US Can't Seek Neutrality In The Middle East

William Murchison: U.S. can't seek neutrality in Middle East conflict 03/27/2002

Among Americans, courtesy of a robust and unshackled media, noses are pressed against all of the Middle East minutiae – special envoys, negotiating sessions, cease-fires, pullbacks and so forth.

Those aren't the questions most in need of addressing by Americans, for all the value that Middle Easterners and American diplomats may ascribe to them. The question needing reflection over here is: Whom would you want living next door – industrious, generally honest people who keep noses and neighborhoods clean, or people ready to blow themselves up and you along with them? It really isn't much of a choice, though that choice's nature gets lost amid the recriminations always on display in the – to give it a neutral name – Palestinian controversy.

The Palestinian terrorists, both individually and collectively, truly are appalling – as bad as any al-Qaedist who ever put a knife to an airline pilot's throat and just as crazy in the head.

I mean, whom do we want to win this thing? The PLO-Fatah-Hezbollah crowd, vengeful, murderous, armed to the teeth and ready to blow up a bus or a crowded restaurant for the sake of expressing its precious hatred? That would be all we needed: these sweethearts running Palestine-cum-Israel, doling out foundation grants for bomb research at Osama (formerly Hebrew of Jerusalem) University.

If it were just the mad bombers, that might not be critical. We could hope for better things from peace-loving Palestinians. There must be some – it is just that they seem, like Br'er Rabbit, to lie mighty low. One reads of families bursting with pride that Junior or Sis self-splattered on a Jerusalem sidewalk, taking several Israeli young people along for the ride. What, for that matter, of Yasser Arafat? Do we read of him frantically working the streets and backrooms, urging the bombers to cease and desist in the interest of peace? He might fail in that beneficent endeavor. There is nothing wrong, all the same, with trying – the activity for which he shows hardly any taste.

Where does all of this get us, then? Is there a larger point than beating up on the morally disabled – the bombers and their well-wishers? Well, sure.

An ingratiating American trait is the disposition to look for solutions – to split differences among contending parties and hope for nicer behavior. It still could happen in the Middle East. Theoretically. (It nearly did in 2000, when Yasser Arafat, in the American-brokered talks, walked away from almost everything he could have hoped negotiations would bring him.) Moreover, simple war weariness sometimes drives compromise.

But what if it doesn't this time around? If it doesn't, and the self-splatterers increase in number and savagery, it is hard to know what we should expect the Israelis honorably to do in their own defense – apart from doing what they have to do under the law of survival. What they "have to" do could entail the reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip and the physical ouster of the feckless or cunning (take your pick) Yasser Arafat. It certainly would entail the wider use of military force.

It is amazing we need to have such an argument as this. Israel, with all of its flaws and failings, is democratic and Western at the core. It strikes only when struck or to prevent being struck. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the slaughter of several dozen innocent Muslims at prayer a few years ago – acts perpetrated by Israeli fanatics – show there are awful people on both sides. The difference on the Israeli side is that awfulness doesn't equate with national policy. If it did, Americans could stand aside while Israelis and Palestinians battled to the finish, and bad luck to them both.

It doesn't work that way. As things are going over there now, our conciliatory efforts notwithstanding, we may have to choose. That is, if you call choosing between the splattered and the splatterer a choice in any normal sense.

The difference on the Israeli side is that awfulness doesn't equate with national policy.

This is about the only part I disagree with. Far more Palestinian innocents are dead from the so-called "collateral damage" of Israeli military reprisals than Israelis from Palestinian terror. Also, I would consider the bulldozing of villages to be "awfulness." And the continued building of settlements and colonization of the West Bank in violation of US wishes and international law is pretty awful as well.

Also, our own State Department places Israel on its list of human rights violators for Israel's treatment of Arabs. Yes, I'd say there's plenty of awfulness to go around on both sides.

Sorry but facts are facts. I'll find the article and post it here. I post facts and you throw a hissy fit. Lash out all you wish. Grover Norquist PO'd Bush and Rove plenty by bringing unsavory characters into the WH. Michael Lind used to be a Conservative. Now he's a Leftist. Conservatives who are not straight with the President are not appreciated. McCain is a Republican, but he can be a real pain.

(Bush) is being understandably criticised for many things

Yes he is and I'm there hitting him on steel tariffs, the education bill and CFR. Those I speak of are one issue people who rarely post on any thread not dealing with Israel. You do not see them pushing school choice, defending the second amendment, advocating privatizing Social Security pushing for a NRST, a flat tax or seeking to abolish the IRS. Their criticism of Bush is not rational, it is hyperbolic. Bush won't let Israel defend herself! Bush thinks oil is more precious than Israeli blood! Bush is in the pocket of Arab campaign contributors!

Come on, you know agitprop when you see it, you know FR has been infested with liberals pretending to be conservatives.

