Posted on 10/24/2006 6:42:33 PM PDT by Esther Ruth
Oct. 24, 2006 16:49 Spain: 'Road map' not working, need new ME plan
One of Europe's foremost voices on the Middle East said Tuesday that the "road map" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is doomed, and that a major new initiative is needed to resolve a conflict that has seemed to stretch on without end.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told a parliamentary panel that Europe has a historic opportunity to take the lead in pushing for new talks, and hinted that it was too late to revive the American-backed blueprint for peace known as the "road map."
That initiative, launched in June 2003, envisioned a Palestinian state alongside Israel but stalled almost from the outset because neither side met their initial commitments.
"It is necessary that this diplomatic initiative be led by the European Union, not with small, gradual steps but with a major initiative that has great scope," said Moratinos, a former EU envoy to the Middle East considered to have excellent contacts throughout the region
MAJOR INTITIATIVE WITH GREAT SCOPE.
Sounds like he is advocating pushing the Palestinians back into the desert. Anyone with a better idea?
Yup,we'll listen carefully to the Communists who now run Spain regarding the Middle East.
Here's a plan: The various coglomerations of arabs calling themselves "palestinians" get KICKED OUT of Israel into whatever hell-hole arab country the Israelis decide whether the damned arabs like it or not!
Push the Palestinians out of Israel? Sounds good to me.
Heck no, send them all to the Sudan and let them take care of them, LOL.
There might just be a good use for those tunnels under Gaza after all.
Build a big TO ISRAEL sign at the tunnels entrance. They go through a turnstile, get a nice refreshing beverage and walk right to Egypt.
The road map: Palis move to Mecca. Problem solved. SA has the $$$ and the empty sands.
Come on Spain, you take the initiative and see what you can do.
I think that the desert follows them, considering
U.S. report: Gaza hothouses face financial losses due to closures
Here's some other links as evidence of my theory.
The last damn thing we need is advice on the Middle East from a bunch of Eurowhiners who have already themselves completely caved in to the Arab threats!
See these links:
LOL. More likely it will be the dismantling of Israel. Initiatives for mideast peace usually translates into asking Jews to bend over and grab their ankles.
That one works.
Interesting links. Zapatero is extremely anti-Catholic, too. He's very pro-Muslim, though; last week, he announced that the Spanish government was fully funding a set of religious textbooks, theoretically for Muslim children but being printed in a quantity way above that of the known number of Muslim children in Spanish schools, which is called "Getting to Know Islam" (in Spanish, of course). In the meantime, he has done everything possible to impede Catholic religious education and to move the Church into situations where he can attack it legally (for example, over its refusal to participate in "gay marriages," etc.). He and the leftists are doing everything they can to advance Islam.
I don't think it's a crime (yet) in Spain to support Israel, so I'm not sure how the blogger managed to get what appears to be the announcement of the initiation of proceedings against him. But all sorts of things are possible, and if I find out more, I'll post it.
Thanks a lot. Looking forward to more info from Spain.
PS:I liked your homepage. It is a serious thing, chosing a screen name! :-))
This from April 04, Moratinos been around ..
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/001696.php
April 24, 2004
U.S. asks Spain to help in Mideast peace search
Arafat and Moratinos (AP)
Now that Spain has knuckled under to Islamic terror, thus announcing to the world its intention to reassume dhimmi status, to whom do US officials turn for help in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why, Spain, of course. And not just any negotiator the Spanish government may see fit to provide, but none other than Zapatero's Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos.
Moratinos is the one who announced in March that he would "urge EU allies and Washington to seek a 'new strategy' to counter terrorism."
His comments came a day after US President George W. Bush had warned allies that "there is no neutral ground between good and evil," adding that the war on terror "is an inescapable calling of our generation."
For Moratinos, however, "our positions are a little different.
"We think we have to use very complex and different instruments" to counter terrorism, rather than simply force, he added in welcoming the "nuanced positions" of EU foreign policy head Javier Solana and Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission.
In Berlin on Saturday, Solana warned against a hysterical reaction to the threat of attacks in the wake of the Madrid bombings.
"We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustn't change the way we live," Solana has told the German weekly Bild am Sonntag in an interview to appear on Sunday, adding "Europe is not at war."
Prodi for his part said that "conflict with the terrorists will not be resolved by force."
Evidently, then, they want to negotiate with the terrorists.
The primary example of how negotiating with a terrorist gives him legitimacy that only leads to more terror is Arafat, with whom Moratinos has met on many occasions.
From Reuters, with thanks to nabrahambi:
MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's new foreign minister said on Thursday the United States had asked him for help in promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked Miguel Angel Moratinos to mediate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during a meeting in Washington on Wednesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
But Moratinos, who spent seven years as the European Union's special envoy to the Middle East, was cautious about the word "mediation" when questioned at a news conference later.
"The word 'mediation' is a word with a lot of diplomatic content. Mediations are when you have the mandate of the parties (or) a clear mandate of the international community," he said after talks with visiting French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier.
"What our American friends have asked me -- given my experience -- is that I should help them, that Spain should contribute within the European Union to create this new dynamic that has begun with the (Israeli) initiative to withdraw from Gaza. No more and no less," he said.
Similar efforts were being made by Barnier and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, said Moratinos, a member of Spain's new Socialist government which took office last weekend.
"I agreed to contribute my grain of sand to get out of this dilemma, (something) which is fundamental for the stability of the whole region," he said.
In Washington, a state department official said there was no question of a mediating role.
"In the meeting it was agreed they would help on the subject of the withdrawal from Gaza and reform in the Greater Middle East Initiative. They agreed to help us present these things as moments of opportunity," the official, who asked not to be named, said.
Barnier stressed Moratinos' knowledge of the people and the sensitivities of the Middle East.
