The Clock Ticking Down on the Bush and Condi Championship Game

Rice: Young Palestinians Losing Hope For Deal With Israel
Heading Back To Mideast, Rice Says Young Palestinians Are Losing Hope For Deal With Israel

WASHINGTON, May. 6, 2008
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(AP) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an American Jewish audience Tuesday that young Palestinians are losing hope for an agreement with Israel.

"Increasingly, the Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age," Rice, 53, said in a somber speech to The American Jewish Committee at its 102nd annual meeting.

Insisting that the Bush administration will never yield to dealing with Hamas militants, Rice said, "What you don't want is that the hopelessness and the vision of the extremists have no counter."

Set to leave early Thursday for more jawboning with moderate Arabs and Israeli leaders, after talks in London designed to raise more economic support for the Palestinians, Rice called on Israel to make "difficult decisions" to provide the Palestinians with the dignity of statehood.

In fact, she said, "we have a chance to reach the basic contours of a settlement by the end of the year" _ a scaling back of President Bush's initial hope for a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians before he leaves office.

Rice also poured cold water on any prospects that Israel and Syria could negotiate peace terms.

The two sides, working partly through Turkey, have shown some renewed interest. The basis would be Israel swapping the Golan Heights for a peace treaty with its Arab neighbor.

Rice said the Bush administration had tried to interest Syria in peacemaking, with such moves as an invitation to a Mideast conference last November in Annapolis, Md.

"It is hard to see there is a Syrian regime receptive" to negotiations with Israel at this point, she said.

"Syria is like Iran's sidecar," she said, aligning itself tightly with a country that threatens Israel's existence. And, she reminded the American Jewish Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby and foe of intolerance and anti-Semitism, "you know about Syria's nuclear program."

Rice referred to a nuclear facility built with North Korea's cooperation and then wrecked by Israeli jets last September.

The central theme in her 15-minute speech and 20-minute question-and-answer session was that the Bush administration would not give up trying to steer Israel and the Palestinians toward a settlement that provides the Palestinians with a state.

And, the administration would have no dealings with Hamas or other Palestinian extremists that war with Israel and refuse to recognize the Jewish state.

"Either you are a political party or a terrorist group," Rice said. "You cannot be both."

Once again, Rice criticized former President Jimmy Carter for holding talks with Hamas leaders. "I don't see the point of trying to negotiate with people who are determined to destroy the foundation of peace," she said.

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Dr. Rice is talking like a basketball coach watching the clock tick away with her team down in the championship game and realizing that with every day of 2008 sliding by, the chance of making a comeback is increasingly unlikely. Then again, maybe these statements are yet another example of the Bush Administration's arabian "end run", not meaning for any true, permanent, resolution to the conflict between the arabians and Israel, just attempting to finish the game in good form.

Her comments lead me to believe there is confusion on her part as to the reason for talks, or is it after all an attempt to stall? If the youth are not interested in peace, who are the guarantors of any agreement? If Hamas cannot be a "political party" how is that Fatah/PA can be a partner for negotiations? The trouble with such logic as hers is that it leaves the door open for one day accepting Hamas as a party to negotiations. Why, all you have to do is say you are a "political party" and ta-da, welcome to the White House.

What is it with this age issue after all? The arabians have been saying since the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland that a war of "liberation" was the only way to expel the Jews. This message has been taught for generations now in "palestinian" and arabian schools. The official PA educational curriculum and press still de-humanizes Jews and Israel. How can it be that only now, the youth of "palestine" do not talk of a "two-state solution"? The only arabians talking two-state solution are the PA on the US and European payroll. Nothing has changed in this regard.

In fact the idea of modernizing, democratizing, de-militarizing the PA is contradicted by Condi's words. It is fair to say that the PA arabians have secured more compromises, promises and diplomatic success than any effort to destroy Israel did in previous generations. An American President has called for the creation of an independent "Palestine" and the sitting Prime Minister of Israel (for the time being that is) is ready to hand over as much land of Judea and Samaria as needed with part of Jerusalem as its capital for the erstwhile new Pali homeland for a people who never had one. None of this was achieved by war, only through talks.