I have stated forever that Israel should do whatever it takes to end all security threats once and for all.

For these positions, I am called a Jew Basher, an antisemite, a hater..blah..blah..blah. Same old identity politics, left wing song and dance.

A Troubling Money Trail

'The Bush administration’s latest crackdown on terrorist finances could touch some raw political nerves. Last week federal agents raided more than a dozen U.S.-based Islamic businesses and charities looking for ties to Al Qaeda and other terror groups.

NEWSWEEK has learned that a main target of the raids, a Saudi-backed charity called the SAFA Trust, has provided funding for an influential Islamic political group with close ties to the GOP and the Bush White House.

The group, the Islamic Institute, which operates out of the same D.C. office suite as GOP activist Grover Norquist, was set up in 1999 to mobilize American Muslim support for the Republican Party. Since then Norquist and the group’s chairman, Khaled Saffuri, have arranged meetings between Islamic leaders and top Bush officials.'

Funding for the institute’s $170,000-a-year operation could prove problematic. Saffuri confirmed the authenticity of checks obtained by NEWSWEEK showing the institute received $20,000 from the SAFA Trust and another $20,000 from Abdurhanman Alamoudi, a board member of the Success Foundation, whose offices were also raided. (The institute has also received foreign funding, including $55,000 from Kuwait and more than $200,000 from Qatar.)'

You can search here for the rest of the article.

This is a different article. I suggest you read before you post. Yes we know the game. Try and sell the idea that anyone who disagrees with Bush on Israel, or even on one aspect of his Middle East policy is not a good Conservative, (even if you are George Will or Wes Pruden) and of course you must be Jewish, oops they are not.

Those of you watching the carnage from the Passover Massacre today have a great opportunity to choose. The splattered or the splatterers. Human vs. sub-human. Western vs. some alien culture I am unfamiliar with. You make the call. Can't ignore the choices.

Sure we can. These folks need to fight it out amongst themselves, and we should let them do just that. We have no business sticking our nose into that mess over there. These folks are not our next-door neighbors, as the author of this piece falsely implies...

I don't think you are called a Jew basher for those reasons. I don't know what you are or what your motivations. But I think you show an obsession with Israel that is different in quality, but matched in quantity only by those you condemn.

If you would like, we could ping the many others who have proven their pro-conservative and pro-FR positions, yet who still disagree with you. Maybe then, you would see that it doesn't take an "Israeli Firster" to think you, Luvs and the people Luvs pinged are truly the ones on the fringe of conservative thought.

BTW, I'm not Jewish, and I work for the Republican party. So far, I agree with you on every other topic. But I am convinced you have a bug up your rear that keeps you from being rational about this subject. Maybe it's a personal grudge with some posters, but if it what keeps you from being objective, you might do yourself a favor and re-focus.

So be it. I'm not going to be silent when decent people like Billy Graham are smeared by tapes of 30 year old private conversations, when IBM is smeared and shaken down for money, when Bush is accused of carrying more about oil than Jewish blood. The racket is the same one Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson run. It is politically OK to point it out when they do it but not when it comes to Israel. What am I supposed to say? Billy Graham is an evil person? IBM should be made to pay for what no one alive in the company today mayhave done 60 odd years ago? Bush is not trying his best to bring peace to the mideast and help Israel? When Grover Norquist is smeared as supporting terrorists am suppose to not wonder if the liberals who hate him so much for helping them lose the House might be behind it?

You simply do not choose to get it. There is bowhere to hide. If Israel didn't exist they would still be coming our way. This is a war over modernity. These people want a world that takes us back to the 16th century. They fight the forces which are moving us into the 21st.

When Osamma made his tape when we began the fight in Afghanistan, he referred to the year 1924. That was the beginning of the downfall of Pan-Arabism as he sees it. It marks the secularization of modern day Turkey. Notice he did not use the date of 1948. The founding of Israel. As many in the Arab World have pointed out, bin Laden has cared little about the Arab-Israeli situation. He is dedicated to a Islamist WORLD,

The war is on. You can see Israel gobbled up. Fine. Chamberlain figured Czechoslavakia would do the trick. Better undue that umbrella.

"We are really fortunate that President Bush is a mature and level-headed conservative unlike all too many posters."

HAHahahhaha. Brother or Sister, you don't know how true that is. We are lucky to have a President who sees the "Palestinian" atrocities for what they are, who refuses to be goaded into a war on Arafat and Saddam's timetable.

When we strike it will be at the moment of our choosing. And it will devastating to the likes of Arafat and his minions. No more Saddam, supplying the muscle. No more menacing Arab neighbors pushing for a "settlement." At that point, the real threat (Iraqi WMDs) will have been eliminated, and Israel will finally be free to deal with the "Palestinians" as she needs to.

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