’s line, but I’ll channel her spirit for a moment:

Why aren’t the Lebanese showing restraint?

Lebanese troops fired at Palestinian civilians demanding to return to their homes at a besieged refugee camp on Friday, killing three protesters and wounding 50, witnesses and hospital sources said.

They said the soldiers opened fire first into the air as hundreds of refugees, including women and children, tried to storm through an army checkpoint and head to Nahr al-Bared camp, scene of nearly six weeks of intense fighting between the army and the al Qaida-inspired Fatah al-Islam militants.

When the crowd did not disperse and attacked soldiers with stones and sticks, the troops fired automatic rifles at the protest inflicting the casualties.

Refugee camps? Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like apartheid? They sound more like prison camps; I’m not sure why the Palestinians wanted to return at all:

Much of the camp, originally home to 40,000 refugees, has been destroyed and mines and booby traps litter its buildings and alleys.

The Lebanese Army is actually forbidden from entering the camps, so they are essentially sovereign Palestinian territory. In other words, they are like mini-Gazas. That tells you all you need to know about prospective Palestinian statehood.