How is it then that younger arabians are not interested in "two-states"? Maybe it is because the older arabians are not really interested in "two-states" either and like the Bush administration may be doing, just walking the walk. So, after President Bush is gone, PM Olmert is gone and very possibly Abu Mazen is gone, then who picks up the pieces of the "failed" negotiations? When will the lesson be learned that just as when road blocks are removed Jews die, chas v'shalom, that when talks fail Jews die, chas v'shalom?

Rice With a Side Order of Netanyahu

Here is a piece from Israel National News that I posted earlier today on Free Republic. I refer the reader to the comment below the article posted by Freeper Turret Gunner A20 . It needs no further commentary. Just read it. Maybe Turret Gunner A20 will be the next Secretary of State.

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Rice to Snub Netanyahu During Mid-East Tour


(IsraelNN.com) US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will break with standard protocol and will not meet with Opposition Leader Binyamin Netanyahu during her upcoming visit to the region, apparently as punishment for Netanyahu's recent call to build up the so-called E-1 corridor between Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim. The United States opposes the plan.

The snub is the second this year from senior US figures for Netanyahu. In January President George W. Bush refused to meet with the Likud chairman until a public outcry forced him to schedule time with the Opposition Leader.

Rice is due to visit the region in early April. Exact dates for the visit have yet to be announced.

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posted by Turret Gunner A20

To: APRPEH
It's time to post this one again -- it's still appropriate to the present as well as to the day it was written.
May 9, 2002 8:45 a.m. Why Don’t I Care About the Palestinians? The options, as I see them.

Why don't I care about the Palestinians? It is, of course, wrong of me not to care. It can't be much fun being a Palestinian. You, or your parents, or your grandparents, ran for their lives in the 1948 war. You — and/or they, plus a couple of generations of uncles, aunts, siblings, and cousins — have been huddled in some squalid refugee camp ever since, living off UNRWA handouts. ("UNRWA," by the way, stands for "U.S. taxpayer." But you knew that!) There is no economy worth participating in. Your leaders won a fragmented, halfway sort of autonomy for you at Oslo; but it didn't work, you're not sure why. Nothing really got any better, and now the Israelis have smashed it all up anyway. The other Arabs all hate you (a little-known factor of Middle East political life, but one attested by my colleague David Pryce-Jones, who knows the Arabs better than anyone). Things look bad, and you are sunk in despair. Shouldn't I feel sorry for you?

Sure, I personally favor Israel in this conflict. That's my right as a freethinking person. I'm a Christian, though, aren't I? Shouldn't I have some Christian compassion to spare for the poor suffering Palestinians? Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc., etc.

Well, I suppose I should, but to be honest about it, I don't. Why not? Why don't I care about the Palestinians? The answer is NOT any of the following. I like taking showers with Jews.
Palestinians have dark skin and I'm a racist.
My name was originally Derbstein.
My British blood is boiling with shame over the lost empire.

I am a lackey of, or am trying to ingratiate myself with, the Jews who run the U.S. media. The answer isn't exactly compassion fatigue, either. That's pretty close, though. I am aware of a certain level of compassion fatigue in regard to the world at large, and it spills over into the Palestinian issue.

The other day I had the depressing experience of reading, one right after the other, Stephen Kotkin's wonderfully titled "Trashcanistan" in the April 15th New Republic, then Helen Epstein's "Mozambique: In Search of the Hidden Cause of AIDS" in the May 9th New York Review of Books. The first of these was a long portmanteau review of six books about the fates of various components of the old U.S.S.R. in the years since the thing fell apart. The second tries to discover why a sleepy rural area of Mozambique, populated by courteous folk practicing a traditional way of life, has high levels of AIDS.