"We need that experience (in the EU) to help the road map progress," he said, referring to a peace plan endorsed by the United States, the EU, the United Nations and Russia.
The EU tried to defuse tension with Washington over the Middle East last Saturday, saying Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip could be a "significant step" on the road to peace.
Posted by Robert at April 24, 2004 07:49 AM | Print this entry | Email this entry
Comments
(Note: Comments on articles are unmoderated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jihad Watch or Robert Spencer. Comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying may be summarily deleted. However, the fact that particular comments remain on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Robert Spencer of the views expressed therein.)
The United States remains on its previous stance, that of a person wearing blinders that does not see the coming threat on his flank is incredible
enough. What is beyond belief is that the State Department persists in its stubborn refusal to correctly label the problem and now is going hat in hand to the Spanish, whom everyone knows as appeasers, to supplicate, hoping that they can assist in find a "peaceful" solution to jihad.
They still don't get it. This asymmetrical "war on terror" is not a military adventure to wipe out a few thousand ignorant desert or mountain
tribesmen. If this were so, we could drop a few Daisy Cutters and be done with them. Any military man understands this premise.
If this were only a diplomatic problem, we have sufficient numbers of capable individuals in the diplomatic corpse that could hammer out a treaty
with this or that entity that would bring a halt to the armed incursions.
But we are faced with something more than generals and diplomats can solve.
For some reason the State Department refuses to acknowledge publicly that we are facing an ideology which more than a billion call a religion. An abstract idea can not be confronted by generals and diplomats that don't acknowledge its existence.
The Spanish may or may not understand why they caved in. They may believe that not provoking terrorists is the proper course. The influence of Moors on Spanish culture, their proximity to Gibraltar, Morocco and North African culture as well as socialism softened them up for the kill.
Their regrettable capitulation is understandable in the light of this influence, but the stubborn intransigence of the United States State
Department can not be explained away in these terms unless there now exists an Islamic element within the State Department that has infected the upper leadership with the meme of Islamism. Can there be another explanation for such gross stupidity?
Posted by: epg at April 24, 2004 08:51 AM
OTOH, the US knows that this latest negotiation dance with Arafat will fail, so why not let the Spaniards take the blame? It will prove the fallacy of their strategy.
Posted by: PJ at April 24, 2004 10:49 AM
In the United States, and especially in Wasington, it is not understood that for three decades -- since OPEC's "money weapon" began to be brandished -- there has been a steady, persistent, increasing islamization of European foreign policy, beginning, but not ending, with the so-called Euro-Arab Dialogue. It is not a dialogue but a diktat, and the one calling the tune is the Arab League, and the dancers, who must forever pick up their step, faster and faster, are the hapless members of the EU. The entire EU bureacracy, like that of the UN, has simply been seized by agents of, or apologists for, Islam. Chris Patten, Javier Solana, Romano Prodi are among the anointed quislings -- who of course cannot dare to look directly at the demographic conquest of Infidel Europe by its overbreeding, and o'erbearing, and expensive (to monitor) and dangerous Muslim population.
How much easier it is to allow onself to believe that as long as Arab demands in "Palestine" are satisfied (which is to say, not that justice is done, but that Israel is thrown to the wolves), there will be no problem, and all manner of things shall be well. It is nonsense. It would mean a great betrayal of the right of the most persecuted tribe in human history. But more than that, it would be to surrender a sliver of land that is equally important to Western civilization, to those who do not, and never have, wished anything for that non-Muslim civilization except for its subjugation and ultimate disappearance.
Zapatero and company are not part of the solution. They are the problem.
The United States must look on Europe as Occupied Europe. It must exercise all of its art and cunning, to articulate, for the mute and helpless and increasingly inglorious Europeans, who live their lives in a world where a campaign of vilification against Israel and America is the daily fare, and where no one is allowed to criticize Islam, or even to tell a few oblique truths about it, without being hounded or otherwise censored.
In the late 1940s, despite the fact that American troops had liberated western Europe, and the Red Army had seized all of eastern Europe, the two largest political parties where the Communist parties of Italy and France. The so-called "intellectuals" (an idiotic word, really) were almost entirely supporters of the Soviet Union. But with the spending of large sums of money, subventions to non-Communist parties, such as the Christian Democrats in Italy (who later became intolerably corrupt, but served a purpose then) to support non-Communist newspapers such as Der Monat, to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in turn gave birth to Encounter, the best English-language magazine in the world, to support for conferences and seminars to and fro across the Atlantic, often conducted by ex-Communists such as Koestler, Moravia, Crossman, and others. It took money, planning, and guile. It worked.
Instead of wasting money and time in Iraq, the main focus of anti-Jihad efforts should be in western Europe. Those in eastern Europe, including such countries as Bulgaria that have historic memories of the devshirme (the Ottoman levy of Christian children for the armed forces) and Rumania, an appeal can be made to enlist their service in helping to convince the decadent and foolish states of western Europe that they must cease to be handmaidens of the Jihad, but instead recognnize, not the pseudo-link that geography provides ("the North" and "the South" -- les deux rives -- of the Mediterranean), but the real linke of culture and ideas. Spinoza and Hume, Leonardo and Pushkin, La Fontaine and Melville, Jefferson and Lincoln and Mill and Raymond Aron -- these are the links that count, not the fact that Muslims live in North Africa and the Middle East, and have forced their way, under the benevolent eyes of very foolish elites (who have betrayed their own peoples and countries and cultures, and cannot for one minute allow themselves, much less those peoples, to realize it -- it would be simply too horrifying). When the Solanas and the Pattens and the Prodis and the Mary Robinsons are all seen for the sinister quislings (and some outright antisemites among them) and fixated anti-Americans they are, American policy will be vindicated, as it was, in Italy, when De Gasperi led that country.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.