Posted on 11/21/2009 9:23:48 AM PST by Steelfish
Tough Lessons For Obama On Mid-East Peace
The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen considers how the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has taught US President Barack Obama hard and humiliating lessons.
Nearly 500,000 Jewish people live in settlements built on occupied territory. The land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea has great sunsets. One the other day turned the sky from deep blue to pink, then angry orange, and flaming red. The fading light glowed on the roofs of the expanding and illegal Jewish settlements that run, like little fortresses, along the mountain spine of the West Bank.
This is also a tremendous place to see a false dawn. The finest was the first, the Israeli-Palestinian handshake on the White House lawn in 1993. President Clinton, beaming, stood between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, old enemies, now officially partners for peace. That was the saddest too, because it might have worked. Two years later, Mr Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist.
Negotiating peace in the region has eluded other US presidents Another false dawn was a trip by Bill Clinton to Gaza in 1998. Yes, an American president in Gaza. It is not conceivable these days. I mention this almost forgotten visit because, as another famous American once said about baseball, it is deja vu all over again. Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel in 1998, and he is again now. Hillary Clinton was on the trip, as the president's wife, and now she is US Secretary of State. Mr Netanyahu used to drive her husband mad.
After he had lectured the president about the Middle East, Mr Clinton famously asked his aides: "Who the (bleep) does he think he is? Who's the (bleeping) superpower here?" Only he did not say bleep.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
If the reflexively anti-Israel (and anti-semitic) BBC is saying this, things are REALLY bad in Obama-land.
The article says it’s all Israel’s fault, of course. Perhaps we, the “bleeping superpower,” according to Clintoon, should just let Israel work out its peace with the terrorist Hamas-Palistinians as it sees fit.
There is no lesson to be learned with batboy. He is his own one trick pony.
The blaming Israel is secondary -- that's just what the BBC does. Anti-semitism runs very deep in England, it's nothing personal against the Jews or the Israelis, it's just the English xenophobia that's basic to their personality. The old-line English don't really even like Americans (just read some Dorothy Sayers some time for some breathtaking remarks about Americans that she no doubt didn't even realize she was making. She also takes shots at Jewish passersby. And she was a very nice, very religiously conservative lady, it was just part of the air she grew up breathing.)
Another false dawn was a trip by Bill Clinton to Gaza in 1998. Yes, an American president in Gaza. It is not conceivable these days. I mention this almost forgotten visit because, as another famous American once said about baseball, it is deja vu all over again. Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel in 1998, and he is again now. Hillary Clinton was on the trip, as the president's wife, and now she is US Secretary of State. Mr Netanyahu used to drive her husband mad. After he had lectured the president about the Middle East, Mr Clinton famously asked his aides: "Who the (bleep) does he think he is? Who's the (bleeping) superpower here?" Only he did not say bleep.
And, even more interesting, her primary character and hero, Wimsey, is none of those things. He likes feminist women (viz. the long-pursued Harriet Vane), he has friends in all classes (his best friend and eventual brother-in-law is a middle class policeman), and does not (at least to my recollection) make racial, sexual or religious slurs although, as you note, many of the minor characters do.
A case in point is the fact that one of Wimsey's best friends, Freddie Arbuthnot, married Rachael, the daughter of a prominent Jew who was the victim in the first novel, Whose Body? and whose family was treated well in the novel. Ms. Sayers' anti-semitism didn't prevent her from seeing Jews as interesting and appealing characters, nor, perhaps, from having her hero be much more egalitarian in outlook than she was herself.
But it's there. It's harmless in the main, because most Englishmen are really decent people who like to "give a chap an even chance". And they love an underdog.
And I have no objection to stereotypes so long as it's just a rule of thumb for which exceptions are generously made (I mean, we all know those Americans Abroad, and cringe, at least I do). After all, my take on the English xenophobia is a stereotype!
Miss Sayers was an equal opportunity basher -- she often teed off on the working class Englishman who tried to "rise above his station" -- I'm thinking of the advertising types in Murder Must Advertise and the pitiful architect who owned the bathtub in Whose Body?.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus
That also goes for some of his diehard supporters. :’)
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