Kotkin's account of the ex-Soviet colonies — Ukraine, Moldova, the central Asian and Caucasian republics, etc. — is hair-raising. Principal features of the landscape here are utter economic collapse, "gangland violence among state ministers," rising Islamofascism and the flight of large sectors of the population. (One-third of the able-bodied workforce of Moldova has fled. I have just been reading another report about that wretched country. Sample quote: "Experts estimate that since the fall of the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into prostitution — perhaps up to 10 percent of the female population.") Kotkin writes beautifully about this appalling situation, which stretches across the entire southern and western marches of the old U.S.S.R., illuminating his account with memorable one-liners like: "Ukraine has gotten its state and is eating it, too."

Helen Epstein's piece on Mozambique tells of a state of affairs just as awful. The fundamental problem, she discovers, is that: "These people are so poor ... that sex has become part of their economy. In some cases, it's practically the only currency they have." The men go away for months on end to work in the South African mines — where, of course, they console themselves with prostitutes. The women left behind survive as best they can, often by becoming the mistresses of the few local men who can actually afford to eat. Why are they all so poor? Because Mozambique has been wrecked by corruption, tribal war and stupid economics.

What a world! You can only read a certain amount of this stuff before you start to avert your eyes. What on earth can anyone hope to do about all this? All the simple explanations for the horrors that stain a large part of our planet have been used up. We now know that it's not the fault of colonialism, or neo-colonialism, or capitalism, or socialism. It's just the way these places are. They can't handle modernity, for some cultural reason we don't understand and can't do anything about.

That's the context in which I see the Palestinians. The Palestinians are Arabs; and the Arabs, whatever their medieval achievements (as best I can understand, they were mainly achievements of transmission — "Arabic" numerals, for example, came from India) are politically hopeless. Who can dispute this? Look at the last 50-odd years, since the colonial powers left. What have the Arabs accomplished? What have they built? Where in the Arab world is there a trace or a spark of democracy? Of constitutionalism? Of laws independent of the ruler's whim? Of free inquiry? Of open public debate? Where in your house is there any article stamped "Made in Syria?" Arabs can be individually very charming and capable, and perform very well in free societies like the U.S.A. There are at least two recent Nobel prizes with Arab names attached. Collectively, though, as nations, the Arabs are no-hopers.

All of this applies to the Palestinians. I spent some of my formative years in Hong Kong, a barren piece of rock with zero natural resources, under foreign occupation, chock-full of refugees from the Mao tyranny. The people there weren't lounging in UNRWA camps or making suicide runs at the governor's mansion. They were trading, building, speculating, manufacturing, working — with the result that Hong Kong is now a glittering modern city filled with well-dressed, well-educated, well-fed people, proud of what they have accomplished together, and with a higher standard of living than Britain herself. If, following the Oslo accords — or for that matter, in the 20 years of Jordanian occupation — the Palestinians had taken that route, had set aside their fantasies of revenge and massacre, and concentrated on building up something worth having, I might have respect for them. As it is, I don't.

The only halfway sympathetic thing I can find to say about the Palestinians is that UNRWA has surely been part of the problem. If you go to the UNRWA website, you will see how proud they are of having fed, clothed, sheltered, educated and cared for the Palestinian refugees of 1948... and their children... and their grandchildren. The number of people UNRWA cares for has gone from 600,000 in 1948 to nearly four million today. Now, I understand that the prime impulse of bureaucracies, especially welfare bureaucracies, is the consolidation and expansion of their turf, and a steady increase in the number of their "clients"; but this is ridiculous. The good people of Hong Kong should go down on their knees every night and thank God that there was no UNRWA in the colony in 1949. So, come to think of it, should the German and East European refugees who flooded into Western Europe after WWII. (I have seen the number 14 million somewhere — the Sudeten Germans alone numbered three million. Where are the festering camps? Where are the suicide bombers?)

Even if their lives had not been poisoned by the ministrations of a huge welfare bureaucracy, though, I doubt the Palestinians would have got their act together. None of the other Arabs have. Everywhere you look around the Arab world you see squalor, despotism, cruelty, and hopelessness. The best they have been able to manage, politically speaking, has been the Latin-American style one-party kleptocracies of Egypt and Jordan. Those are the peaks of Arab political achievement under independence, under government by their own people. The norm is just gangsterism, with thugs like Assad, Qaddafi, or Saddam in charge. It doesn't seem to be anything to do with religion: the secular states (Iraq, Syria) are just as horrible as the religious ones like Saudi Arabia. These people are hopeless. We are all supposed to support the notion of a Palestinian state. Why? We know perfectly well what it would be like. Why should we wish for another gangster-satrapy to be added to the Arab roll of shame, busy manufacturing terrorists to come here and slaughter Americans in their offices? I don't want to see a Palestinian state. I think I'd be crazy to want that.

What, actually, are the possible futures for the Palestinians? I think the following list is exhaustive.

1. An independent state, under Arafat or someone just as thuggish.
2. Military occupation by Israel.
3. Re-incorporation into a Jordanian-Palestinian nation. 4. Some sort of U.N. trusteeship.
5. Expulsion from the West Bank and Gaza, those territories then incorporated into Israel.

Number 1 is what we are all supposed to want. As I have already indicated, I don't want it, and I can't see why anyone else would, either. Except Palestinians, I suppose: If they yearn to be ruled by amoral hoodlums (as, according to polls, they apparently do), I suppose they have some theoretical right to see their wishes fulfilled — but why should the rest of us allow it to happen, given the dangers to us?

Number 2 might work for a time, but the Israelis would eventually get fed up with it, and then we'd move on to one of the other options.

Number 3 would get us back to the pseudo-stability of pre-1967, but is deeply unpopular with Jordanians — and look what happened in 1967!

Number 4 undoubtedly has the UNRWA bureaucrats drooling, but as with number 1, it's hard to see what's in it for the rest of us. Aren't we handing over enough of our money in welfare payments to our own people?

Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this might be the best option. I'm not the only one, either. Here is Dick Armey, Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to Chris Matthews on Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?

Rep. ARMEY: Yes.

When I say "the best option," I don't mean "best for the Palestinians". I don't think they have any good options. Being Arabs, they are incapable of constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless whatever happens. Their options are the ones I listed above: to be ruled by gangsters, or Israelis, or Jordanians, or welfare bureaucrats. Or to go live somewhere else, under the gentle rule of their brother Arabs. Would expulsion be hard on the Palestinians? I suppose it would. Would it be any harder than options 1 thru 4? I doubt it. Do I really give a flying falafel one way or the other? No, not really. — iMr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor/i


28 posted on 03/27/2008 1:34:42 PM CDT by Turret Gunner A20

Who Speaks For the Rebbe?

"The Rebbe would never tolerate Wolpe's actions"

The Forward: In a major blow to a decade-long campaign to play down divisions within the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement, the movement's Israeli leadership appears ready to publicly distance itself from a significant messianic strand within the movement.

Nathan Jeffay/The Forward
Rabbi’s Incitement Against Olmert Threatens To Split Apart Chabad
Lubavitch Messianist: Prime Minister Should Be ‘Hanged From the Gallows’
In a major blow to a decade-long campaign to play down divisions within the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement, the sect’s Israeli leadership appears ready to publicly distance itself from a significant messianic strand within the movement.

The unexpected development has been forced on the Chabad leadership by a spreading tide of anger toward the movement this week, after a rabbi from the messianic strand declared that, were Israel properly run, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would be “hanged from the gallows.”

Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, a Chabad educator and author, launched into a tirade about Israel’s negotiations with Palestinians at the conference of a right-wing organization he runs, S.O.S. Israel.

“The terrible traitor, Ehud Olmert, who gives these Nazis weapons, who gives money, who frees their murderous terrorists, this man, like Ariel Sharon, collaborates with the Nazis,” Wolpe said on Wednesday, January 2, in remarks that were shown on Israeli television news.

A Chabad spokesman in Israel, Moni Ender, lashed out at Wolpe for his comments.

“This is not Lubavitch. Rabbi Wolpe is talking by himself. We have nothing to do with him. He makes dirt for Chabad,” Ender said.

Wolpe is the most popular leader of the messianic strand of Chabad, which holds that the 1994 death of the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson did not challenge the belief held in parts of the sect that he was the messiah. Wolpe was the first rabbi to go public with this position in 1994. A conflict has festered since then between followers of this belief and others, who present themselves as the mainstream and who reject such overt messianic claims.

Leaders on both sides have struggled to honor a ruling of a Brooklyn-based rabbinical court, issued immediately after the rebbe’s death, that said the movement should not split in two and the factions should not publicly undermine each other. This week, though, Ender told the Forward that Wolpe’s comments are doing such damage to the sect’s reputation that it could become necessary to publicly declare that the messianists cannot act or speak on its behalf.

“If we are needed to make it black and white we are different to [the messianists],” Ender added. “We never talk about politics. If necessary, I will do that.”

Some Chabad leaders in America also directed strong words at Wolpe. Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the Chabad representative in Washington, told the Forward that Wolpe’s comments “contravene the most basic tenets of Chabad philosophy” and are “beyond the pale of what the rebbe would tolerate.”

Mainstream Chabad newsletters did not reference the matter.

Wolpe’s outburst is so problematic because incitement to violence by rabbis has become the ultimate taboo, since rabbinical injunctions were blamed for inspiring Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin in 1995.

In the past, mainstream Chabad leaders have been on the right side of the political spectrum in Israel. During the 1990s, a number of leading Chabad rabbis in Israel were involved in the opposition to the Oslo peace process.

During that time, one messianist rabbi, Yitzhak Ginsburgh, was put in administrative detention for incitement to violence. But at that time, few observers connected Ginsburgh to the Chabad movement.

This time around, the backlash to Wolpe’s comments is taking on Chabad more generally, even resulting in calls to stop it from engaging in its trademark task — taking Judaism to secular Jews. Meretz party Knesset member Chaim Oron has urged the Knesset to issue a blanket ban on all Chabad activists from Israeli army bases. Other politicians have also responded angrily.

Chabad occupies a privileged position among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox groups, being the only major Hasidic group whose members serve in the army. Its rabbis are also regarded as informal chaplains.

It is the threat to this activity that could force Chabad to declare the messianists separate from the movement, Ender said. The sect would “prefer to get to every soldier and every Jew wherever they are, rather than pay the price of Rabbi Wolpe’s comments.”

In America, Shemtov said that Chabad would not comment on whether it would back such a move “unless or until such a situation arises.” He did say that as a rule, Chabad headquarters back Israel: “In general, when the Chabad rabbinate in Israel makes a decision, you don’t find opposition to them in America or around the world. They have a force of authority.”

Wolpe went beyond criticism of Olmert. He claimed that if justice were done, Israeli Vice Premier Haim Ramon, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak would hang, as well as Olmert. In an interview with the Forward last Tuesday, Wolpe stood by his comments, adding that they were an acceptable way to “show how far [Olmert] has gone.”

The determination of Wolpe and other messianists to make political statements is integrally connected to their belief that the rebbe is the messiah. Working from statements that Schneerson made, opposing land for peace and calling for expansionist policies for Israel, the messianists have tended to promote hard-line right-wing positions.

As to the heat he is feeling from other Chabad leaders, Wolpe said: “What is embarrassing Chabad is that we don’t do anything to stop the Holocaust Olmert is bringing to Israel. What are they doing?”

Statements of condemnation have come from American Jewish organizations, including the Orthodox Union, which has been critical of the Olmert government but said the comments were “beyond the pale of legitimate democratic protest and have no basis in Jewish law or hashkafa (philosophy).”

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APRPEH in an earlier post stated that ChaBaD had at the time of the post not officially distanced itself from the comments of Rabbi Wolpe. According to the Forward article reprinted by Shturem, an effort may be under way to do that. Whether or not it can be considered official is another matter. It seems that Rabbi Wolpe has moved away from suggesting the death of Olmert to suggesting that the time for martyrdom on behalf of the land of Israel may have come. Most recently his rhetoric has lent an opinion that Bush and Olmert are "bringing another Holocaust".

Now clearly I am against concessions to barbarians whether political or territorial. But to suggest that Bush and Olmert want or are proposing actions that will lead to "another Holocaust" is merely outlandish. The end result of an ill-advised deal with the arabs will likely result in bloodshed but a "holocaust"? Is such imagery really productive?

Yes, it is important that a strong opposition be mounted against any arrangements with the arabians, especially with Olmert in charge and even more so as it impacts Jerusalem. But in order for that opposition to be effective, such leaps to the ridiculous must be shunned. Rabbi Wolpe has his right to an opinion. His opinion however, must never be considered the voice of the opposition to deals with barbarians.

The Bush Burned And Olmert Was Consumed

The following is a press release from Americans for a Safe Israel I received by email today. Judging by the headline in today's Jpost, Olmert and Abbas to start negotiations on core issues the long awaited crash of the Olmert regime may finally come to fruition. Bye bye Shas and Yisrael Beitenu. Pres. Bush may leave Israel wondering if he caused his friend Ehud his job.

Click to enlarge

Press Release:

U.S. Evangelical Leaders Reject Palestinian State in Judea and Samaria
in Jerusalem Post Ad Keyed to President Bush’s Arrival in Israel

Jerusalem, 1/8/08 – Proclaiming “an ineradicable bond between the geographical integrity of the land…and God’s promise of the land as “an everlasting possession” to the people of Israel, 26 American Evangelical pastors and lay leaders from 11 states and the District Colombia (plus a Canadian entry from British Columbia), affixed their signatures to a full-page Jerusalem Post ad flatly rejecting President Bush’s Annapolis-launched campaign to shoehorn a “Palestinian State” between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River (see attachment {the above ad, APRPEH}).

Headlined “President Bush: There will be No Legacy” and timed for the President’s January 9-10th visit to Israel, the ad declares the creation of such an entity “detrimental to the stability or both Israel and Jordan, the peace of the Middle East and the security interests of the United States.

The signatories mirror a cross section of some of the most influential voices on the U,S.Evangelical and Pentacostal scene, including, inter alia, national media personality Dr. Michael Evans, chairman of Churches United With Israel in Mr. Bush’s home state of Texas; Tennessee Pastor Robert Upton, a major figure in the powerful Pentacostal Congress; Pastor Jim Vineyard, whose press and internet opposition to Israeli territorial concessions has attracted national attention, and White House backyard neighbors the Rev. James Hutchens of the Jerusalem Connection and Richard Hellman, head of Christians’Israel Public Action Campaign, Capitol Hill’s best known pro-Israel Christian advocacy group.

Herbert Zweibon, chairman of New York-based Americans For A Safe Israel, sponsor of the ad, characterized it as a “reflection of the rising concern among Bible-oriented Christians at the negation of the Covenant, the marginalization of four millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization and the existential and geostrategic peril implicit in any decision to dismember Jerusalem and deliver Judea and Samaria into the hands of a radical Islamic nexus.”

Zweibon said he was awed by the moral courage exhibited by the signatories. “Taking issue with a president they admired and supported was no easy matter for these pastors and their congregants,” he noted, “but as Christians, addressing a professed born-again Christian, they felt obligated to tell the president that pressuring a weak and extremely unpopular Olmert government to place Israel in the direst jeopardy it has ever known was morally, religiously and geopolitically indefensible. We all hope he gets the message.”